Chien Ming Chess Blog

A game of chess is not only impersonal process involving 32 pieces and 64 squares. A game of chess is a struggle between two adversaries taking place under certain concrete conditions: but the people are never free from fault; they are unavoidably, to a lesser or greater extent, influenced by particular moods; they have differing characters. All this is reflected in their performance in a game of chess.

Every chess player, whether an eminent master or an amateur, brings in to his games certain elements of his personal style of play. His style is not only the sum of his chess knowledge and views on the game; it is to a large extent the expression of his character. If we study the games of a player personally unknown to us, we can discover much about his character from his play; on the other hand when we know someone well, we can with a fair amount of certainty guess what style of play he will choose in the game of chess. A man cautious and anxious in life will not be quick to indulge in daring play; a gambler, or someone of frivolous nature, will conduct his game in a risky manner, often without a proper evaluation of the possibilities open to him and his opponent. The optimist tends to overestimate his positions, whereas the pessimist sees dangers and difficulties in every position. The individual style of play is a reflection of the character of the player.

When i search for middle-game book in my book shelf, I found a book "Modern Chess Strategy" by Ludek Pachman, an old book of year 1963. A good book of middle-game. He mention in one of the chapter The Basic Concept of Chess Strategy and Tactics. I would share some of his good explanation of this topics.

A widely held view is that the differenced between the expert chess player and the novice lies in the extent to which the former can calculate in advance; and the question of how many moves in advance a Grandmaster (GM) can reckon is often thrown up for argument The ability to calculate correctly is undoubtely a necessity for the top-class player; but is is not the only one, and certainly not the most important differences between the master and the average player. There are many players who have a good command of art of accurate combinations, but who will never reach master strength: for they lack the ability to conduct the entire game on the basis of a correct plan laid out in advance. The calculation of particular variations is only possible, and necessary, in certain clearly defined positions; in most cases one's overall plan of play is the correct pointer to finding a given move. Rudolf Spielmann once said "I can see the combinations as well as Alekhine, but I cannot get into the same positions" - Ed

The plan of play at a particular point in the game is called the strategical play; the way in which it is laid out, the collections of principles we follow in itns determination, is known as strategy.

It might be thought that the strategical goal in every game was the mating of the opposing King. And, indeed, such a superficial comprehensive of strategy prevail in the early days of the modern form of chess. Nowadays, however, technique has improved and ideas have become more profound. In the games of good players even the winning of a weak pawn no longer appears with frequency as a strategical goal; more often a small positional advantage (such as control of an open files, the weakening of an opposing pawn, or the creation of a passed-pawn) is the object for which a player puts up a bitter fight.

It is hardly necessary to add that the best of plans come to nothing if they are not carried out correctly; this applies in chess as in life. The collections of measures and methods for executing one's strategical plan or thwarting the opponent's is called tactics. To this field belong manouvres, combinations and sacrifices, as well as double attack, pinning, discovered check, traps, etc.

In chess, as in life, we are constantly subjected to tests. We are immersed in a world of struggle, which demands that we be constantly on the alert. We need to be able to carry out our ideas, to achieve recognition - A Quote by Joseph Dorfman

To get better at any game, you must identify your weaknesses, then try to eliminate them. I learned from chess that my weaknesses included mental laziness, being fooled by appearances, and being distracted by the past when I should be focusing on the future. When I tried to improve these faults, I not only became a better chess player, but also a better person. There aren't many games which can improve your character like chess - A Quote by Daniel Freeman

Weaknesses of character are normally shown in a game of chess - A Quote by Garry Kasparov

Let us say the game may be continued in two ways: one of them is a beautiful tactical blow that gives rise to variations that don't yield to precise calculation; the other is clear positional pressure that leads to an endgame with microscopic chances of victory.... I would choose the latter without thinking twice. But if I see only one correct path win, then I folllow it. If the opponent offers keen play I don't object; but in such cases I get less satisfaction, even if I win, than from a game conducted according to all the rules of strategy with its ruthless logic - A Quote by Anatoly Karpov

My chess friends are young and old, white and black, men and women; there is no discrimination over the chessboard - A Quote by Vlad Vainberg

Playing chess gives us a chance to start out life over again, and this time, no one has more money than us, no one is more beautiful, no one lives in a better neighborhood, and we all go to the same school. Other than having the first move, and this benefit is shared equally, no one starts with any unfair advantage.

The more we sweat in training, the less we bleed in war - U.S. Navy SEALs

Chess is the art, which expresses the science of logic. A Quote by Mikhail Botvinnik

On the chess board lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite - A Quote by Emmanuel Lasker

It's generally - but erroneously - assumed that the best teachers are the best players, and that the best players can easily communicate the secrets of the game. Actually, the best teachers are often just interested amateurs. A Quote by Andrew Soltis

We learn chess when we study. We apply what we learnt when we play. and we learn more during analysis of game played.

I found this very intersting Question and Answer between a casual player and Pete Tamburro, head of New Jersey Chess Federation www.njscf.com at this link.

Q : I was told (by an IM) that it's best to stick with one or the other while you are starting out. Views?

A : We've discussed this before on this site. My opinion, and I don't claim originality here, is that 1.e4 is best for starting out. The elements are simpler: bad development is hammered right away, tactically sharp positions arise and you have to calculate right away, the elements are clearer to understand. 1.d4 may very well be a better opening move, certainly an arguable issue, but mistakes by White are not punished as quickly, less tactics arise...not to say it doesn't happen, just not as much. So stick with 1.e4 at the beginning and then grow into the more sophisticated stuff. That even works within 1.e4. Try gambits, then graduate to the Ruy Lopez, a more sophisticated opening.

Q : I'm agreeing with you that some experience of the open game is good. and that I should try some e4 openings.
My next question is simply this: Should I EXCLUSIVELY concentrate on e4 openings (bearing in mind I already play some d4); i.e. should I switch entirely for a year say. OR can I play both e4 and d4 openings for the next year.
My question is, is mixing and matching OK?

A: After 50 years of playing chess, I can honestly say there is no "formula." Unless you plan on becoming a GM, don't worry about it. As I said above, I think you learn a lot of lessons more quickly with 1.e4, but, of course you can switch or do whatever. Take a year. Study and play e4. Take another year. Study and play d4. That goes for Black, too. Forget your "ELO"--that has done more harm to chess development than any other single concern. And don't forget those king and pawn endgames and rook and pawn endgames!

Some chess quotes:

The aim of opening is to get a playable middlegame (Lajos Portisch)

Openings teach you openings. Endgames teach you chess (Stephan Gerzadowicz)

In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame (Jose Raul Capablanca)

Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine (Spielmann)

After a bad opening, there is hope for the middle game. After a bad middle game, there is hope for the endgame. But once you arein the endgame, the moment of truth has arrived (Edmar Mednis)

Many players throughout the whole five hours of play, occupy themselves in the main with calculations, and their work during a game reduces approximately to the following: 'If I go here, he goes there,' and so on, as much as strength will permit. More experienced players, who have deeply studied the secrets of their art, frequently do not tire themselves with such a lengthy process, and being guided, in the main, by unshakable principles, they plan their subsequent play (Mikhail Tal)

Half the variations which are calculated in a tournament game turn out to be completely superfluous. Unfortunately, no one knows in advance which half (Jan Timman)

Anatoly Karpov's play can be described as : He denies freedom of action to his opponent's pieces, slowly squeezing the vise tighter until he strangles the opponent's position (what's often called a "python-like crush" or "boa constrictor")

A famous Capablanca story (the short version)... Several very strong masters were analyzing a chess game. Capa walks by and checks it out. They ask him, "Capa how do you win this?" Capa says, "Simple! First you get this position and from here it's a forced win." and then he walks quietly away. The assembled Masters spend the next hour arriving at the position Capa said was a forced win. Another one-half hour to discover 'why' it's forced win! Therein lies your answer. Capa just knew whereas the Masters had to figure it all out. That's judgement at its best!

Many players in beginners and intermediate level put too much emphasis on opening study and not enough on other areas. Tactics and endgames are foundation of chess, and doing tactics and endgame exercises daily is recommended. Deep opening study is very important at higher level such as expert, master and beyond. It is enough for beginner and intermediate players, to understand basic principles of chess opening. (Susan Polgar)

About opening study, the key is understanding the ideas. A mastery of a little theory which conveys real understanding of the game is infinitely more valuable than a memorized of endless moves. If you know objectives you are seeking and you have a complete understanding of this phase of the game, you will be able to play strongly in the openings without too much memorizing any series of moves or variations. (Rueben Fine)

All chessplayers eventually come to appreciate the importance of endgames. Some of us take longer than others. The lucky ones get to love the endgame from the early days of their chess careers, perhaps because of the influence of a wise trainer. Others among us are less fortunate, and spend years using our chess study time to memorise ever-longer sequences of opening analysis, whilst ignoring the endgame. We only realise the error of our ways when we finally manage to trap a much stronger opponent in our opening preparation - our carefully opening preparation generates an ending with an extra pawn, which we then finish up only drawing, or even losing. After a few such experiences, a sadder and wiser man, we finally go home and take out our pristine copy of Basic Chess Endings, bought all those years ago, and left standing on our bookshelves ever since, untouched by human hand.

This series of article below is compiled from Josh Waitzkin Chess Academy. I appreciate my good friend Manuel who share and send me the article.

Have you ever asked yourself, after spending years at some job or hobby or pursuit: what am I in this for anyway? Do I play chess or the guitar or do I write or read to bolster my ego or to grow as a human being? Am I in this for glory or wisdom? Is it the process or the result that I value most?

Developmental psychologists have done extensive research on this question and on the effect of a student's attitude on his or her ability to learn and ultimately master material. Dr. Carol Dweck, a leading researcher in the field of developmental psychology, and a woman who I have enjoyed studying with at Columbia University, makes the distinction between entity and learning theories of intelligence. Children who are "entity theorists" are prone to use language like "I am smart at this" and to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability at a particular task or of intelligence altogether. "Learning theorists" are more prone to describe their results with sentences like "I got it because I worked very hard at it" or "I should have tried harder." While this research is very extensive, and I can't begin to explain it in a few paragraphs, suffice it to say that when challenged by difficult material, learning theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game, while entity theorists are more brittle and prone to quit.

In any case, I believe that performers are consistently undone by materialism. When I have begun to smell the win, and my imagination drifted to the feeling of victory and the post-tournament celebration, I have inevitably blown the position. Similarly, when students of mine have said during analysis of one of their games "Now I knew I was winning," they have inevitably made errors that let the opponent back into the struggle. Also, when players tell themselves "now I am busted" or "this position is completely lost" they shut their minds off to the rest of the struggle and miss countless chances to get back into the game.

Thinking about the result of the game takes us out of the moment--your consciousness is like a kite soaring with the wind that smashes headlong into a tree. Suddenly your creativity stops. Flow is gone. But the wind blows right along, only now it is without you. Imagine two timelines running parallel to one another--one is your awareness (the kite) and the other is the immediate situation on the chess board (the wind). When you start to drift towards materialistic thoughts your timeline stops and the chess position continues right along. The resulting layer of detachment is very dangerous and playing through it has the feeling of staring into thick fog. Interestingly, I have observed that the first things to go when this detachment sets in are the sense of danger and alertness to slightly unusual possibilities

But how can we fight the natural tendency to think about winning when we are competing and the obvious goal is to win? This is a difficult question, and one that should not be tackled glibly. First of all, I would recommend a relationship to chess which has more to do with the process than with results. This is not to say that we don't want to win--I am an incredibly competitive guy and when I play I play to win--but there can be a broader perspective that focuses on the larger growth process and the long term ramifications of every moment. For example, when I was 8-years-old I lost a huge game in the last round of my first national championships. Of course I was devastated in the moment, but in retrospect that was the best thing that ever could have happened to me because I worked the whole next year and won the next championship. I learned that you have to sweat to win, and I gained a respect for hard work. In contrast, I have seen many young players who had so much easy early success that they never associated work with victory, and when the going inevitably got rough they quit because they were not prepared to buckle down.

Whether you fool around with chess for a few weeks, delve into it for a few years, or spend a lifetime enjoying its ever-expanding mysteries, the art will teach you about yourself. If you open to the learning process the experience will be intensely rewarding on many levels. So don't worry if you lose a game, but learn from your errors; and don't become over-inflated when you win, but maintain the humility of a true learner. Chess is not about perfection. If it were, the game would lose much of its mystery and artistry, and would quickly be dominated by computers. Human beings can access and create the music of chess because the game is a channel for our creative spirits. But our creativity is blunted by thoughts that take us out of the struggle.

This series of article below is compiled from Josh Waitzkin Chess Academy.

One day, when I was 18 or 19 years old I was walking on 33rd street and Broadway in NYC to teach one of my chess classes to my team at PS 116. Every one who has grown up in Manhattan knows that it is important to look both ways before crossing the street--cars run lights and bicyclists often ride the wrong way down a one way street--admittedly, I have been guilty of the latter. To survive in the city one mustn't blindly leave his fate to the traffic light gods. So I was waiting for the light, thinking about the ideas that I would soon be discussing with my students, when I noticed that a woman wearing headphones had walked right into oncoming traffic and was completely oblivious to the chaotic street that she was crossing. Just then, as she looked right, a bicycle bore down on her from the left. The biker lurched away at the last second, but still gave her a harmless bump. This was a critical moment in the woman's life. She had a near miss and could easily have walked away unscathed if she had just stepped back onto the pavement--but instead she turned to the fading bicyclist and cursed his impudence. There she was, standing with her back to the traffic on 33rd and Broadway screaming at the back of a biker who just performed a miracle to avoid smashing into her. If that moment could be frozen in time it would be a terrifying image for us all to weep over and learn from. A taxi cab was the next to speed onto the scene--the woman was struck from behind and sent reeling 10 feet into the air. She smashed into a lamp post and was knocked out and bleeding badly. The ambulance and police came and eventually I walked on to PS 116 only hoping that she might survive.

Regaining presence and clarity of mind after making a serious error is a struggle for all competitors and performers. Great stage actors often miss a line but improvise their way back on track. The audience rarely notices because of the perfect ease with which the performer glides back from troubled waters into the tranquillity of the script. What is more, the truly great ones can make the moment work for them--heightening their performance with improvisations that throb with immediacy and life. Cellists, violinists, chess players, actors, basketball players, and countless others all understand that brilliant performances are often born of small errors. The problems set in if the performer has a relationship to his or her art which has a brittle dependence on the safety of absolute perfection or duplication. Then an error shatters the glass menagerie and some clouded state of detachment haunts the decision making process. This is quite common among chess players, and the danger is that a small ripple can quickly rise into a tidal wave if the player does not regain a peace of mind with which to tackle the new situation.

In chess, one form that the downward spiral can take is in the strange emotional attachment a player often has to a past evaluation. Say you have a much better position and then make an error that allows your opponent to equalize. There is nothing wrong with equality, but because of the transition and your resulting cloudiness, you may be prone to cling onto the past situation and in your evaluations reject variations in which you are equal because emotionally you are still much better even though there is no longer any objective justification for such an attitude. What results is a downward spiral where the foundering player at once despairs and pushes, with hollow over-confidence, for more than there is. At once too high and too low, there is a complete absence of objectivity, and when we try to squeeze more out of a position than we have a right to expect, we will inevitably make the situation progressively worse. Our vision gets cloudier as the position gets further away from us--and we make mistakes that are far beneath our level. Sometimes all a chess player needs is a bucket of cold water over the head--something to wake us from the lethargic resignation to our emotional swings. With practice and introspective attentiveness, we can learn to be our own cold water

This series of article below is compiled from Josh Waitzkin Chess Academy

Two people sit facing one another in silence. A few feet apart, each can smell the other and hear every breath. They focus with forbidding intensity on the space that separates them. Sometimes one looks up and searches the other for meaning, mood, an idea. Occasionally their eyes meet until too much is revealed and one glances away. Hours pass. They sweat with strain and the passionate need to overcome. They are pushed to the limit. Bodies are separated by a table, but minds are dancing in a common dream until the bodies fall away and all that is left is thought and emotion and a shared journey through a jungle of complexity.

This is a chess game. It is rare that two human beings, short of lovers, share such an intimate focus. As players we learn each other's rhythms. Every mine that you lay, I must uncover and avoid. Every attack I plan, you hinder before it begins. I begin to feel what you are thinking, where you are immersed at every moment. If I see something that gives me a rush of fear, you will feel my reaction and search for the weakness. If there is an easy tactic that you are too deeply into the position to notice, I may sit motionless to avoid a rustle that may snap you back to the surface. If I am sweating you will feed off my fear. If you are excited I will search for the reason.

With our minds so attuned to one another, we may see and miss many of the same things. It is quite common for two players to share an obvious blind spot or false evaluation because their concentrations are entangled on the wrong path. We may both think that I am winning because of the emotional evolution of the game, when in fact my attack is unsound and you are clearly better. At such times, the objective evaluation is practically secondary to the emotional reality. If you believe you are much worse, then you may not be cool-headed enough to find the dispassionate refutation.

There is a real fascinating story of Boris Spassky playing an entire match against Viktor Kortchnoi from a seat away from the table watching the demo board. Spassky was one of the more charismatic world champions--so such an unusual move was consistent with his boisterous personality. Apparently Spassky did this firstly to unnerve Kortchnoi who was prepared for and used to feeling a presence against whom he was wrestling. Suddenly Victor was out there all alone, and Spassky had months to psychologically prepare for this new competitive situation. Also, Kortchnoi holds that Spassky wanted to personally be more objective and less impassioned by Victor's emotional state. Kortchnoi told me that he was so unnerved that he asked the tournament arbiter to force Spassky to sit down. Of course such a rule could not be enforced and Spassky had gained the upper-hand before a chess move was played.

Such tactics might seem strange to a beginner, but when you have felt the intensity of extended match play, and vibrated with the tension of two tremendous forces in a month-long stand-off, you will understand the desire to find even the most bizarre ways to gain a slight edge. But methods such as Spassky's tactics and Tal's penetrating ability need not be taken literally when relating them to our own competitive lives. What is crucial is not the particular mechanism, but the reality of an interconnectedness that exists between opponents. And once again, I believe that the best way of handling this reality is to stay present. When you find yourself in the spell of an emotional sway, try to snap back into clarity. If you are in a deep think and can't find an answer, go to the bathroom and splash cold water on your face or refresh your biochemistry by sprinting up a flight of stairs--upon returning you may immediately see the way. I have had many moments in my career when I simply could not find anything and then I got up from the board and had the solution dawn on me when I took a sip of water or just cleared my mind. Sometimes we are attached to the left when we should be looking right. More often we are looking too deep, when the first move of our calculation is the error. Sometimes both players will feel a certain way, and the game will go that way, when all that was needed was a new perspective and the whole character of the struggle would be jolted 180 degrees. Again, if you can snap into the moment and out of the spell of inertia, many cases of chess blindness will be avoided.