http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article1816459.ece

check that out

Just tonight while trying to track down a certain unnamed chess tournament that took place in Milwaukee during 1973, I came across William Martz’s name. I had no idea that Milwaukee (I was born and raised here and currently live in Greenfield, WI) had such a chess star. I also had no idea about his untimely death at the young age of 37 in 1983. How sad for Milwaukee. We had a great chess history here, but it seems hardly anyone knows about it!

Is there a way to contact you? I have some historical questions to ask about Alina Markowski and a player in a 1973 Milwaukee tournament who, on threat of being disqualified from the event, played one move and then left the playing area and “lost” the game.

JN

Think of the different facets as legs: if one grows longer than the other, you’ll walk lopsidedly and will have trouble getting where you want to go.

Tactics alone can take you all the way to master and even beyond. That’s already been proven. But if that’s all you study and work on, you will pick up some bad strategic/positional habits along the way, making more work for you later as you have to unlearn bad habits as well as learn good ones. (In one sense, that’s what happened to me. Back in the day I couldn’t handle tactics at all, played very quiet chess — one opponent said my winning method was to lull my opponent to sleep and then win on time. I realized that was the weakest facet of my game, and so focused on it, forcing myself to play tactical openings, and my results improved. But I failed to pay attention to the balance in my game, and the scales tipped in the other direction. I began playing solely for tactics and paid no attention at all to strategic concerns. My development as a chessplayer was stunted.)

I’ve set about correcting that course, but it would have been so much easier had I kept the two in balance earlier in my career. Today I spend most of my study time working on calculation, because that’s currently the weakest part of my game, but at the same time, I’m keeping the tactical work linked to positional considerations by identifying and examining the positional weaknesses that make the tactical blows I’m calculating work.

That’s where most tactical study fails, I think. Just by practicing on tactical problems, you automatically improve in recognizing the tactical possibility when it arises on the board. But by not correctly understanding what weaknesses led to it, you never gain the ability to create those possibilities in your games. You become very good at picking up what your opponent drops, but never acquire the skill of knocking something out of his hands in the first place.

As a class player, that’s not all that big a handicap, because players below 1800 drop things all the time, almost every game. But the farther a player goes above 1800, the less frequently they drop things on their own. So either you end up drawing a lot of games, or you learn how to knock things out of your opponent’s hands.

It goes back to one of my favorite quotes from Rudolf Spielmann. When a spectator once remarked on the depth and beauty of Alekhine’s combinations, he snorted “Given his positions, I would have no trouble finding his combinations. But I can never get his positions!” That’s the trickiest rung on the improvement ladder, gaining the ability to create/induce weaknesses you are prepared to take advantage of tactically.

Once you can correctly recognize one pole of the magnet, the positional weakness, you know what the other pole will look like, so it makes searching for it easier. But the only way to recognize that pole in the first place is by studying tactics in the context of the positional weaknesses they exploit. In your study you work backwards from the effect (the tactical blow) toward the cause so that in your games you will be able to recognize the causes and more easily settle on the effects.

You know, I think there’s a longer essay in that, just waiting to come out.

I personally don’t know where I fall on the scale right now. My play has gone from almost completely strategical to having some tactical maneuvers. I suppose I shouldn’t worry about it too much and should just focus on improving and having fun!

On a side note, State is this weekend. I hope we’ll see you there.