“Don’t believe it if someone tries to convince you that they know the only correct method of improvement. Such a method does not exist, and such claims are at best self-deception and at worst a deliberate attempt to delude pupils or readers.” Mark Dvoretsky, 2009 in “Controversial Thoughts”

Strong words, but if any chess instructor has the “street cred” to back them up, it’s him.

What does he mean? That a specific study recipe that improves everyone as efficiently as possible, whether it’s “all tactics, all the time” or “endgames above all” or anything else, flat-out doesn’t exist. Everyone’s different, more importantly, everyone learns differently.

So does that mean we’re all doomed to fail, or worse, to pay high fees for personal instructors in the game? No. (That is, unless you’re intending to pay me those high fees, then of course it’s true! Um, that’s a joke, son.)

It also means that generic, off-the-shelf, one size fits all classes are no match for dedicated individual work, with or without a trainer.

I don’t like to recommend books without knowing the person I’m recommending them for, because there are several choices and every person is different, so what works best for one might not work for another. But there are a few titles that keep recurring. I’ll reproduce the list here, along with some notes.

Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. Yes, as a human being the man was pond scum. So was Ty Cobb, when it comes to that, but he was still a great baseball player and one of the best hitters who ever lived. Like wise, Bobby Fischer was one of the greatest chessplayers ever.

But that’s not why I recommend this book. The book was designed from the ground up by professionals to be a teaching manual. Fischer contributed the chess expertise, but the text and the manner of presentation have nothing to do with him, and they’re pure gold.

It’s a “programmed instruction” format, meaning each page asks a question that is answered on the following page, and it builds up chess knowledge by a gradual question and answer cycle. It works well even as a teaching tool used by a parent for a child, but not so well in a classroom environment. It builds from one concept to another perhaps a little fast for young children, but middle school on should find it quite useful.

Comprehensive Chess Course. Two volume set from Lev Alburt and Sam Palatnik. This is much better suited for a classroom, formalized environment than the last book, and also much better for younger children. Don’t confuse this with the follow-on volumes Lev Alburt issued later, I’m talking just about the two-volume set.

Progress here is slow, you’re halfway through the first volume before you learn how all the pieces move. That pacing makes it good for the younger children, but can lose older kids through boredom. Take the program the way it’s written for primary-age children. Let the older children race through the book at a faster pace, or better yet, get them into a different set of books.

Guide To Good Chess. Cecil Purdy was an Australian, a world champion correspondence chess player, and one of the best chess writers ever, probably the best who ever had english as his native language. Mix those last two attributes into a beginner’s chess book, and you have something special.

Mind you, his word selection can be a bit archaic (he wrote this in the middle of the last century, after all) so the person reading it should be able to handle that, but even if it’s a bit difficult at times, it’s more than worth it. Contains exercises, advances from concept to concept very quickly until it gets to some pretty advanced territory for a beginner’s book.

For those reasons, I definitely wouldn’t select this book for anyone below middle school level, and really, it’s more for the high school and older crowd.

Secrets of the Russian Chess Masters. OK, so the title is a bit pretentious, but this series of two volumes from Lev Alburt and Larry Parr is sort of an adult version of Comprehensive Chess Course. It contains exercises and information, and builds from one concept to another, but doesn’t take as long, so it covers more territory, and thus has space to give deeper concepts a more detailed approach.

This series is definitely for the older player; advanced middle school or higher because of the vocabulary and the speed of progression. It can also be followed as a classroom manual, though it will take a little more ingenuity for this set over Alburt’s previous set.

Conclusion

Well, there it is. These are the best books I’ve found for starting someone out from the very beginning. Once a person has the basic concepts from these books and has started playing the game, there are other questions, other learning opportunities, and other books. The order of presentation here doesn’t mean anything special, so don’t read anything into that. Take what I’ve said about the books, and look them over. One will probably appeal to you more than the others; pick it. You can’t really go wrong with any of the selections I’ve listed here.

Good luck, and let me know how it goes.

(drum roll, please)

Chess Assistant.

Why? A lot of factors played into this, but here’s the deal, as the short mad one used to say:

Updates. The plain fact is CA databases are easier to update, especially when, like me, you don’t do updates every single week, but sometimes let a month go by before updating. If I want to do a 5-6 updates from TWIC into CB, for example, I have to download the files, unzip them, open the individual databases and copy them into the main twic database I have here. With CA, I just download the files, go in to CA, hit “Join…” and point the program at the downloaded zip files. It does the rest automatically. Oh, and the program itself is easier to upgrade — you can download the upgrades after purchase, instead of waiting for a package with disc(s). This is important to me since I had a disc from CB that went bad, and it was a month-long hassle that began with the assumption that I was a thief, which, I’ll have to admit, was another factor in the decision (but since most software companies treat their customers like thieves, that doesn’t prove a serious objection). Easily better than CB.

Analysis.CA shipped with Deep Rybka, CB with Fritz 6. This one isn’t even close.

Cost. Gotta admit, money is a factor; like I said, GM’s may get a free ride, but I don’t. CA cost $100 to upgrade it and the 4 million game hugebase. Chessbase wants $140 just for the program. their large database, megabase, is sold separately. It’s at least another $50 to update the megabase.

Does that mean I won’t miss CB? Of course not. I absolutely love the opening report you can build with CB; never saw anything like it anywhere else. But that’s about the only feature of CB I’ll miss. Oh, wait…except for the nice way it lines the test positions I print out up in nice neat columns and rows. CA still hasn’t figured out how to do that; the positions are off by a line or two from one column to the other.

Considering I don’t do a lot of opening reports, and CA10 has now fixed the silly bug that kept it from printing diagrams without moves, so there’s no good reason for me to spend twice as much.

Then why the title? Because you can’t begin to identify what you don’t know, until you have identified what you do know.

So here’s your challenge: over the next few weeks, re-create this notebook, but about chess. Document what you know.

For openings, write out the moves you remember, at the end of that, write down the typical plans for each side. What are the typical tactics each side has to be aware of (e. g., shots against the g5 Bishop in the Cambridge Springs) and how do you exploit or secure against them? How should each side handle the transition to middlegame?

For middlegames, what basic tactical methods (pin fork, etc.) do you know well enough to see them in your mind? What cues may you find in a position for their existence? (e. g. two pieces one square apart horizontally cues possible pawn fork, rook fork, etc.)

For endgames, what rules do you remember for pawn endgames, rook endgames? Which positions do you have memorized? What’s the winning procedure? Basic checkmates? Typical maneuvers and traps?

And now that you’ve finished with the easy part: Set up any chess position (can be just a random piece arrangement or a position from a game you’ve never seen before — doesn’t matter, so long as it’s not one you’ve thought about) on your board. What thoughts cross your mind about it? Speak out loud into a recorder, have someone else write what you say, or write it yourself. Be honest. Don’t do it the way you think you should; do it the way you do it in a tournament (have your clock running, just to help with the atmosphere).

The first part of the exercise will hopefully show you what you know, and from that you can start to see the shape of what you don’t know. Can’t remember many opening moves? Either memorize more or switch to openings that are governed more by principles than specific moves (King’s Indian Attack, Paulsen Sicillian are two that come to mind quickly, but there are more). Don’t have a large store of middlegame or endgame techniques? Game collections like Informant give them to you in raw form; databases can help you find mammoth amounts of material pertaining to similar positions. Play them over and get a feel for more positions. Endgame books like Silman’s or Flear’s or Muller’s, or Shereshevsky’s trilogy, or Averbakh’s even larger set give you many more sources for patterns for your mind.

But the most important work will probably be on the last part of your book. Examine the copy of your thinking process. Look it over closely; you’re looking for cracks where good moves, either for yourself or your opponent, can escape your notice. You’re looking for what you use to form your plan (and if you don’t plan, mark that down as a major flaw right now) and what you may be missing. Take longer than just the few minutes you spent the first time, use a computer to help you. Compare your move selection process with Purdy’s, or Silman’s, or Kotov’s, or Tisdal’s, or any other documented process you can find. Where do you differ from them? Is the difference significant? Can you change your approach slightly to include it, or do you have to unlearn and start over?

Yes, this is sketchy. It has to be; to treat this subject in detail would take more than one book, and even then it wouldn’t be sufficient, because every individual case is different. I can (and probably will, before I’ve finished with this topic) tell you how I learn, but that won’t necessarily apply to you. I’ll return to this topic with more details several times, and still won’t cover it in depth.

The point of this is: now that you’ve done all this heavy lifting (and if it takes less than a month, you’re either a beginner at this game, a liar, or have an awful lot of spare time) you’ve got the raw material in hand to begin a serious improvement program.

Pick a flaw you’ve identified and fix it. I don’t think it matters a great deal which one you start with, but if for some reason you really need to create a priority list, go over your last dozen or so serious games with this notebook full of identified flaws beside you. Every time you see an instance of one of the deficiencies you’ve listed show up in a game, mark it. When you’re done, the one with the most marks wins — start with it and fix it. Pick the next flaw. Rinse Lather. Repeat.

No it’s not easy. Anybody who told you it would be is either lying or a natural GM. Either way, it doesn’t apply to us. You got your map. Start hiking.

And my answer always disappoints.

Because there is no simple opening, or set of moves, that will win. My advice is best summed up in the title of this post: “Don’t get comfortable.”

As I look back on my early days, I let comfort get in the way of my improvement often, which is probably the main reason I didn’t advance any farther than I have. I got comfortable playing the Colle, playing the Stonewall Attack, and that limited my experience in other positions. I got comfortable playing the Grand Prix, which again limited the kind of positions I knew how to play. I got comfortable playing Bronstein’s Caro-Kann.

And all of these “comfort zones” were little more than prisons. Oh, some were quite comfortable (my lifetime 70% score with the GP, for example) I have to admit. But they denied me other experiences, of equal or greater value to me, and kept my knowledge of chess narrow.

I came to the idea of variety late in life (odd, I know, for a man whose chess idol was David Bronstein, but there it is, nonetheless). I got there when I was enlisted to coach a HS team. There were players of many stripes and temperments, and I began badly, because I couldn’t explain much outside of the narrow chess neighborhood I’d grown up in.

So I expanded my horizons. I went to tournaments with the resolution to play a completely different game every round, to never repeat myself.

And whole new vistas opened to me. More importantly, what I learned from these new positions I found could be brought back into the chessic “ghetto” that I’d grown up in, and enrich it as well (such as when I undertook a winning Queen-side attack from a Stonewall Dutch, something I would never have considered before).

After about a year of pain, I found I was getting better with every game, to the point where I was even able to win club tournaments that I would have finished well down in before.

I could blame it on opening study. Opening study is cheap and easy, and you can get seduced by some early fast wins, and you settle in. But that’s the actual problem, not the study itself. Especially as a developing player, once you get comfortable with an opening, with a set of positions, your growth stops. You simply begin to repeat yourself in game after game.

Far from being a welcome condition, this feeling of comfort should be a danger signal. It means it’s time to switch to a radically different set of openings, to completely unfamiliar positions, and begin to explore them.

That is the real road to improvement.

So let me talk a bit about the problems draws cause an organizer. Not the hard-fought earned draws; they’re no problem at all. But I mean the “tactical draws,” the short ones players make because of tournament standings, when they take a draw with their main competition for the event in a dozen moves or so. They’re part of the game, like playing “safe” in billiards they keep a player from damaging their own chances while at the same time blocking an opponent’s advance. I’ve said before that from a player’s perspective, these draws absolutely make sense.

But from an organizer’s perspective, they’re trouble. For two reasons.The first is reputation. A tournament gains stature from the great games played in it. And that stature attracts more players. It’s not the only attraction, but it’s a definite factor. High rated players draw players from the next lower rank to your event. (That’s one reason I always cut breaks to ranked players, ranging from conditionally free entries — 2200+ only paid an entry if they won more than twice the entry fee in prizes — up to paying for hotel expenses and more when  a titled player committed to playing and letting me use their name in advertising.) But when the top players sit down to quick draws so they can beat up on the class players and split the prize money among themselves, this attraction becomes a disincentive, because the lower players learn they won’t get to see a “clash of the titans” nor will they have a reasonable expectation of getting a piece of the pie after the dust settles. I mean, who really cares how many IM’s or GM’s are in the room if all you’re going to get to see is 15 moves from main theory?

The second problem those draws cause an organizer is more subtle. One of the things I’d always wanted to organize is a round-robin to go with the Western Open, creating a European-style festival with the open winner moving into next year’s round robin. I had everything laid out, the plan was in place, the budget was solid. I’d talked to players I hoped to be able to invite, and the terms (free hotel plus per diem for meals, plus prize money for the top 50% of the players) were attractive enough (two rounds per day were a bit of a downer, but with enough budget I could work around that as well). All I needed was a sponsor to make it happen.

I came close, but the last straw for me came a couple of years ago, when I had a consulting firm and a high-tech company (whom I decline to name, mainly because they did nothing wrong and so shouldn’t be mentioned in a negative context) interested in going ahead. Money wasn’t the issue that made the deal fall apart. We’d talked about the titled players that had been coming to the Western (4 IM’s were semi-regulars, and there were a couple of GM’s that could be attracted by the round robin under discussion) and they were excited about the opportunity.

Then they asked what had happened in those previous encounters. They were expecting tales of a struggle, subtle moves and plans. All I could show were 13-move draws.

“Where’s the rest of the game?”

“That’s it. The players called it a draw at this point.”

“You mean, they quit?” I tried to explain about tournament tactics, preserving energy, all the very real reasons for playing such a short game. But I knew I was an exchange down in this endgame, and while the end might take a while to arrive, the result would be inevitable. Three months later the deal died, quietly, with phone calls no longer being returned.

These were businessmen. While we all know the phrase “past performance is no guarantee of future results,” we also know this phrase is only used to downplay past excellent performance. If the performance has never been there, there needs to be a reason to expect it to change, and they didn’t see one. I couldn’t convince them that if they plopped their money on the table for a 5-9 round event, players wouldn’t decide to take 60% of the games off, so to speak, and really only play 1-2 games over the course of the event. That wasn’t value enough for them. They wanted their names linked with intelligent plans carried out with boldness, overcoming all opposition. 13-move draws need not apply.

And I can’t blame them for that attitude.

So while short draws make sense in the context of a single event, they’re a deal-killer for any attempts to grow tournaments. That’s one of the big issues you’ll face as an organizer; I hope you find a better solution than I could.

All things must pass. This decision wasn’t easy for me to make; in fact it’s overdue. I feel like I’m letting Fred and Marshall and Pearle down. But I just can’t do it anymore. The game has changed. The players have changed. I’ve changed. I would hope they would understand.

Scenes from the life of an organizer and coach:

The time one of my players was making a meteoric rise. He deserved to play on a higher board, and the website ratings supported that move. The organizers of the state scholatic tournament, however would not use the website ratings in his case. Another coach in the same event was allowed to do so.

The time one of my players, a borderline varsity player, walked up to me during a match, and threatened to throw his game, and with it quite possibly the match, if I wouldn’t guarantee him a seat on the team I would be taking to Nationals.

The time I actually had to forfeit a player over cell phone use, after three times making the announcement that I would, and having to listen to hours of whining afterwards, then having him stalk off in a huff, never to return (OK, so there was an up side to that one).

The time the USCF, then in the middle of a push for drug-testing chess players, endorsed a supplement (an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, of all things) to help you play better chess.

The moment I came to accept that getting high ranking chess players to come to your event was one thing, but that getting them to actually play a game (instead of regurgitate a few moves from theory and shake hands) against each other was quite another, and in the rare event that happened, getting either of them to turn in a copy of their scoresheet was impossible, anyway.

The many times I overheard players, who thought I couldn’t hear or understand what they were saying, “negotiating” the final tournament standings. 

The year I spent in the middle of a fued between officers of an organization that were old enough to know better.

The time a mother threatened to sue me because I dared ask if her precious and perfect little girl had moved one of my books to another table, one of middling commercial value but priceless to me sentimentally.

Just a few moments from the last decade or so. There are plenty more where they came from. Straws on the back of a camel.

This is my last year as an organizer; my last year as a coach was a few years back. I could continue a litany of reasons, but it all comes down to one very simple one: It’s just not fun anymore. I’ve spent upwards of $15K over the last decade or so on chess organizing and coaching, and while I don’t begrudge doing it I just can’t keep spending that for an activity that I no longer enjoy.

I’m tired. I’m tired of begging players to share their games with the organizer of the event they’re playing in. I had planned on publishing a book of the best games from the Western Open. Trouble is, only a few really good games are played there every year, and only a small minority of those ever made it into my hands, despite my entreaties.

I’m tired of complaints. In the same event I’ve heard complaints from players that the time control was too fast and too slow, that the entry fees were too high and not high enough. That the prize fund was generous and low.

I’m tired of dealing with a national organization that’s more interested in sniping at each other and playing with children than actually promoting chess tournaments to adults.

I’ll keep playing chess, and maybe even play in a tournament or two. But I won’t be behind the big table. I’ll be the grumpy old guy in the corner at the chess club. My interest in chess as a game continues (I just renewed my subscription to New In Chess, if you need proof of that). It’s just my interest in chess organizing and organizations that has evaporated.

And I’ll keep on writing about chess history here. The chess players of the past still interest me. The computer-generated progeny of today don’t.

Maybe I’m just old and grumpy, living in the past. Whatever it is, the prospect of tournaments today fills me with more dread than excitement. I refused point-blank the idea of making players pee in a cup for the absurd drug-testing schemes that were proposed. I’m even less thrilled at the prospect of following some kid into the bathroom to make sure he’s not running Fritz on his iPhone, or frisking players for dubious “hearing aids.”

It was a fun ride, but now it’s over. I just don’t fit anymore. I don’t relate. It’s time to step aside.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

People will tell stories. And, in the end, we’ll all remember what we choose to remember.

I’ve always felt an affinity for Fischer, probably because like him, I grew up in a single-parent household. At the same time, his behavior embarrassed me. How could anyone make such tantrums a normal part of their lives?

For me, there will always be two Fischers: the chessplayer, and the man. I may not have enjoyed watching Robert J Fischer the man’s slide into madness, but I could understand it. I had a relative get involved with Armstrongism, like Bobby did. It drove him to attempt suicide. Fischer only let drag him into a world of lies and deceit.

It’s not all that unusual for people with fine minds to let themselves get deluded. More recently, Gary Kasparov bought into the “new chronology” being peddled in Russia, whose basic claim is that the last two millennia of world history is a complete fiction, the ostensible goal of which was to hide the importance of Russia’s domination of the west during that time (in fact, according to these folks, we had to make up two entire centuries from whole cloth just to accomplish that feat, so it’s only been 1800 years, not two millennia). Fischer declined to turn his critical mind, even for a few moments, from debunking unsound chess variations to considering the claims of the historical revisionists of a different stripe, and so bought the Great Jewish Conspiracy Theory peddled by Blavatsky and others.

Yes, I can understand the failures of the man, though I cannot condone them. But Fischer the chessplayer? No,  that one I will never understand. The player who walked through an entire US Championship without giving up so much as a single draw? The player who scored over 75% over all the Interzonals he played, where the best of the world challenge for the crown? The player who, in his final Interzonal appearance lost only two (and drew seven) out of 22 games? The player who only lost one game out of 21 against the top players in the world in the matches that followed? Who spotted the reigning world champion a 2-0 lead and yet leveled the match by game 5?

No, that man I will never understand, and I further suspect that anyone who says they do understand Fischer’s chess is lying. If, as Larry Evans once said, he makes grandmasters look like children, then I’m probably somewhere around the earthworm in that comparison. When I was young I tried to play what he played. It wouldn’t dawn on me until much later that Fischer didn’t win because of the openings he played; the exchange Ruy Lopez wasn’t an overpowering opening. Fischer would have won no matter what he played, because Fischer was, well, Fischer.

Fischer will be talked about. It can’t be avoided. He was a small man who was larger than life. Certainly his chess was. A 13 year old boy, walking in a circle, defeating a club filled with grown men. A young man, confident to the point of arrogant, who had a laser-like brain seeing through to the conclusion of the game. Who could write “…pry open the h-file and it’s sac, sac, mate.”

What is there to be said, that will matter? For a few brief years, a giant walked among us. He performed many prodigious feats (who could forget the Queen sacrifice against Donald Byrne, at the ripe old age of 13?) which showed his might. Then the giant came to a sticky end.

No amount of details will change anyone’s mind about it. It’s up to each of us how we will choose to remember him: as the young man who stood toe to toe with the Soviet machine, and who faced them down; or as the bitter old man, lost in his delusions.

I’ve made my decision as well, as I sit here, once again marveling at 17. … Be6!!

It’s a lot like the adage “there’s no smoke without fire.” The fire may not always be visible, so looking for it doesn’t help you find the smoke. And just as some fires burn without smoke, sometimes there are positional advantages without a combination available at the moment to exploit them.

This came home to me in a recent game, where I found a little tactical riff that raised my game from horrible to merely discouraging. I didn’t have an advantage; I’d long ago blundered away every expectation of that. In fact, the combination merely took advantage of my opponent’s unfortunate piece configuration (potential skewer) to eliminate one of my weaknesses. There’s no way I could be said to have had any sort of advantage.

It made me stop and consider after the game, and I think I’d actually rephrase it “No combination can exist without a weakness for it to exploit.” In other words, it doesn’t really matter one whit to a combination which side has an advantage, it only matters which side has the weakness.

So, what does that mean for your thinking process at the board? Look for the signs to a combination in every position. Keep on the lookout for pieces that can be forked, skewered, pinned, etc., on every move. And if you find them, then look around for a combination to exploit them. Think of them as the smoke that leads you to a burning weakness in your opponent’s position. If you can fan the flames a little, maybe you can bring the whole house down.