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.

He starts out by noting that Botvinnik only lists any sort of chess preparation and training as one of four factors in chess success, and the place of opening prep falls farther from there.

In large part, the article is a continuation of a dispute with another Russian coach over training methods. Along the way he quotes heavily from Jonanthan Rowson’s Chess For Zebras (and if you don’t have that book, run, don’t walk, to your favorite chess book supplier and get it. It gets my vote for chess book of the decade, not just the year). But it’s what he says for himself I’ll be quoting here.

Following this kind of thinking, chessplayers forget that the opening stage must sooner or later come to an end. Even if the outcome of that opening is favorable, sooner or later, we have to search, move by move, for the very best continuations, and solve one problem after another – positional or tactical, technical or psychological. And the way in which a chessplayer deals with these problems has a far greater influence on the outcome of the game than does the position he gets out of the opening duel. When all’s said and done, the one who makes the last error loses.

In many events – chiefly children’s and teenagers’ tournaments – I have observed the same picture, again and again. The players run through the opening stage “according to the last word of theory,” and sometimes even introduce their own novelties. But after a half hour to an hour, a great change occurs. The level of play declines sharply; there are extended periods of thought over elementary moves; positional or tactical errors follow one after another.

A point I’ve tried to stress to my students. I frequently come out of the opening badly in my games, only to win later as my opponent’s book knowledge runs out and the outcome of the game begins to depend on chess skill, rather than memory.

It’s hard to make that point, especially to kids, who see that they can use the new opening line they’ve just memorized in their very next game, while this endgame position I’ve put before them won’t come up for weeks, if not years, and they know it.

So – what’s more important for a ten-year-old chessplayer? To study the games with 13 Nd1 in the database or to train his eye for combinations and his calculation of variations? To me, the answer is as obvious as I hope it is to you. Concentrating a youngster’s attentions on the openings, which must unavoidably come at the cost of other more important developmental problems (time, after all, is not unlimited!), means that a trainer will do a poor job with his student: he will disorient him.

And again:

Of course opening knowledge is necessary. But in the first place, only part of a student’s time should be devoted to it (the stronger and more experienced the player, the less time needed). And in the second place, a player should never become a slave to his opening knowledge. What’s important is to learn how to make use of it in order to resolve the problems arising over the board yourself.

Maybe they’ll listen to him, if they don’t listen to me.

Here is my list of the top annoyances and how Chessbase, Chess Assistant, or both, fail to deliver:

1. Illegal Positions. Both allow me to create a position, but neither allow me to create either a fragment of a position or a position that lacks one or both Kings, something that is useful especially when demonstrating the essentials of a tactical sequence or the characteristics of a pawn structure. Chessbase comes the closest, as it will allow me to create such a position in a text file in the database. Maybe it’s just my installation, though, but I am unable to print those positions with the text file to create a handout for my classes. Not all of the classrooms I work have video projectors, and not all of the students have computers, hence an electronic-only version doesn’t cut it. So far, I’ve had to create the positions in the text file, convert the text file to html, then export the text file to RTF, load it into a word processor and copy/paste the diagrams into the word processor (because for some reason known only to CB, it doesn’t export the images). It’s even more tedious than it sounds.
2. Homework Diagrams. This is one that CB does much better than CA. You have to make a training annotation on the first move, but once you do so, you can select a sequence of diagrams, tell CB to “Print Multiple Training” and hey, presto! Out of the printer come pages of diagrams, sans moves, followed by a list of answers for each. But the problem is CB only prints out the first move as the answer, not the entire answer. Give it 6 out of 10 for that. CA can’t do even that much. If you want to do this in CA, you have a few workarounds, but none of them are really practical: You can create a second database of just the positions, without answers, or you can export to an RTF file and delete all the moves before printing, or you can make the answers a variation rather than the main line and print with variations disabled. Eew.
3. Export Graphically Annotated Diagrams. This is a feature that makes me think CB has a much higher estimation of their printed output than I do. CB will only do this directly to the printer. CA will export these diagrams to RTF files as well as print them. Personally, I think CA’s output is friendlier to print publication efforts while CB’s is friendlier to the web, but classroom work is printed. So, yes, CA does this one at an acceptable level.

Full Disclosure: I am affiliated with neither company, but I have much more familiarity with CA than CB, so there may be ways to get CB to do what I want that I have yet to discover. Over the past year or two I’ve used CB more than CA in the classroom because of “print multiple training”, but recently I’ve started to prepare more complete homework packages, and I’m starting to switch back, because of CA’s flexibility.

What would be your ruling?

Youth often feels a burden when they mature under the shadow of those who have gone before. It’s only human nature. We feel a need to assert ourselves, and grow weary of the tales of past giants.

The player in question is certainly an excellent player: In anyone’s list of the best players to have called the state home over the past century, he should certainly figure to be in the top 20, perhaps even top 10. I mean no disparagement of him. But the problem is, the other player would be on the same list.

Among other things, the charge is offered that he was a  rabbit-basher, someone who lived off beating weaker players. This is no better than a half-truth. Our fair state doesn’t produce many high-rated players, so top players have two choices: travel or settle for playing the few good players who venture here.

Years ago, there were many more good players coming here, but beginning in the late 80’s the state was a desert of chess competition. And for a player who isn’t willing to put his real career on hold (or turn pro) the only viable option was to settle for what you could get.

But I called it a half-truth, which clearly implies part of it was false. This rabbit-basher, faced with what little 2200+ opposition that showed up, managed to log a record of 17 wins, 18 draws, and 7 losses. (This in the last decade before his retirement from the scene, long after he’d earned his senior master rating.) Scoring 62% against masters hardly is evidence that one doesn’t deserve a master’s rating, or being remembered fondly. Add in to this the National Blitz Championship Title he won, and we start to get an entirely different picture from the one put forward in the remarks that triggered this observation.

As I said, I understand where the comments come from. They’re just not accurate.

Recommendation: This book is not for beginners. It has philosophical advice that is excellent for coaches/teachers, and has some interesting analysis of opening/middlegame positions that I suggest you double-check before you playing. (You do double check all analysis before you play it, don’t you?)

So, for those cynics I’d like to present some numbers from a Milwaukee Recreation Department document. It’s undated, but from external evidence I’d place it in the late 1950’s. It summarizes participation in the first 23 years of the Milwaukee chess program.

During the first 23 years of the program’s operation, they held 7,382 adult tournaments and 36,626 playground tournaments. In addition, they organized 1,602 matches with teams from other cities, and 1,478 chess exhibitions.

Yes, you read those numbers correctly. Before you dismiss it as hype, remember there are 17 social centers and 72 playgrounds covered by this report. That means every playground averaged about 22 tournaments during the year. Since the standard practice was to hold tournaments at the end of most organized classes, and there were multiple classes every week on every playground, that’s not as incredible as it perhaps first appeared.

During the same period they held 29,614 classes at the social centers and another 115,126 classes at the playgrounds. There was also a league (actually several leagues — by 1936 there were 14 leagues) with regular team play, as well as individual tournaments. The 23-year total of attendees was 340,182.

Before you completely boggle, remember this: the numbers here come from the period 1930-1952, about a decade before the program peaked. They are just a fraction (albeit a healthy one) of the program I saw when I was a young visitor to the city. Until present numbers rise to a significant portion of these figures, perhaps the scoffers will be willing to grant me the right to feel a little disappointed by the current levels of activity.

While these words can be truthfully applied to some positions, not all positions can be so easily pigeonholed, and certainly no player can be so pigeonholed. Don’t believe me? Think of former champion Tigran Petrosian. A quiet, maneuvering player - obviously a positional player.

But what typified his games, what was his “signature?” Sacrificing the exchange, a tactical sequence. And who can forget the time he played Tal, when tactics lit up the board with enough fire to satisfy Alexei Shirov. And it was Petrosian doing it, not Tal.

Don’t trap yourself into a style of thinking that’s false. Stop thinking about them as two completely separate and distinct forms of chess. Tactical play exposes positional weaknesses. The foundation stones of good positional play are tactics.

Emanuel Lasker wrote: “With combinations they [chess masters] attempt to refute false values, and by positional play to demonstrate true values. ”

Neither positional play nor tactical play can exist in a vacuum. They enable each other. Instead of “two sides of the same coin” (the metaphor often used) think of them as poles of a magnet. You don’t get one without the other (yes, I know about unipolar magnets, but when you look at them you’ll see they aren’t truly unipolar, they’re just hiding the other pole).

And like magnetic poles, they are attracted to their opposites. Tactical flourishes exist because of poor positional play. Positional weaknesses attract tactics just as surely as the north pole of a magnet attracts the south pole of another.

Next time you’re tempted to think about yourself in terms of tactical or positional, think again. You don’t want to label yourself as half a chessplayer. Where’s the attraction in that?