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Table of Contents
Bobby Fischer is dead.There’s a lot that could be said at this point, both good and bad. There’s the brash young kid who wanted to be the youngest world champion ever. There’s the bitter old man, spewing invective at everyone.
People will tell stories. And, in the end, we’ll all remember what we choose to remember.
We’ve all heard the saying, “No combination exists without a positional advantage.” I’ve struggled with implementing that for years, and I’ve given up. While the statement is quite probably true (at least I’m not going to dispute it) I’ve come to the conclusion it’s also quite useless as advice.
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.
Over at the Chess Cafe (I’d provide a link to it, but Hanon Russell doesn’t appear to believe in permalinks, so any link I’d provide here would break in short order, hence there’s no point in doing so) Mark Dvoretsky has written an excellent piece on the place of opening preparation in the development of a chess player.
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.
I’ve been spending some time the last couple of years teaching chess classes (numbering from 5 to 36 kids). I have used both major databases in support of that goal, and I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with them. They both have some drawbacks, and I’d fully switch to one that lacked those drawbacks.
Here is my list of the top annoyances and how Chessbase, Chess Assistant, or both, fail to deliver:
Players A and B are playing in a tournament. A gets up, takes a step back from the board and leans against the wall behind his chair. He’s farther away from the board than he would be while playing, about where a spectator would be standing, maybe just a little closer. Other than that, he’s not moving. B complains about his behavior and insists he has to sit down or walk away from the board.
What would be your ruling?
Recently I’m told one of our top players made some disparaging remarks about a predecessor. It wasn’t the first time it happened nor, I’m sure, will it be the last.
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.
Been spending some time in some older books, and revisited one I think is vastly underrated: The Soviet Chess Conveyor, by Mikhail Shereshevsky. The translation is terrible, but there’s a lot of good material there just waiting to be dug up.
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?)
Knowledge of How Things Used To Be doesn’t prevent me from acknowledging changes in How Things Are. Some recent postings on Craig’s List reveal that not only are there two local organizations teaching chess to scholastics in the area, along with a couple of Illinois organizations expanding northward, but there’s an Arizona organization moving in as well.We remain independent, but willing to teach for any of these organizations, as our schedule allows. And there are several more like us. But the interest of all these organizations indicates there is both an interest in and a market for more chess classes in the Milwaukee area than currently exist.Small steps, but in the right direction. Progress is rarely made in single leaps, but rather in the slow process of placing one foot in front of the other, continually, until the goal is reached. We welcome you all to the party; there’s plenty for everyone. Enjoy.
Some people seem to think I’m lost in nostalgia. There’s a genuine resurgence of chess going on in the schools around here. Hundreds of kids are playing, so obviously I’m just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses and refusing to acknowledge that the chess scene has been rebuilt. I’m sure there’s even some who think the only reason I haven’t come around to this conclusion is that I’m not in control of the current chess scene. It’s not my achievement, therefore I don’t want to acknowledge it.
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.
How many times do you hear that sort of contrast being drawn? “I’m a positional player.” “I’m a tactical player.” We put ourselves in boxes that we then have trouble climbing out of. “I didn’t want to play that line because it was too tactical.” “That line is too quiet.”
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?