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Chessville
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(Lack of) Progress Report by Tom Rose
After one full year of regular study and competition I have to report that my competitive ability has hardly changed at all. The first target of achieving the strength of 2200 Elo seems as far away as ever. I should obtain a new Elo rating of approximately 2000 in the next list, but my British rating (based on more games) has fallen by 6 BCF rating points. What has gone wrong here? The Importance of TacticsThe answer is simple. I am constantly making tactical errors. I am not talking about being surprised by a hidden twist at the end of a long forced line, or missing some subtlety in a dense thicket of variations. I mean overlooking simple, obvious possibilities, often only a move or two ahead, and with not many side variations. How significant is this? Very! If I could reduce my serious errors by half my Elo rating would be about 200 points higher. Nothing else I could do has the potential to improve my competitive results as much or as quickly. The trouble with regularly making tactical mistakes is that any deeper skills like accurate positional judgment, or comprehensive endgame knowledge are just irrelevant ... because you never get the chance to show them. I think that my studies have improved my understanding of chess. I can now follow Grandmaster games with a good idea what is going on, even without the help of extensive annotations. I have a broader view of what is possible on the chessboard, I know more endgame theory, and I think my positional judgment is better. But I could easily be fooling myself, and until I stop making bad tactical errors I will not know. The fact is that in most games, and at all levels (novice to grandmaster), tactics are decisive. The winner is usually the player who sees a tactical opportunity that his opponent overlooks. It is only when you have painfully worked out the truth from your own experience that you notice, and more importantly, really deeply feel, what chess teachers have been saying all along. As Gerald Abrahams put it in The Chess Mind:
A typical errorHere is a typical
example from Mitchell-Rose, Heywood 2005:
I have mishandled the opening and have a difficult position. Something has to be done about the threat to my rook. Three moves earlier I had assumed that in this position I would be able to play the obvious13. ... Nc6, otherwise I would have exchanged my bishop for the N at f4 by now. I played 13. ...Nc6, and was shocked by the reply 14.Nxe6! winning a pawn. Now if you were to show me the position after 13. ... Nc6 as a problem, and ask me to find White's next move, it would have taken about a microsecond to see 14. Nxe6. Yet in a real game I completely missed it, despite the warning signs in the position (R and Q susceptible to a Knight fork, d-pawn overloaded, White's active, centralized pieces). After Nxe6 I played 14. ... Qe8 and after 15. Ng5 Qh5, 16. h3 Rae8 I had compensation. White's damaged Q-side pawns make his extra pawn worth less and my pieces are quite active, but I lost in the end. I was still feeling
really bad about this blunder when I came across the following position from
Keres - Spassky, Gottingen Interzonal 1952:
Spassky played a move that even I would be ashamed of (the truly awful) 29...N6d7?? After 29. Qxg7+! he was lost, and so resigned. 30. ... Kxg7 31. Nxd7+ Kg8 32. Nxf6+ Kf7 33. Nd5+. 29.Qxg7+ is not very hard to find so I would guess that Spassky was so wrapped up in looking at the possible exchanges or retreats of the N at e5 that he did not look at other possibilities. Or perhaps he failed to register the fact that at d7 his own knight would block the Queen's defence of g7. It is comforting to realise that the world's greatest players are capable of blundering just as badly as me. The difference is that for Spassky this oversight was a rare aberration. With me it happens in almost half of my games. Improving Tactical SkillGM Anthony Kosten was kind enough to help with the analysis of one of my games at Sautron and he told me that the best thing I could do to get stronger was study tactics. He recommended the Test Your Chess IQ series by Livshitz. But there has to be more to it than that. Solving positions from books of exercises is very easy. I sail through them. In the last year I have solved literally thousands of tactical positions from those books and others. According to the scoring system in the "Grandmaster Challenge" I have the tactical ability of a 2440+ player. But of course I am not that strong tactically, not even close, even after allowing for the undoubted generosity of the scoring system. In real games I often miss the most elementary and short-range tactical shots. The answer is that these tests do not measure real-life tactical skill at all, any more than skill in juggling a football with the feet demonstrates effectiveness as a soccer player. The ability to solve selected tactical puzzles does not automatically carry over to competitive chess. It is only one component of useful tactical skill. The big difference is that in a puzzle you know there is something to be found. Often you are even told what kind of combination you are looking for. In a competitive game the main difficulty is not in finding the ideas and working out the details when you know that a combination exists, but in recognising when it is worth using valuable time searching for a tactical idea, or trying to make an idea work. This would not be a problem if I had 15 minutes available for every move, but in OTB chess the average is more like 2.5 minutes per move. Sometimes something in the position screams that there is a good chance that there is a tactical possibility to be found, but often it is not till after missing a tactical shot that I realise the motifs were there to be seen all along. What I need is a less haphazard approach to recognising when there is a tactical solution ... some way of training myself to recognise in seconds what at present takes me minutes. Causes of Tactical ErrorWhy do we make tactical errors, or overlook tactical possibilities? For some players it is a difficulty with mental projection, for others a lack of familiarity with tactical possibilities, for yet others unreasonable fearfullness and timidity. None of these can explain my oversights. I can play blindfold almost as well as with sight of the board, I am familiar with a huge variety of themes and motifs, and no-one that has seen me play would accuse me of excessive caution. There is no single explanation for my errors, but I believe most of my blunders, oversights, and missed opportunities are due to some combination of:
Here is a case in
point. This position arose in my game with Monsieur Christian Berthou,
at the Rohde International, Sautron 2004. I was White.
Black has just played 25. ... g6. It is easy to see that if White simply moves his Q Black can defend adequately, and in the long run he has the better game because of his better pawn structure. However there is a pretty, though not difficult, sacrificial continuation that I had foreseen before burning my boats for this attack: 26. Nxg6 fxg6 27. Qxg6+ Rg7 28. Qxe6+ Kh8 29. Rh3+ Rh7 30. Rxh7+ Kxh7. I did not spend too long looking for a mate here as I thought I reached an easily winning ending: 31. Bxe4+ dxe4, 32. Qf7+ Kh8 33. Qxb7 Qxg5+ 34. Kf1 Qg4 35. Qxe4 Qh3+ 36. Ke2 Qh5+ 37. Kd3 Qh3+. Here I had seen the idea 38. f3 and if 38. ... Qxh2 then 39. Qe5+ even before I played 26. Nxg6. But when the position came up on the board I thought, why do I need to move a pawn. I'll just block with my Queen and give him more chances to go wrong. At worst we'll repeat moves. So 38. Qe3?! Qh7+ 39. Kd2???? Qc2++ How is this possible? How could I see and calculate the 7-move combo, then miss an elementary epaulette mate in one? There is only one answer. I had already mentally awarded myself the full point, and had switched off mentally. I considered the fight over when it was not. Hence I was not even looking at my opponent's possibilities. I arrogantly assumed that he could do nothing. This is a first-class example of what Kotov (Think Like a Grandmaster) calls "Dizziness due to success". Here is another
position (Rose - Ponter, Frome 2004) where failure to see the fairly obvious
is attributable to an inoperative sense of danger, unsystematic thought, and
simple laziness:
Admittedly White has already mishandled a once promising position. But now, why should I not just grab the a-pawn? 23. Rxa5? Qa1+! I just didn't see it. Why not? Because I did not ask the obligatory question, if I do this, what can my opponent do? Has he any checks, captures etc. The position may still be tenable, but in a quick time limit game, the sudden change was disorientating and unsettling. After 24. Bf1 Rd1 25. Qe2 g6, I felt that I was struggling, defended weakly, and lost in 44 moves. Finally an example
of moving hastily, Rose - Guo, Warwickshire Open 2005:
After the premature f4 and allowing the isolation of the d-pawn White has an uncomfortable position. I had decided to play 18. g3!, which is holding, but at the last moment I thought, why not 18. Ng5? intending Ne6. The instant I let go my knight I saw the answer to that question, but it was already too late. After spending a minute or two checking his calculations my opponent played: 18. ... Nxf4! 19. Bxc5? (Compounding the error) 19. ... Qxg5 20. Bxb6 Re2! 21. Qxe2 Nxe2+ 22. Rxe2 Rf1+ 23. Kxf1 Bxc3 24. bxc3 Qxd5 and the ending is hopeless for White. What is to be doneAll of these errors could have been avoided by some more systematic method of move selection. I had always thought that such methods were no more than crutches to make up for lack of vision, but maybe I need crutches. I suspect that by using a system consciously in every game it eventually becomes internalised, i.e. it is one tool for developing vision. The late Australian IM and 1st World Correspondence Champion CJS Purdy has never tired of pointing out the importance of tactics, or of devising systematic processes of move selection that maximise the chances of tactically accurate play. His system evolved with the years, becoming simpler and more streamlined. It is not a proper (complete) algorithm as a computer programmer would understand it, but it is a useful set of guidelines:
Systems like this may well be crutches, but I now believe they are also a useful tool for developing stronger vision and a sense of danger. At least a system like this will immediately do away with the problems of overconfidence and laziness. So my new objective is to apply this system, or something similar, at every move, in every single game I play, until it becomes second nature, and tactical oversights are practically eliminated. Visual errorsMost of my errors are explicable by one or more of the above failures of effort - but not all. Occasionally there are problems with the mental mechanisms of calculation. Visual errors sometimes happen. For example, my game with IM Richard Palliser from Huddersfield 2005: 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 Palliser has written a book, Play 1. d4!, and I had based my Queen's Indian repertoire on his recommendations. I did not want to play his own lines against him, hence this diversion. 3. ... c5 4. Nf3 cxd4 5. Nxd4 Nc6 6. Bg2 Qb6 7. Nc2 h5!? Up to Palliser's last move was all standard opening theory, but then 7. ... d5 is normally played. I don't believe h5, but you can see its point, especially when played by an IM against a player he expects to beat easily. It is rather like a snooker or pool professional scattering the pack. It would be fatal against another pro, but an amateur will eventually miss a pot, and let the pro in to clear up the rest of the balls. Now I got the crazy idea that I could trap Black's Queen. 8. Be3? Qxb2 9. Bxc6? bxc6 In my mind I had
this mistaken position:
In my calculations at move eight, when black captured the bishop on c6 I placed a pawn on c6, but did not mentally remove the pawn from b7!! Consequently I did not see that the Queen had an open line of retreat to b8. 10. Bd4 Still playing on inertia instead of looking at the board objectively. 10. ... Qb8 White has a horrible position: a pawn down, with weak white squares, weak Q-side pawns, no King's bishop, and no safe place for the King. In fact Palliser made hard work of the rest of the game, and gave me hopes of surviving, but the game was eventually lost. Perhaps this is really just a special case of LAZINESS. (Failure to properly register each move). This is an error I would never have made had I been playing blindfold. To play without sight of the board it is important to mentally register very firmly all aspects of each move or proposed move. There is also an element of stupidity in a mistake like this. Palliser is a strong IM. Would he really allow his Queen to be trapped in such an elementary way? Maybe, but I should have been encouraged to look a little harder for possible errors in my own thought. Saving Lost GamesOne of the astonishing things about chess is how a single bad move can turn a crushingly won position into a complete loss. No matter how hopeless a position looks there is always a possibility that some combinative opportunity will arise to be exploited by the tactically alert player. In the past I was good at spotting random tactical chances, and using them to save otherwise hopeless games. In the last year the chances have been there as always, but I have failed to take them. Here is a case in point: From Rose-Delorme, Rohde International, Sautron 2005.
The winner of this game would finish among the prize winners, ahead of
several IMs. I had been outplayed from an equal opening:
But here my young opponent committed a serious inaccuracy with 25. ... Nc7? I played the obvious but weak 26. axb4?? and after 26. ... Nb5 everything was once more in order for Black and he eventually won. After 26. Qc2! White would have been right back in the game with everything to fight. I saw 26. Qc2, then didn't play it. I still don't understand what was happening in my head. Perhaps I was simply tired after the previous eight hard games. Here is an example
of how quickly an even better looking position can fall apart. From
Surtees - Rose Heywood 2005:
After 22. ... Bxf4 White played the apparently strong 23. Re7, and won quickly after Black blundered with 23. ... Nb5? But 23. Re7 it is in fact a terrible mistake, as I realised moments after my mistaken reply, with 23. ... Rae8!! Black could have wiped out the whole of White's advantage thus: 24. Rxe8 Rxe8 25 Rxe8+ Qxe8 26. Qxf4 Qe1+ and 27. ... Qxc3. White might even lose! If you think that
was hard to believe, look at this, from a game of mine in the Coventry
International 2005 (I was Black. I'll omit my opponent's name to save his
embarrassment):
In this position Black goes astray and White repels his attack: 23. ... Ba4?! 24. Qf1 Nc6?? 25. Bh3! Qh5?? (25. ... Qg6 resisted more strongly, but I was seeing nothing) 26. Be6+ Kh8 And now my opponent played the apparently crushing 27. Nxe5. As I was pondering whether or not to resign I noticed a sudden change in his expression, and without waiting for my reply he got up and left the board. What had he seen? I looked for five minutes, but could see nothing but a hopeless position. Eventually I played 27. ... Rxf2 and after 28. Qxf2 Bxf6 29. Nf2+ Kg1 30 g4 Qh4 31. Qxh4 Bxh4 my opponent blundered with the horrible 32. Nxd4?? After 32. ... Bf2+ White was lost. But let us return to
the position after 27. Nxe5:
Here Black had the amazing move:27. ... Bb6!! It is almost unbelievable, but it appears to be holding in all variations. For example: 28. Rxb6 Rxf2! The strong competitorMany rants ago I described how I played when I was much stronger:
Right now I often
make gross tactical blunders and often fail to see interesting tactical
blows. I am the one that self-destructs within 40 moves! It
seems that the way I used to play is not so bad after all.
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