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Chessville
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What Makes A Strong Player Strong?
Rose's Rants by Tom
Rose My superficially flippant answer to this question is: "He started young, and stuck at it". And there is a lot of truth in that. But consider a pretty strong player, and a world-class player. What really accounts for most of the difference in strength? Obviously there are many differences. The stronger player probably works harder at the board. He may calculate variations in a more disciplined and methodical way. He probably has more fighting spirit. He may remain calm and perform well under pressure. He envisages future positions with greater clarity and, when he needs to, can look further ahead. He is likely to have a better-prepared opening repertoire. These are all important, but none is enough to explain the gulf in strength. If you ask the strong player what he does you'll find that most of the time he is calculating variations. So you go away and read Think Like a Grandmaster and try to learn to calculate variations better. And it does you no good at all, because it is not the mechanics of calculation that matter most. A grandmaster's superior discipline and method in calculating is the least of his advantages over you. Yes it is important, but far more important is what you choose to calculate. Vision The biggest and most obvious difference between players of different strengths is that with no conscious effort whatsoever the stronger player sees stronger and more promising moves and ideas. This is Vision - defined by that most perceptive of chess writers, Gerald Abrahams in his book The Chess Mind as "the unforced intuition of possibilities by the minds eye". The ideas that come to consciousness still have to be analyzed, and variations have to be calculated, before choosing a move. The weaker player spends much time and effort looking into moves that the strong player does not consider at all, yet might fail to see at all the good moves that the strong player finds obvious. The Importance of the Subconscious So the difference is not so much in what a player does consciously, but in what his mind does for him without his awareness. It is in the subconscious workings of the mind. It is not that the strong player sees all the legal possibilities, and quickly filters out the weak ones. In a quiet position only the promising maneuvers come to mind. In a tactical position only the meaningful moves are considered. Really weak plans and moves are not rejected. They never come to mind at all. So the important processing is taking place at the level of perception and evaluation. In fact it seems that those two operations are not separate. Perception and evaluation occur together, both in the position visible on the board, and at every node in calculations stemming from it. How Can Vision Be Developed? The practical question to be answered is: What must I do to create in my mind effective subconscious processes that process a position so as to present only the strongest ideas and moves to my conscious awareness? or, more tersely: How can I train my vision? You might think that you could simply ask strong players what they think about but most strong players are unaware of their own mental processes. They simply do not know what is going on in their minds to make them play well. Perhaps it is better to look more objectively at what strong players actually did to become as good as they are. There are problems with this too. Memory is selective. And just as most players do not really know what their mind is doing when they are playing, neither do they remember what they really did when they were developing as players. Can A Coach Help? A good coach should have accurate records of what works and what does not. If you could find someone that already knows the answer to the question: What must I do to get strong? then obviously you should follow their advice. Here the problem is slightly different. There are good coaches, and there are poor ones. How can you tell which is which? Can I Teach Myself? Most players teach themselves, and some become very strong, so it is obviously possible, but when you think about the hours that are spent on chess by thousands of hopefuls, the standards we reach are pitiful. The trouble with being your own coach is that as you are not yet a strong player you don't really understand what you are doing wrong. You have no real conception of what it is like to be strong - even temporarily. You don't know what you don't know! You can try to analyze your weaknesses, hypothesize about their causes, review what has been written, and try various ways of getting stronger, but you could easily be wrong, and end up with misconceptions that hinder your progress and have to be unlearned. You Can't Play By Rules Early in my chess career I thought that there were a few rules to be learned, and that by applying them correctly I would play like Capablanca and Alekhine. That is not an unreasonable view if you look at some of the books for lower graded players and novices. Of course it is nonsense. You cannot apply simple rules without a wealth of additional experience to help. It is like the stupidity of politicians that think if only they could draft the right laws society would become perfect, or scribble enough lines on our roads and place enough signs and there would be no more road deaths. Good civic behavior, and good driving, take more experience and understanding than could ever be written down. So does good chess. Ultimately strong chess might well be playable by rules but the number and complexity of the rules would be huge, such that they could not be consciously applied, at least not by a human being, within the time limits of a real game. The rules have to number in the hundreds of thousands. Pattern Recognition and Standard Plays The basis of human chess skill is deep familiarity with a huge number of typical configurations of pieces and pawns, and with the types of plan, or the typical tactics, to which they give rise. The two go hand-in-hand. Patterns are recognized and suggest plans and moves that lead to yet more recognized patterns. This has been known since Adrian deGroot's investigations in Thought and Choice in Chess, but only towards the end of the 20th Century, fifty years after deGroot's work did modern Grandmasters begin to write explicitly about these ideas. Patterns and operations include typical mating positions, standard endgame techniques, thousands of different types of tactics, and typical middle game operations. It takes hours of regular daily study over years, combined with regular competition to gain this knowledge. Most of us dream of success but just aren't prepared to put in the work, to pay the price. It is this vast neural net that, at a subconscious level, recognizes patterns and provides moves/ideas/evaluations that give a player material for further analysis. It is only when you have sufficient knowledge of this type that higher level rules and heuristics like "Rook behind passed pawns", "Knight's before bishops", "When material ahead, exchange pieces not pawns", and a hundred more will be of any use to you. You might argue that this cannot be right, because it leaves no scope for originality, insight, or creativity. But it is no different than any other art or skill, painting, woodworking, musical composition … you start by copying the work of masters, even blindly imitating. Eventually, after much study, practice, reflection, you find that you can create original works. There is still a mystery here, but the route to be followed is everywhere the same. Static Evaluation There has been a lot written in the last few years about "dynamic chess" and the importance of working out specific variations, but the truth is that it is impossible to play chess at all unless you can just look at a position and make a reasonable assessment of how you stand just on the features of the position as it looks, without considering any of the possible moves at all. Ability to Project Positions (Wetzels Term - APROP) Naturally you will often need to look ahead either to get a better idea of what is really going on, or because there is too much happening - exchanges, forcing moves - to make a reliable assessment. But it is impossible to calculate out every possibility in a position to mate, or to massive material superiority, so at some point you are forced to make a static evaluation, if not of the position on the board in front of you, then of some the many positions that you have envisaged in your calculations. How well you can do this depends not only on your stock of stored patterns, but also on the clarity with which you can project a future position. Training v. Competition It is pretty well established in physical sports (Golf, tennis) that when you are playing you should just play. Reflecting on your technique while you are actually playing just gets in the way and damages your performance. Chess is no different. Competition should be the application of well-practiced perceptions and techniques. Study and training is the way of creating that perception and acquiring those techniques. They should not be mixed up. In fact we recognize a still higher level, theorizing on the nature of chess, and the design and selection of study methods and materials. So we have:
An Approach The way to improve has been known for over a century. It is straightforward. It works. Why then is the general standard of chess so poor? Why do so many of us fail to reach the standard we should? Laziness! Everyone is looking for a short cut. So we try learning offbeat openings, trying to win without work. We try to learn some kind of "system", Horowitz's "point count chess", Kotov's "Tree of Analysis", Berliner's "The System". Or we try to apply simple rules, and find that they are too ambiguous or imprecise - that if you had the experience to know how to apply them you wouldn't need them! For my part, I have wasted years searching for a lazy way to success. What should we do instead? What you have to do has been recommended by the world's strongest players and by successful coaches, and boils down to this:
It is that simple. And it is easy to see how it works. By studying endgames you are exposed to:
All in a simplified context that develops your power to project future positions, and that provides a basis for eventually judging positions with more pieces. By studying tactical positions and studies you learn patterns and plays specifically as they relate to tactics, and develop your eye for a combination. By studying whole games you learn the same three lessons, and see the play that gives rise to those patterns. By playing regularly you learn to actually apply what has been absorbed. By studying every day you make continual progress, and the information is absorbed in manageable doses. By studying your own games you get feedback on what you have learned well, where you have misconceptions to be corrected, and what untouched areas still need to be studied. And that is it. Oh, plus the will to persevere for as long as it takes.
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