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Chessville
Advertise to Single insert:
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“Loek van Wely put it to me that you only know you
are improving Back in 2000, Rowson made a splash in the chess world with his book, The Seven Deadly Chess Sins. Although there were those who thought it was quite good, I was not one of them. I felt the book needed a severe editing job as it seemed unfocused and bloated. To my mind, he had forgotten one of the key ingredients to good writing: Less is more. While he would start out with a good idea, he would end up rambling on about it and throwing in so many extraneous quotes, concepts, and random thoughts, that in the end he ended up diluting the strength of his original idea. I finally gave up on the book in frustration. A large part of my frustration stemmed from the fact that I could tell that Rowson’s heart was in the right place (meaning it was obvious he wanted to help people improve their chess playing ability), and that he had some interesting and original things to say about chess, but that he just needed to get his thoughts streamlined and organized. Well, what a difference five years makes! Chess for Zebras is simply superb. Rowson eliminated much of the rambling that brought down 7DCS, and instead has produced a focused and well thought out manual that is as enlightening as it is original. Rowson has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about chess and how to improve at it, and he shares his ideas in a very straightforward, yet chatty style. The thing is so packed with great ideas (many that I have seen nowhere else), that I have pen and highlight marks (gasp!) on practically every page. He is like a chess psychologist who delves into the mind of the average player and shines a flashlight on those parts of your thinking that are holding you back. Lots of chess books promise to improve your game—this is one of the very few that actually delivers. What’s more, I believe this book can help you improve regardless of your current rating. I say this because his ideas are applicable to all levels even up to GM, not just class players. But enough talk. Let’s lift up the hood and take a look at a few of the many things Chess for Zebras has to offer: Preface: Why Zebras? Rowson begins things by explaining the books strange title: ‘Thinking of a zebra’ therefore means being more open to experience and less constrained by convention. It means allowing yourself to think differently." While the book’s title is a bit odd (I myself don’t particularly care for it, as my brain keeps telling me that Zebras DO NOT play chess!), it does serve as a reminder that this book is all about looking at and thinking about chess in a different way. Still, if you are going to use the “Zebra” title, than I would have gone with a more cartoonish cover, like the late Simon Webb did on the cover of “Chess for Tigers.” As it stands now, the cover has a picture of four horses (two white and two black—apparently knights from an old chess set) standing in the center of the board. This staid, traditional picture is somehow at odds with the book’s whimsical title. However, this is just how the title/cover hits me, and there are others that may like it. Of course, it’s the book’s content that is what’s important here, so let’s move on… Part 1: Improving Our Capacity to Improve The book is broken up into three parts. The first part covers some of the problems adults have trying to improve at chess. How many of us talk about wanting to improve, but few of us really devote the time necessary to realize these improvements. However, as it turns out, this is not even the main problem; the main problem has to do with our thinking. And to illustrate this, Rowson cleverly uses a song (which I had never heard of before), called, “There’s a hole in my bucket.” 1. What to Do When You Think There is a Hole in Your Bucket It seems a guy named Henry has a problem: his bucket has a hole in it. However, the solution to plugging up the hole involves using the bucket… however, since the bucket has a hole in it, this proves to be a problem. As it turns out, the situation is a Catch-22. He can only solve the problem IF the problem didn’t exist in the first place! Thus, no matter how much or how fast Henry fills the bucket with water, the water quickly gushes out. It’s the same thing with chess knowledge. No matter how much new information we cram into our brain, if our brain doesn’t know how to correctly IMPLEMENT this information, what good is it? And yet many of us erroneously continue to soak up chess literature, somehow believing that we are just one or two good ideas away from achieving a big breakthrough. We keep shoving more and more ideas into our head, yet our rating doesn’t seem to dramatically improve. Clearly something is amiss. As Rowson points out, we are looking to increase our chess knowledge, when what we should be looking to do is improve our chess skills! Says Rowson (pg. 25):
And on page 28:
I bolded the last sentence because it hit home with me. I have always loved chess books and have quite a big library of them. However, I have always wondered why several of my friends, who like to play but rarely study from books, were stronger players than me. I simply chalked it up to raw talent, however after reading this I now realize they were getting “board experience” while I was getting “book experience,” and clearly OTB experience is superior. It’s sort of like reading about war versus actually being in one. There’s no comparison as to which arena teaches you more, better, or faster. Additionally, when you learn while doing (as opposed to sitting passively and reading), you are immersed in the experience at a much deeper level, and thus the brain simply remembers much more about the experience. Rowson also believes this is why kids tend to improve more rapidly than adults:
This is one of the best explanations I have ever read as to why kids tend to improve much faster at chess than adults. What Rowson is saying is that we adults tend to “over think” what we are learning, rather than just accepting it and moving on, which is what kids do. This is why kids can learn a foreign language so much faster than adults. Where we try to “understand” everything we are learning, kids simply begin to use it ASAP. While Rowson’s ideas about how to improve at chess are the backbone of the book, that does not mean that it lacks chess material. On the contrary, there is quite a lot of good chess in it. For example, take a look at the following position in a game between GM Rowson (playing White) versus GM Emms (Gibraltar Masters, 2004):
In Chapter Two, called Psycho-Logics (which Rowson explains means the logic that our mind tries to impose on the things around it) he points out how often we will come up with a faulty plan, because our original assessment of the position is faulty. Take a look at the following position (White to Move; from Te. Petersen –Rowson, Torshavn 2000):
This last sentence by Rowson made me laugh out loud, as like most readers I was tempted to quickly skip ahead to his analysis of the position, but after his mild reprimand I made myself stop and study the position for a few minutes. Rowson goes on to explain how a student of his rated around 1600 was concerned with Black playing …e5 in the above position. He felt that White would then be ‘forced’ to play d5 (after all, why activate Black’s knight for him?) and then White’s light squared bishop would be ‘bad’ due to the pawn on d5. So therefore, the student proposed 10.Bb5 as the best move, so he could then trade off his soon to be ‘bad’ bishop for the knight on d7!? Now, before you laugh at the students ‘logic,’ it actually makes sense IF the student was right that …e5 would be a problem for White. Says Rowson:
I really like how Rowson explains the flaw in his student’s logic by giving the following example (pg. 32):
This excellent example shows how oftentimes we play a move that we believe is totally logical and therefore correct, when in actuality the move was based on a ‘bad premise’ and is therefore wrong. Rowson goes on to say that one of the traps players fall into is not realizing that “problem solving” is an on-going process that should take place throughout the entire game, i.e., that we shouldn’t just “turn it on” when we see a combination, and then “turn it off” when we have concluded our analysis:
By the way, in the above diagram, White played 10.Qf3?!, Rowson (as Black) went on to win in a mere nine more moves. However, the point of the exercise is not simply to “guess” what was played, but rather to take a look at WHY and HOW you arrive at a particular chess move. After all, if your ability to correctly assess a position is flawed, you are more times than not going to have a hard time finding the best move simply because you are starting out with “bad” information. It’s like having a smudge on your glasses—until you remove it, everything you look at will be distorted. Another useful gem I got from this book was how higher rated players are not as quick as lower rated players to jump to conclusions about a position. In other words, higher rated players understand that positions are usually much deeper and contain more hidden resources than first meets the eye, and thus they usually refrain from making snap judgments. Whereas, lower rateds have no such inhibitions and are happy to blurt out the first assessment that pops into their head, no matter how shallow or flawed! Next time you see a group of chess players standing around analyzing a position, watch and see which one is first to venture an opinion… it usually WILL NOT be the highest rated player! There is so much more that I liked about this book, however I have already gone on too long. For the sake of completeness, here are the remaining chapters in the book: 3. Storytelling 4. Which Myth are You Playing By? 5. Concentrate! Concentrate? Concentrate. Part 2: Mental Toolkit for the Exponential Jungle 6. Why is Chess so Difficult? 7. Something that Works for Me 8. Doing and Being 9. Why Shouldn’t I be Defensive? 10. Glorious Grinding Part 3: Thinking Colourfully about Black and White 11. Three Types of Theory and What They Mean in Practice 12. White’s Advantage 13. Black’s Advantage 14. Finally…. The Bottom Line
I have not even begun to scratch the surface of how much original and
fascinating material is in this book. Chess for Zebras
is a book that is worthy of repeated studying, and to which a “workbook”
would be a logical follow-up. Rowson is simply one of the greatest
“chess thinkers” alive today, and if you have been frustrated because you
have been stuck at your current rating level for far too long, this could be
the book to get you over the hump. Rowson doesn’t just give you more
data, he forces you to take a hard look at “how” you are processing that
data. Furthermore, he gets you to work on improving your chess
“skills” rather than simply increasing your chess “knowledge.” If a
better chess book has been written over the past year than Chess for
Zebras, I have yet to see it. On a scale of 1-10, Chess
for Zebras gets a 10.
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