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The Wit & Wisdom of Nigel Davies Words of Wisdom from GM Nigel
Davies (Ask
the Tiger!) that we culled from the
TigerChess email discussion list.
I have a preference for working with well written old books plus databases rather than new books, mainly because the new books are out of date anyway and they also don't explain things.
Bent Larsen once said something to the effect that it's one thing to be a good writer but quite another to explain how you intend to beat Portisch the next time. In any case a book about a particular opening is only useful as a starting point, mapping out the territory which you then need to explore for yourself. Some explanation of the strategy is a good thing, but after that it's necessary to think and make your own decisions and choices.
If you like the way someone plays a particular opening, check out what they play in other openings too. It could be that you've found a good model whose thinking accords with your own.
There never was a Soviet school of chess and the success of Soviet players had nothing to do with its coaching methods. It was not the 'Botvinnink school', Dvoretsky, Dorfman or any other chess guru. This is all a big con, perpetrated by people who wanted to secure their place within the 'system' by being pillars of its so-called 'school'. And lest we forget, Bobby Fischer exposed it.
As for the principles of how to improve your game, they
can be stated very simply:
I'm a firm believer in studying games collections of very strong players: In my youth I worked through the games of Lasker, Capablanca, Rubinstein, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Larsen and Fischer. This is also a superb way to educate yourself in chess.
There are plenty of books of openings propaganda (all crushing wins for one side or the other) if that's what you want. Of course if you think that these books 'prove' that an opening is good by giving a large percentage of the results you want to see, I suggest that you try it in practice. It should be educational....
One very important aspect of actually achieving
something is, I believe, the ability to avoid making excuses, in all their
guises. I have heard almost every excuse under the sun why people have
lost a game, protecting the ego but inhibiting the learning process.
Similarly people will claim that either they or their peers would have
I've always found it difficult to study openings ...
some might say that it shows! Amongst the things that I have done are
playing through lots of games collections, solving positions against the
clock and playing a lot. I've learned most from analysing with strong
players (usually after games that I lost). I suspect that my
Amongst GMs I'm not alone in thinking that the openings you play early on are the ones that you feel most comfortable with. I see this in itself as an argument against focusing too much on gambits/tactical play, I think that kids need to move on to real openings as quickly as possible (they tend to interpret these in tactical fashion anyway, depending on where they are in the learning curve.)
It is interesting that a player's 'intuition' normally improves with age (experience) whilst their tactical ability will tend to deteriorate. To me this suggests that there is very little direct connection between these two types of thought; it also suggests that chess is a whole-brained game in which getting experience as early as possible gives you the best chance of having good intuition whilst your left brain is still sharp enough to calculate quickly.
I think we mislearn a lot about chess and acquire bad thinking habits. Central to this is not checking things carefully and instead going by 'feel'. There is, for example, a huge overestimation of the strength of 'attacking positions' at club level. Unless players start checking positions for themselves at some point (ie processing the information which comes their way) they'll continue to misassess these things based on generalities such as 'this looks dangerous'. This is why we must ANALYSE, ANALYSE, ANALYSE. And NOT generalise!
The vast majority of players will have some degree of laziness in their thoughts both during and in between games; they talk about chess a lot, skim through lots of books but don't actually sit down, get a board and pieces out and analyze chess positions.
If you write about openings you don't play you can tell the whole truth... On the other hand it's boring and maybe even a little stupid to write about the openings you do play.
And no, I feel no guilt about having no 'anger to win', I'm very cold blooded about these things. These days I gauge tournament success very much in terms of the overall financial returns; for me this is the only perspective a professional player should have. Of course one can reach the conclusion that it's better to try and win most games for this particular purpose.
I know very few professional players with very fixed views; in some games they take pawn centres and in others demolish the same centres. The tendency is to become 'universal' and not have particular prejudices about things.
Things always look different when you're at the board. I've lost count of the number of times I've cooked up some idea at home only to see the drawbacks when I think about playing it in a real game. The problem with a live opponent is that he has a vested interest in destroying our ideas. We, on the other hand, have a vested interest in seeing them work so we can admire our own handiwork and congratulate ourselves on being such clever chaps. Of course this creates a tendency to overlook contradictory details....
'Understanding' comes on many different levels. The people who manage to 'digest' are the ones who will sit for hours in front of a chess set, tinkering with ideas, or those who play THOUSANDS of games with particular ideas. Not those who just read and nod...
I think that one of the great problems with trying to learn chess like academia is that usually there is no 'right answer' as such. You can spot players who think there is - they can be a fountain of knowledge but are never quite to the pitch of the ball when it comes to thinking about a real position. So they read every book under the sun and talk a magnificent game ... but remain weak.
What is the difference between chess and other subjects? It's the ever-present reality of the opponent - the guy that tries to defeat our every idea. So the nicely illustrated examples crumble into dust when you read them in a book and then try and use them in practice... unless you've tested them with a zillion 'what-ifs'.
After many years I reached the conclusion that everything you do at the board should be automatic - trying to remember things is a mind killer. This is where the 'digestion' of chess ideas comes in - it's the process whereby conscious 'knowledge' becomes instinctive. And I'm convinced that it's better to have a small supply of well digested knowledge than a huge supply of things you've read but don't have 'hard-wired' into you at an instinctive/subconscious level.
Some basic guidelines for analyzing one of your own games: a) Make a note of what you were
thinking during the game immediately when it finishes and check your
thoughts against those of your opponent in the post-mortem. Are you getting the picture?
Dedication is the key factor that means you really go to
town on the material. And there's no great mystery about this, it's the way
people achieve excellence in any sphere. But people always want an easy
short cut. More of Nigel's unique perspective: Part Two
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