Katar on the social dimension of chess improvement

In response to my previous post, which has lots of good comments, the following from Katar triggered a bunch of thoughts:

Environment is a big factor. If one has chess-playing friends it will speed up one's progress...

Somehow internet friends do not seem to have this effect, as far as i can tell. But i'll tell you this: I met a few cool guys at the club, they happened to be mostly around 1600 or 1700s. We played blitz and analyzed games after the club meetings. Within a year I was also rated in the 1700s, where i stayed for 2 years. Then my buddy jumped to 1870. Somehow I almost instantly jumped up to about 2000. The hard part is finding decent players (geographically close) who are interesting and diverse people away from chess. Then you can develop real friendships and what starts mainly based on chess can later exist independent of chess. Which is just a board game for gods sake.

There is something magical about going over games with humans, moving pieces around, throwing out ideas, making fun of each other, getting stumped on problems, doing postmortems with others watching. Humans are social creatures.

Imagine learning a language without interacting with other humans. We often stress the analogies between chess skill and language acquisition, but seem to forget the important social dimension of language acquisition. My hunch is the social dimension is radically under appreciated in the chess improvement blogosphere and chess improvement literature (for obvious reasons in the blogosphere, but also because books tend to focus on what they can directly provide the reader).

Coaching=Sex, Computer=Masturbation
Perhaps it is no coincidence that all the best players in any sport, including chess, have had extensive individualized coaching from real coaches. This is something that is stressed, to greater or lesser degrees, in the books. However, the books don't stand to gain all that much by telling you to get a coach rather than follow their generic chess path. And what can they do besides recommend that you get a coach, briefly explain why, and leave it at that?

It is usually stressed that it is the individual treatment is what is important in the coach relationship, but my hunch is that one-on-one social interactions with real people may be equally important. Our brains are wired to learn in a social way. Imagine an infant that hasn't learned to walk. Or speak. Learning such skills is an almost ineliminably social affair.

At the International chess school forum, I had a very vigorous debate with a guy who didn't do postmortems with his opponents because "Fritz is better" so what could he learn from them? I found this to be one of the most insane self-immolating sentiments I had ever heard about chess improvement. You can find the thread here, and it relates to this topic in ways I frankly hadn't even thought about yet.

At that post I said:

Key is to talk to chess peers after the game, go over it, hash over ideas, see what they were thinking, play around with pieces, refute each other. The more exposure to real people (including yourself), interaction, conversation about positions, with nobody involved allowed access to the computer nipple, the better. Then the computer later, if you must, will reveal some weaknesses of what everyone said, and that is a nice final evaluation of the position, but not necessarily superseding what you found in the conversation.

I have usually thought about this topic in terms of the importance of interacting with real people because it is so important to think like a real person, and be exposed to what other people think (because you will face real people in tournaments). This is in contrast to trying to emulate a computer that uses algorithms that do not resemble in the least the type of cognition humans use. I remember J'adoube tried to argue that computer emulation was the ideal, which I still think is just silly.

There are levels of possibilities here that go well beyond the need to have a human, rather than computer, approach to the game, and Katar's got me thinking about them.

Just putting my thumb on the scale
I don't want to suggest that everyone can get better if they take the social dimension of improvement into account. Some autistic folks probably would learn much worse if forced to communicate and interact socially with people to learn chess.

I'm just suggesting that the picture of the lone chess improver studying tactics on his computer, emerging like a butterfly from the cocoon of CT-Art problem sets to demolish the competition at the World Open, is pretty much bullshit. And it's bullshit in ways we in the chess improvement blogoshere, and especially Circles advocates, might not appreciate (not because it is bad to do a lot of tactics, but doing them with other people and talking about them and moving pieces around might be better).

I also am not suggesting that it is a mistake to work on chess by oneself, such as solitary opening study or whatever. I'm suggesting a counterbalance to the picture of solitary chess improvement, but not eliminating the quiet enjoyment of chess by oneself. I am, however, suggesting that improvement solely by solitary means is not the norm, but an aberration that most of us should not strive for as a realistic improvement technique. I'm basically putting my thumb on the scales, which are usually biased toward the solitary picture of improvement.

This all reminds me of something Davies once wrote that I cited here:

It really doesn’t matter what you study, the important thing is to use this as a training ground for thinking rather than trying to assimilate a mind-numbing amount of information. In these days of a zillion different chess products this message seems to be quite lost, and indeed most people seem to want books that tell them what to do. The reality is that you’ve got to move the pieces around the board and play with the position. Who does that? Amateurs don’t, GMs do.

Perhaps even better than moving pieces around in isolation (solitary chess) is the moving of pieces in an ongoing conversation about a position with another person. And what is a game of chess in a real-life tournament, if not a conversation over the board that involves moving the pieces?

What if you live in East Bumslap South Dakota?
To those that literally cannot find real people to play chess with, the computer and internet especially is a godsend. To what degree can we reproduce the benefits of chess facetime with others? I welcome your thoughts in the comments. E.g., is online coaching as good as face-to-face coaching? Is there some way to have a "chess club" atmosphere online?

Frankly I think just as a gymnast in East Bumslap would move to where the best gymnastic coaches are, that might be necessary for people that have high aspirations in chess improvement. You need to travel to play with real people, and perhaps even get coached by real people.

Or is that total bull? Can getting phone lessons be just as good?

(Aside: I wonder how many posts in a row can be seeded by comments from previous posts.)

Innate, acquired, or both?

The comments at my previous post were again excellent. Pretty much you guys are now writing my blog for me.

Anonymous said the following, which struck a nerve with me:

Some of us need to face the fact that we have no natural chess ability. From his rapid rating increase from the beginning it is obvious to me that MDLM had natural ability. Book smarts does not equate to natural ability in chess or else some of us would be Grandmasters.

I coached youth baseball for 15 years. Some kids had no natural ability at all and despite one-on-one instruction, showed no improvement at all over the course of their years on the diamond. They stuck with it for fun and to be with friends.

I look at it as two Gaussian distributions, one of innate talent, the other of time spent playing and trying to improve. I could beat someone who is way more talented than me, as long as they have only spent ten hours on the game in their entire life. However, there do seem to be those that are abnormally good, and when they work abnormally hard they destroy (e.g., Carlsen). These are the GMs. The rest of us with average talent who work really hard can probably reach around 2000.

Note also that "innate" talent Gaussian shifts markedly to the left as a function of onset of age of playing chess (I started at age 35). Hence, age, talent, and motivation/time all interact in interesting ways.

Unfortunately none of this is new, and all of it is obvious. You can't change your age or your innate talents. All you can do is train, play, and train some more. As I've said, chess improvement is like planting a flower. You can nourish it, do everything possible to have a healthy flower, but ultimately you can't force it and it will grow in its own way.

I certainly see the effects of "talent" in academia. There are kids I tried to teach formal logic, and they would go to office hours, do extra homework, and just couldn't seem to get the logic of the conditional, or indirect proofs. For some students, who never went to class, and were slackers, they just "got" it, and got the As, while many of the people who put in the hours would end up with crappy marks.

When it comes to chess practice, I often feel like those slow kids. I'm quick enough on the uptake when it comes to wordy explanations, the kind of crap that Rowson basically says is useless in practice. And he's right.

Thanks, Robinson

Useful analysis of MDLM from previous post comment section:

I think one thing that is often overlooked in Michael de la Maza's success is the high number of rated games he played over a relatively short period of time. I've read many, many of the past Knights Errant posts and I don't find a lot of comments about the number of rated, slow games being played as part of their improvement programs. (Nor do I find a lot on people talking about doing the micro-level drills).

MDLM played 193 rated games in 45 events from July 1999-July 2001. He's only ever played 4 games that were quick rated. These quick-rated gamers were in the second-ever rated event that he played in and he received a provisional quick rating of 1649, which remains as his quick rating to this very day. So, 189 slow, rated games played over a 2-year period. This is an average of nearly two serious games per week. He accomplished this by playing a combination of a weekly regular game and a number of weekend Swiss events.

His rating after this period was 2041. During these 193 rated games, he played 143 different opponents for a record of 116-55-22 (W-L-D) (.658). His best upset was vs. Robert Egan (1713), 417 points higher rated (08-22-1999). His best draw was vs. Edwin Burnett (1556), who was 295 points higher rated at the time (08-08-1999). His worst loss was to a player 479 points lower rated, Samuel Atwood (1043) (02-29-2000), who was also the lowest rated player he ever lost to in a rated game.

The highest rated opponent he ever beat? Joel Johnson (2207) (10-31-2000). The highest rated opponent he ever drew was Herbert Carswell Jr. (1991) (7-05-2001).

Against players rated higher than him, he was 33-39-9 (.463). Against those rated 100 or more points above him, he was 17-32-3 (.356).

Against lower rated players, he was 83-16-13 (.799). Against those rated 100 or more points lower, he was 57-10-5 (.826).

MDLM was 41-13-14 (.706) against players who had a rating within 100 points plus or minus of his rating.

If we consider MDLM's lowest rating, which is a rating and not playing strength, as 1163 (his provisional rating after his first 4 games), then we can say his ratings climb was 878 points in about 730 days. However, since his ratings climb happened immediately upon beginning playing rated chess, it is very difficult to make any determination about actual playing strength at any given time. Though he says his rating made him a "Class D player because I played, well, like a Class D player," he is being a little bit disingenuous because his rating immediately went up from there and in four months later he had a 1421 rating and four months after that a 1600 rating.

Perhaps the circles didn't help him as much as playing slow rated games. Because he did both, we can't separate out the effects. Perhaps the best way to improve at tactics is to play slow games and go over them after.

That's one reason why, for beginners, I emphatically do not recommend the Circles, but simply playing lots of games (as described in my Chess Study Plan for Beginners). As I said there:

Much like learning to sing or swim well, chess skills are built up largely from extensive practice. Hence, as a beginner, it is most crucial to simply play chess. Some people attempt to improve at chess by focusing on everything but playing: they do puzzles, read lots of books, or (worst of all) spend lots of time studying openings. As I discuss below, some of these things are important, but if you are truly a novice you need to develop some intuitions about the mechanics of the game by playing as much as possible.

Reminds me of the good old days

Remember when everyone was doing the Circles? Remember the sometimes crazy heated discussions of them? How many problems per circle? How many circles? What software to use? That was fun.

Loomis provides a good reminder.

I need to think more about the circles, where I stand on the de la Maza methods. I started the juices flowing in a comment at Loomis' blog.

Chesstiger brought up one of the objections Knights heard frequently (that it is bad to do circles because you just memorize specific puzzles). It is far from clear that chesstiger is right. I wrote a detailed response to this objection here). However, it was nice to get thinking about this again, now that I've got quite a bit of perspective on the whole Circles thing. I will have to revisit it and think about it some more.

Where is the mad man?

From a commenter on my previous post:

I liked your blog when you were a crazy obsessed mad man.

Yes, I admit my best chess writing accompanied an almost neurotic obsession with the game. Sorry folks that person is taking a back seat for a little while. Luckily Blunderprone and Temposchlucker are blogging a lot right now, and a lot of other great stuff is out there. But I have to admit it breaks my heart a little bit to have my blog be in a down time, to not be in my A-game in chess or chess blogging.

This is such a great game, definitely worthy of being an object of one's obsession. For now I'm focusing on less important things like work. :) (And I'm writing a book proposal, but it isn't about chess).

Eventually I might learn to actually have a balanced approach to chess. I tend to be all or nothing.

London Chess Classic 2009

Mega-GMs playing for glory including Nakamura and Carlsen. I usually don't do tournament news here, but this tournament is special. They have enacted a different point system to promote fighting chess. Three points for a win, one point for a draw, zero points for a loss.

Great point system, in my opinion. There is little incentive to go for a gentleman's (i.e. lazy man's) draw. It will force the GMs to play out the games, to fight for a win, and in the last couple of rounds things should be really crazy as players six points back still have a chance to tie for first.

In round one, Carlsen got the full three points against Kramnik, as did the lesser-known McShane against Nigel Short in a seven hour battle.

The tournament site is here.

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On an unrelated personal note, when I first started playing chess about five years ago my goal was to have a fun lazy past time, something I could do quickly before bed or during lunch break to help me relax. I got my butt handed to me, was simply destroyed in every game. To improve, I bought a book (I think my first book was 'Teach Yourself Better Chess'). Not too long (maybe two months) and I was hooked, I had bought de la Maza's book, and wasted too much time on this crazy hard game (if it weren't a challenge I wouldn't give a crap about it).

Now I'm no longer working on improving at the game, I'm just enjoying it. I've been like this for a couple of months. In other words I met my goal from five years ago, to get good enough to have fun at the game. I sort of forgot that goal as I got obsessed with improvement and ratings. I had forgotten that this game is actually really cool even if you don't care much about it, perhaps especially when I don't care much about it.

That said, good luck to the ACIS people. I'll keep posting infrequently. I requested a review copy of that Zuke 'em book on the Colle Zuckertort as it might be fun to mess around with a new opening, so I'll post a review of that within a few weeks of receiving it.

On the Complementarity of Queens and Knights (Guest Blogger)

Hank, a frequent commenter at this blog, and someone I've played in real life (and usually lost) , gave me permission to publish the following excellent piece he wrote. Beautiful, deep, yet simple ideas. Thanks, Hank!
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I've seen a number of different articulations about piece coordination and the complementarity of certain pieces, that explain why the relative value of individual pieces can vary depending on what other pieces they are teamed up with, and especially how redundancy of function can account for the lower combined piece values of certain configurations of pieces (due to a lesser degree of coordination)...

And in fact it is the lack of redundancy that accounts for the higher combined "scores" of other combinations of pieces. For example, strength of the famous "bishop pair" lies precisely in the perfect non-redundancy of the 2 bishops, which will never overlap one iota in the squares that they cover/guard/control/attack.

Another noteworthy example is the queen+knight combo, in which the 2 pieces are said to work particularly well together.

So I was just idly daydreaming about queen moves when the image below popped into my head:


Basically I was realizing that a queen at the center of a 5x5 grid covers or influences a high percentage of the squares in that grid. It turns out that the queen influences 16 of the 24 other squares in the grid (not counting the center square on which it stands), which is 2/3.

And then it struck me that those "other" 8 squares - the remaining 1/3, which are not influenced/guarded/attacked by the queen - are precisely the 8 squares that a knight would influence from the same center square.

So those 16 squares that the queen controls are either a rook's move or a bishop's move (or a king's move) away - betraying a certain redundancy of influence with those other linear pieces, but the elusive in-between squares that remain inaccessible to the queen are all a knight's move away. And in fact the sets of squares influenced by a centralized queen and knight in that 5x5 grid are 100% complementary.

Anyway, I thought there was something particularly tidy and aesthetically pleasing about this image. It conveys somewhat how a "knight's-eye point of view" would tend to see the world somewhat myopically in terms of "local" 5x5 (or smaller) grids, whereas the "vantage" of a bishop/rook/queen can "take in" up to a full 8-square span or expanse. Or you could say that their "sphere of influence" has a radius of 5, versus (up to) 8 for the stronger pieces. Hence we can also see why knights would be at a disadvantage in endgames with few pieces where action is taking place in different quarters/corners/regions of the board (they might run short of viable targets, or end up in the wrong place).

This kind of rudimentary thinking about the way pieces occupy and interact with space is inspired by my current browsings in Maurice Ashley's new book "The Most Valuable Skills in Chess". It's all pretty basic stuff, but I find it helpful (and entertaining) when a couple of insights can be crystallized in a single image like this.

ACIS: bold as love

Or ACIS of evil. Or ACIS in the hole.

Any way you pun it, Adult Chess Improvement Seekers (ACIS) are a staple of the blogoshere, and aren't going away. Also, it is quite clear that the Knights Errant aren't big enough to contain the blogosphere's burgeoning mass of people scrambling to improve. The Circles are cool and all, but the Knights Errant have pretty much died.

There are googles more paths to improvement than dreamt of in the Circles. Some people read books, some get a coach, some play correspondence chess. What they have in common is a struggle to improve at this impossibly difficult game (if it were easy my hunch is we wouldn't bother with it). Nobody knows what the heck they are doing, nobody knows if it will work, and we all should just chill out and support one another. That's where Blunderprone's great idea for ACIS comes in: the next step in the evolution of chess improvement blogs (my hunch is they won't mind children being in the loop as well).

Keep an eye on Blunderprone and others' blogs for new developments. I think we are witnessing a speciation event in the blogosphere. I'll try to keep you updated, please link in the comments to any updates, new discussion.

The instrumental part at the end (starting ~2:50 into the song) is freaking amazing nobody can replicate Hendrix (though I think 'Tuesday's Gone With the Wind' by Skynyrd tries)...a gorgeous anthem to climbing the chess ladder.

Boycott Liquid Egg Product's Blog

Don't believe his lies.

Are the Knights truly dead?

Question from a reader:

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Hi BlueDevil,

I would like to join the Kights Errant. It appears as though the secretary is inactive? Can you help me? Your post reminds me of some some comments that I read about Lasker on chessgames.com having a great "Geometer", looking around for features and only then calculating.
smiteknight.blogspot.com

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What's going on, Knights?

Sorry smiteknight this is all I can do, but I fear the Knights are pretty much dead....Perhaps the FAQ site should reflect this fact, or we need a new Secretary Knight who will take up the responsibilities.