Advice for chess beginners

This is a summary of a simple improvement plan for chess novices. It is meant for those trying to get from beginner level (~700 at the Internet Chess Club (ICC)) to about 1400 in slow games (your rating in rapid games will probably be lower by 200 points). This is based on my personal experience trying many ways to improve, when I went from 950 to about 1450 in slow games at ICC (rating high was 1476).

The following suggestions are roughly in order of importance.

1. Play and do postmortems
Some people trying to improve at chess focus on everything but playing: they do puzzles, study openings, or read lots of books. Some of these things are important (see below), but if you are truly a novice you simply need to develop some intuitions about the mechanics of the game by playing as much as possible.

Slow games (e.g., 30 minutes or more per side) are the best way to develop your chess, but don't worry if you enjoy the occasional fast game too, especially if you are still very much a beginner. Two months of only blitz is better than no chess at all, and there were many good lessons I learned from playing lots of blitz chess that you might read over.

But it isn't enough to merely play. There are lots of players rated 1000 that have played more than 5000 games at the ICC. It is crucial, in addition to playing, that you do a postmortem for your games. A postmortem is when you critically examine a game soon after you finish it. Go over both wins and losses, looking for good moves you made as well as blunders that you want to avoid in the future. Some may tell you to only go over your losses: I disagree strongly with this sentiment for reasons I spell out here and a follow-up post here.

After going over the game on your own, find someone or something better than you to go over it one more time. The chess program Fritz is a wonderful tool--it plays as well as a Grandmaster, never gets tired, and loves to show you places in your game where you could have done better (and importantly, where you played well!). Even better than Fritz is a human coach or advisor. While Fritz just shows you the moves you should have made (and then you need to figure out why), a person will be able to explain it to you, answer your questions, and generally give more usable and practical feedback.

Note, don't be too hard on yourself with this. If you are playing and analyzing at least two slow games a week, that is great. However, it is important to perform postmortems even on your blitz games, as such analysis will reveal tactics that appear in real games, the best types of tactics with which to be familiar.

Just to sum up: it is crucial that you play in addition to working on the other things I mention below.

2. Read a general overview of chess
Before getting focused on specific areas of the game, start by reading a general overview of the principles of chess. This will give you a useful birds-eye view of the game, and provide a foundation for the sometimes strange terminology used by most chess players.

My favorite beginner-level book is Wolff's Idiot's Guide to Chess. He describes how to play in the opening, middle, and end of the game, basic tactics (see below), strategy, and even how the pieces move. Each chapter includes many problems that are explained in the back of the book. Work on those problems, as chess is a game best learned by doing, not reading. This is a book I wish I had when I first started playing.

3. Study tactics
I define tactics as sequences of moves that lead to a gain of material or mate (there is some debate about this definition, but as a beginner you really don't need to worry about it). For instance, you have doubtless left your queen open for the plucking, losing a game in ignoble fashion. This happens to everyone starting out, and such material blunders are the most decisive events in all games of the novice.

When you are playing, you should be focusing almost all of your energy on not committing tactical blunders, and exploiting those of your opponent. Really, that is the key to reaching 1400 at ICC. You will read a lot about pawn structure and other chess 'strategy', but until you stop leaving pieces open for the taking and missing simple mates, this stuff will just not make a big difference.

Aside from playing and doing postmortems, how can you improve at tactics? There are lots of resources for learning the basic mating patterns, such as the wonderful little book Simple Checkmates.

There are also tons of resources out there for tactics beyond simple mates. I'd suggest attacking your tactical deficiency in two steps. First, read an explanation-heavy book that will familiarize you with the basic themes, a book such as Littlewood's wonderful Chess Tactics. Another nice book with less explanations that contains extremely simple tactics is Pandolfini's Beginning Chess.

Once you have studied basic mates and tactics, I recommend using software with lots of tactical problems to build experience and intuition. Chess Tactics for Beginners and Personal Chess Trainer (aka Chessimo) are both great programs. Do a few problems every day--you will learn faster if you spend two hours spread out over a week than if you spend two hours one day a week on tactics.

You will learn tactics fastest if, in addition to trying to figure out the problem, once you figure out the solution you construct an explanation of each move in the problem. E.g., 'I moved the queen to the back rank because the enemy King is hemmed in by his pawns, so he can't escape mate.' There is a study that demonstrates that such narratives improve people's performance when the same position is seen again.

4. Study the endgame
As you improve at tactics, more of your games will reach the endgame. You will be playing better players, and the games won't be decided by move 20 anymore. So it is time to learn something about how to finish the game.

Of course, if you already know the basic mates, you already have a bunch of endgame knowledge without knowing it. In addition to basic mates, it is important to learn about pawn play in the endgame (the fact that pawns can be promoted to Queens make their importance skyrocket in the endgames), and many other topics that will help you tremendously.

Luckily, Silman wrote a wonderful endgame book that will tell you all you need to know about the endgame, Silman's Complete Endgame Course. Once you master the first few chapters of this book, and have stopped missing elementary tactics in your games, you will easily reach 1400 at ICC.

5. Don't worry much about the opening
You might be tempted to memorize a bunch of specific openings. This is relatively easy to do, and is tempting because the opening occurs in every game, but unfortunately opening study just won't help you very much. You are losing your games because of tactics, not subtle opening errors. If you are losing in the opening, it is because of opening tactics that you should be able to work on in your postmortems.

A few simple principles are all you need in the opening, and those can be found in Wolff's book (Step 1 above). Sure, there are interesting openings that violate the principles, but you are guaranteed to make it safely to the middlegame if you just follow the principles while keeping your eyes open for tactically-justified exceptions.

6. Develop good thinking habits
When playing, you will be tempted to make the first move that pops into your head. Don't. Relax, sit on your hands, and take your time to think through the moves, consider your opponent's replies to your moves, and how you will respond. This will be hard at first, but it is crucial. Dan Heisman has written a lot about this, such as his classic article Real Chess. Once you have read Wolff's book, you might also take a look at my extensive discussion of thought process in chess, found in PDF form here. As you might expect, it advises: on every move, think about tactical threats before you do anything else!

7. Have fun, relax, don't force it
Being smarter than the average Joe is only marginally important for chess improvement. For even the smartest person, getting better at the game takes a great deal of time, energy, and commitment. You will lose a lot of games. This is very important to do, as losses are wonderful learning opportunities.

You will not get better as fast as you want to, and unfortunately that is simply the case for everyone. Learning chess is not like learning World History, getting better is not a matter of memorizing facts and reading books. It is a much slower process, in which we control the amount of effort, but the improvement tends to come at its own pace, just as a well-tended seed will follow its own time course as it grows into a beautiful rose bush.

So, relax, don't let yourself get too frustrated with this game. You can't force yourself to improve, but you can study, and the improvement will come on its own. Chess is a beautiful, complex, often exhilerating game, and if you follow the simple advice given here you will come out with a greater appreciation of the game in addition to being able to crush your Uncle at Thanksgiving.

Once you approach 1500 (this should take between six months and three years, depending on how much time you put into chess study and other factors such as your age), aspects of the game such as strategy and the openings will merit a bit more attention. That is, simple tactics and endgames will decide fewer of your games. Your course of study will need to become more individualized, and expanded to include things such as the study of annotated master games. At any rate, at this level I recommend finding a good coach or advisor, and generally talking to people much better than me about how to take your game to the next level. Good luck!

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Thanks everyone for reading my blog: I'll be taking a break from blogging for a while. With the help of writing here, and the excellent comments, I easily surpassed my goal when I started of reaching 1200 at ICC, and I'm no longer focused on chess in a serious way. Please look at my Blog Highlights for what I consider the most helpful or interesting material on the blog from the last few years, most of it geared toward novices struggling to improve at this complicated and fun game.

Another de la Maza hater surfaces

Jon Jacobs, a noob who probably thinks he is being original posts some Circles hate, and I respond here. (See Blogotype #4). Ah, the memories. Every six months or so one of these turds folks floats to the surface.

Of course I love smart discussion of chess improvement, especially criticisms of the Circles method of tactical training, but blustering simplistic bombast posing as sage instruction is annoying.

Hey, Liquid Egg Product, I bet you'll be surprised to find out you are a member of the Knights Errant.

Who should do the Circles, and how?

My post on pattern recognition as seed planting was the first of two major topics I've ruminated on since finishing the Circles. The second topic is this--the one serious problem with the Circles isn't that they don't help (they do, to varying degrees), but that they tend to lead to burnout or boredom.

[For those who don't know what the Circles are, see the description here.]

Clearly the way Michael de la Maza (MDLM) did them, with 1200 very tough problems in CT-Art, doing all of the problems with no repetitions until that Circle was finished, is one of the best ways to burn out (for those who don't know, first Circle 10 minutes spent on each problem, second Circle 5 minutes, and eventually Circle seven when you do all 1200 in one day, 30 seconds each in a marathon session).

So we have two questions. Who should do the Circles, and what is the best way to modify them to avoid burnout? I don't claim to have the answers, but look at this as a brainstorming session to which others can contribute.

Who should do the Circles?
The idea behind the Circles is that gaining tactical acumen is largely a matter of learning patterns. Tactics are often hard to 'figure out' over the board. Such calculation is time and energy consuming, so we want to learn to recognize simple tactics quickly, effortlessly, as easily as we would recognize a friend's face. Most people agree that a key to gaining such skills (as opposed to book knowledge--in which case you would be a chess scholar not a great player) is repetition. It's like training for tennis, you practice the overhand over and over again, doing it with a coach and on your own until you just get it right without trying

So, who should do the Circles? If you are a tactical car wreck, overlooking simple tactics (where 'simple' depends on your skill level), and that is clearly the weakest part of your game, and if you already read and understood one or two of the text-heavy tactical books out there, then the Circles may help you get better at tactics.

That, anyway, is a necessary condition for doing the Circles. What else should you consider? First and most important, do the Circles sound fun to you, or like a hellish chore? To me, the Circles sounded quite fun, and I was just so horrible at tactics that something extreme seemed necessary, so I was quite excited to do the Circles. If they don't sound fun before you do them, then perhaps you should try to find a different approach to remedy your tactical flat tire.

Also, do you have the time to devote to them? They require at least a half-hour a day devoted to studying tactics. Do you have this time? Will you have enough time to actually play games?

Finally, the Circles are anything but a balanced approach to chess. Will it bother you if your tactical muscles grow at the expense of some of your other chess skills?

Frankly, I would hesitate to recommend the circles to a true beginner. A beginner should probably spend a year or so working on more general issues, of course spending a great deal of time on tactics, but also taking the time to study the endgame, and especially the majority of time actually playing and analyzing games. Perhaps once you hit 1000-1100 at ICC, then you might consider doing the Circles, as it will pretty handily take you to 1400 or higher levels at ICC (if my experience is any indicator).

How should the Circles be modified to prevent burnout?
This has been discussed by many Knights, as I catalogued a couple of years ago here.

MDLM, who was helped tremendously by the Circles, focused exclusively on chess for over a year. He wasn't working at the time. Doing the full-blown MDLM style circles is very very hard to do, so modifications are almost mandated if you want to maintain sanity and balance (though don't let me discourage you if you want to be like the Knights Errant of old and be a total bad ass).

So, how to modify them to prevent burnout? Again, I don't have the answer, but here are two suggestions:
1. Mini-circles.
Do circles on small sets of problems. E.g., one hundred at a time, learning them extremely well over a course of a few weeks rather than months. You can even take a break between mini-circle cycles, and go to the next cycle when your batteries are refreshed. This is something that probably would have helped me.

After the break, you can come back to previous problem sets to refresh your memory, to make sure you are still sharp.

I did minicircles, and I did get a little burnt out but because I probably went a bit overboard near the end and I didn't take any breaks.

2. Use simple problems.
CT-Art has some very hard problems, many of which have mistakes in the solutions. For those reasons, I used Chess Tactics for Beginners. This was great for me, as it hammered home the basic mates, but by the end had 3-5 move combinations which helped me appreciate how basic tactics interact over the board. Personal Chess Trainer also seems to have many simple problems (for a comparison of CT-Art and PCT, see this post).

The whole point of the Circles is to help you improve at chess. So pick a set of problems that start out a bit too easy for you, but progress to problems that you would tend to miss in over the board situations. I believe it is a mistake to start out with problems more complex than you are missing in real games. Start simple, and build up to the more complex problems that are presently a bit out of your reach in real games.

Those are my main ideas. Again, I don't claim to have any final answers, and consider this a brainstorming session.

This is my second-to-last post for this generation of chessconfessions. Only one more post in my pile that I've been meaning to get to.

100 Chess Book Reviews Portal

Here are all the links for the chess book review movies I made.

YouTube channel

Bibliography of the books that received grades of B or better

Liquid Egg Product's Mascot's hilarious parody of the videos

Review Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Chess memorization as seed planting:Relax and let the roots grow

Over a year ago, when I posted my new method for learning a bunch of tactical problems, Haunted Knight made the following excellent comment, a sentiment that has been expressed by many bloggers in response to the Circles program of study:

But something that worries me about repeating the same set of exercises over and over is that I'll just be learning that set of exercises, rather than tactics in general.

I waited all this time to reply to Dean, wanting to finish the Circles and better judge their effectiveness. I think now I have a slightly better perspective, being done with the Circles for quite a few months.

My quick and dirty response is an analogy. Memorizing a set of tactical problem or master games is like planting a bunch of seeds in a garden. Initially these seeds are isolated, unconnected. After a while, these seeds have become a garden with a beatiful complicated and interconnected root system. The difference is, for chess the roots are neurons and they can talk to each other. This is very good for us.

I said at Phaedrus' blog (when he made a similar point to Dean's):

I'm not convinced simply "memorizing" 1000 positions is all that bad. It all depends on how our brain treats those memories once they are implanted. The brain may (with no conscious effort on our part) integrate these different memories into more general categories, form cross-links among categories, striving to build an ever-more coherent picture of the chess world, even while we sleep our brain probably does this. If this speculation is right, the individual problems are like nodes in our brain that are initially implanted, but connections are formed among these nodes so ultimately it becomes a more general and useful integrated tactical skill set.

From my experience with the Circles, I think we can eliminate the worst-case scenario, in which case you memorize the exact position, and that's all you've learned so you only recognize it when it appears exactly the same as during training. This would be fairly useless. Luckily, this isn't how my memories of the solutions work. Back-rank mate, for instance, pops out at me regardless of the exact location of the King (e.g., queenside, kingside) and whether there are two or three pawns hemming him in.

In general, it seems the way our neuronal pattern recognition machinery works is to store not just the exact template, but a more general category into which it will place similar but not identical instances. For instance, once I've acquired the memory/pattern of a person's face, it then generalizes so that I can recognize him laughing, frowning, talking, at sunset, in artificial lighting, or even if his face is upside down (though in the latter instructive case it will take me longer, and I'll have to double-check just to make sure it is really him, just as when my recognition machinery kicks in for chess it is imperative to check to see that the tactic will really work given the particulars of the situation).

We don't know how this works, but we certainly don't consciously force our brain to do this. But we can probably help our brain do it by taking a single position and studying little variations on it from multiple perspectives. Like looking at an elephant from the front, you might not recognize one you see from the tail-end, so you want to walk around the elephant, see it moving around and interacting with things, to really build up a more perspective-independent ability to recognize it. This should help with basic chess tactics. E.g., study the back rank mate twenty different ways and it should stick better.

So, in contrast to Tempo's focus on the importance of conscious feedback and narratives, I give our brain more credit. I say, be more Zen. The vast majority of information processing going on in our brains is not consciously accessible, the brain does amazing and wonderful things with "isolated" individual things we've learned. It seems to strive to build models of the world, models that will generalize so we can use them in novel but similar situations. There is a tendency to want to force oneself to improve at chess via conscious exertion of will, but my hunch is that most of the learning goes on beneath consciousness, when we are sleeping, when the brain is consolidating into long-term memory the bits we have most recently learned.

Of course, we still need to work, and all the narratives and such are very helpful (in practice, I learned a bunch of tactics much faster when I started using narratives to explain each problem to myself). The two approaches are not in contradiction. Like with a seed, you can create good conditions for it to grow (lots of feedback, narratives, conscious effort), but then you have to step back and let it grow. If you fuss with it too much, try to force yourself to improve faster than is humanly possible, you will just get frustrated and may even kill the plant.

Chessplanner: final revision

The loose ends are almost all tied up...

Based on some great comments I got on the penultimate draft of my thought process (discussed here), I have built the final draft that can be found here as a PDF. I added an acknowledgments section to the document for those that helped. Overall, I am very happy with it, consider it the best thing I have written on chess. I spent more time on it than I care to admit, but whenever I read it it makes me want to go kill some Kings.

No huge changes this time. I added a little bit about confirmation bias (try to kill your candidate moves!). Also, one suggestion I got from readers was to add a bit about time management. I added a little squib, which I paste here:

In practice, will applying Chessplanner chew too much time off the clock? Indeed, it does take up a good deal of time and is probably not possible to use in blitz games. However, there are a few reasons not to fret too much about time. First, note I haven't advocated spending a ton of time on every move—recall from §3 that the only positions which demand time-consuming thought are the sharp positions.

Second, while applying Chessplanner is initially quite intellectually demanding, it becomes easier and faster with experience, just like your ability to multiply two numbers. It becomes somewhat unconscious, automatic, and effortless with extended practice.

Third, board evaluations have a good deal of inertia during a real game; there is a big difference between evaluating a novel board position and evaluating the board on move 30 of a game you have been playing with good evaluation the whole time. Typically, features such as pawn structure have changed very little. You do need to be careful, of course: that helpful evaluation inertia can lead to blunders, such as when your opponent unleashes a discovered attack that wasn't present in previous positions.

One thing I should stress: if you don't apply (at least unconsciously) a sound thought process on every move, you will simply play worse. Heisman (1999) rightly points out, "In order to be a good player, you have to at least try to play correctly on every move, not just most of them. Consistency is important: remember that your chain of moves, in many cases, is only as strong as the weakest link.

There is a lot written elsewhere about practical aspects of time management (see, for instance, Heisman (2001b)), so I recommend reading that and the other articles Heisman has written on the topic. Briefly, the most important thing is to use all the time on your clock. Doing anything else short-changes all the hard work you put into the game when you aren't playing. It is a recipe for sloppy chess. Resist the urge to move quickly after making a blunder (to make it seem you meant to give up your rook), and also after going up material (you may get over-excited and make a blunder of your own). In other words, use your thought process on every move. For practical advice on how to avoid taking too much time on moves, see the cited Heisman article.

A final note. To be clear, I don't think everyone needs to follow an explicit, conscious, step-by-step thought process. Some people are beyond that and already have a perfectly good implicit thought process. For discussion of what use a thought process is, check out this post (and the posts directly before and after it), the discussion in the comments here, and especially the first, beginning of the second, and the last sections of the Chessplanner PDF.

At this point, I am happy with the content of the document, and only plan on making minor word-choice and grammatical improvements. That is, there may be a 3.1 and 3.2, but not a 4.0 for a long time. The links on this page will be maintained so they are always to the most up-to-date version of Chessplanner.

Hypothesis, Movement, Procedure

Psychological studies of chess are not only cool, but if we are lucky they can suggest practical ways to improve. Readers will be familiar with this wonderful study that helped me out a great deal (discussed in practical terms here).

Here I discuss two studies that may also have practical implications. One is a nice paper that someone recently sent me. The other has been on my 'Blog This' pile for a year or so now.

1. Candidate move evaluation as hypothesis testing: amateur confirmation bias

The first paper, Chess Masters Hypothesis Testing is extremely interesting. In looking at chess players' thought process, they fruitfully frame candidate moves as hypotheses. The hypothesis, for each candidate move is: "This is the best move in this position." What is the best way to test this hypothesis for a given candidate? Obviously you must consider how your opponent will respond (especially sharp moves such as checks, captures, and other threats). Unlike science, where the data are measurable quantities like voltage and mass, the only data we have to go on are variations we calculate and patterns/procedures stored in our memory.

If you'll forgive a brief digression, an early and common view of hypothesis testing in science was that we should go out and seek confirmation. E.g., if you think F=ma, then look for instances in which that is true. Observe it enough times, and you have good scientific support for your hypothesis.

But that isn't often the best way to do things. It suffers from a 'confirmation bias', our tendency to look for data that confirms our theories, much like a UFO conspiracy theorist who sees every unexplained light in the sky as being controlled by little green man. It is like a person that believes God created all species that seizes on any gaps in our scientific knowledge of biological speciation as evidence for intelligent design.

In contrast, a good scientist will do her damnedest to kill her own pet theories, to falsify her hypotheses. They try to find the most unexpected, surprising prediction and do the experiment. After a while, those theories that remain, that survive these falsification attempts, are taken much more seriously.

And that is what we should do in chess. When considering a candidate move, we have to consider the worst possible outcome, we have to put ourselves in our opponent's shoes and try to kill that move. If we just look at moves we'd like our opponents to make, we are not being objective, and will get demolished. Sure, it might lead to mate in three if he plays like a jackass on crack, but if he plays like a human being, you will get destroyed. So be objective.

Getting back to the study, the researchers studied thought processes of amateur versus master-level chess players, and they found a significant confirmation bias in the amateurs. Specifically, when analyzing candidate moves the amateurs tended to spend their time thinking about subvariations that were good for them, but overlooking variations that refuted that line. The master-level players were much more objective, able to quickly see the bad aspects of a move as well as the good aspects.

That is really cool.

We have known for some time that in chess, the least bad move is the best move. So while it is good to have positive plans and strategies, once time is running and you have settled into the nitty-gritty of evaluating a particular candidate move, hold nothing back, attack it with all your intellect. The candidate that is least bad is the best.

Amateurs, beware the tendency to see UFOs where there are just flying turds.

Note also I think this confirmation bias is ubiquitous in the chess improvement literature. There are not enough objective studies of chess improvement, so you end up with chess improvement clans. What we need are chess improvement data and studies, not anecdotes and emotion anchored in a cult of personality.

2. Learning 10,000 Pictures
The second study, Learning 10,0000 Pictures, is just amazing. Subjects were shown more than ten thousand pictures in one session, viewing each picture for five seconds, and saw each image only once. Two days later, subjects were tested for their recall of the images (some they had been shown previously, some not). They were able to accurately recall over 6500 of these pictures! The experimenters didn't even try to train the subjects on more images in this heroic experiment, but simply concluded "the capacity of recognition memory for pictures is almost limitless."

Holy shit. So why do we have so much trouble remembering a few thousand chess positions? If we remembered positions the way we remember more natural visual images, we'd all be much better at chess: we could scroll through a bunch of positions or problems and remember them without a lot of trouble (especially if we did the Circles on them!).

Why are we so much worse with chess positions? I think there are two reasons. I didn't mention before that subjects did much worse when the task was to recognize words, and much much worse if they were shown nonsensical strings of letters. So it seems important that the images be of things you would tend to actually see in real life rather than abstract names or symbol strings. Chess seems to be more like language than real life in this regard--abstract symbols that you wouldn't exactly encounter in nature were it not for human cultural scaffolding.

If only there were some way to translate chess information into naturalistic images in our brains, so we could better remember the former.

The second difference between the study and our chess learning is in the task itself. Subjects only had to recognize the images, not do anything with them that could be construed as right or wrong. In chess, pattern recognition is not enough. I have had many instances of remembering a pattern in a tactical puzzle book, but having no idea of the solution even though I had worked through it before. Pattern recognition and solution recognition are different species. Indeed, I don't care if I recognize the original position as long as I remember the bloody solution!

It seems there are two components to chess mastery--yes, pattern recognition which humans are very good at (though better with realistic images than symbol strings). That is fairly passive, and happens without any effort (like you recognize your mom's face). But there is also a more active component--the ability to do something. I can recognize the dials and gizmos in an airplane cockpit, but I have no idea what to do with them. Becoming a good pilot, so you are flipping the dials like an old pro, takes a great deal of experience; no matter how much book knowledge you have it just takes a great deal of time to develop the procedural expertise. In other words, it is a motor skill only partly guided by pattern recognition.

Chess seems to be the same way--sure it helps to recognize patterns, but it is even more helpful to just move your hands to the right piece and move that piece to the right square with minimal thinking. That is, you need to build up procedural memory, and that just takes a lot of time, and you can't force it no matter how smart you are.

What can we do with this? Well, one thing to do is follow Temposchlucker. Like Fox Mulder, he is getting closer to the truth than he has ever been in his recent post that touches on this selfsame topic. Tempo and I have been orbiting this topic for over two years, and I think this study sheds some light on the topic (that post was the first one where I brought up and defined the distinction, from psychology, between procedural and declarative memory).

But what would falsify this hypothesis about motor skills in chess? To be objective, it is crucial to think in those terms: otherwise I'm no better than a new-agey Creationist UFO hunter. Can someone with severely impaired motor skills, such as a quadriplegic, excel at chess? If a theory implies that Stephen Hawking couldn't get good at chess, the theory is in need of revision. If so, does that falsify this motor skill based hypothesis? What types of procedural learning is there besides specifically motor learning? Not all actions involve flexing muscles. I can learn to do mathematical problems in my head by practicing them, until I can do them quickly without thinking. That is a type of procedural learning that may be more relevant for chess mastery.

Sweet Leaf--The Best Books

Hidden Leaf wrote up a very useful bibliography of the books that got B's and better in my reviews (that is, the stuff I'm keeping). One really nice feature is that at the end of each bibliography, he notes which video that review is in! Thanks a lot, Hidden Leaf. Seriously, you help make it feel worthwhile.

Code:
Grade/Author/Title/Publisher/Date/Year/Vid #

'NR' means 'not reviewed' in the videos, but good material I didn't have at hand when I did the videos.

The A Pile
A+ Silman, Jeremy; Silman's Complete Endgame Course. From Beginner to Master, Siles Press, 2007/01, 5
A+ Wolff, Patrick; The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess, Alpha, 2005/05, 7
A/A+ Cheng, Ray; Practical Chess Exercises. 600 Lessons from Tactics to Strategy, Wheatmark, 2007/05, 4
A/A+ CT-Art (Chess Tactics Art); Convekta (*, NR)
A Basman, Michael (Mike); Chess Openings, (Crowood Chess Library), Crowood Press, 1987/04, 3
A Chandler, Murray; How to Beat Your Dad at Chess, Gambit Publications, 1998/08, 7
A Chess Tactics for Beginners, Convetka, 3*

The B Pile
B Anderson, Ian; Chess Visualization Course, 3
B Buckley, Mark; Practical Chess Analysis, Thinkers' Press, 1987/06, 7
B Burgess, Graham; Winning with the Smith-Morra Gambit, (Batsford Chess Library), Henry Holt & Co, 1994/12, 4
B Chernev, Irving; Logical Chess. Move by Move. Every Move Explained, Batsford, 2003/06 algebraic, 6
B Collins, Sam; Understanding the Chess Openings, Gambit, 2005/07, 4
B Davies, Nigel; Gambiteer I. A Hard Hitting Opening Repetoire for White, Everyman Chess, 2007/05, 6
B Dzindzichashvili, Roman; Unbeatable Secret Weapons for Black; Roman's Lab volume 17: Sic Def, Scan Def, 4*
B Emms, John; Attacking with 1e4, Everyman Chess, 2001/08, 7
B Euwe, Max & Meiden; Walter, Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur, Dover Publications, 1994/03, 5
B Fischer, Bobby; Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, Bantam, 1992/07, 7
B Gilliam Simple Checkmates, Ballantine Books, 1996 (NR)
B Golombek, Harry; Capablanca's Best Games, Intl Chess Enterpr, 1997/02 8
B Grivas, Efstratios; Chess College 2: Pawn Play, Gambit Publications, 2006/06, 7
B Harding, Tim; The Total Marshall, 2*
B Heisman, Dan; Elements of Positional Evaluation. How Chess Pieces get their Power, Chess Enterprises, 1999/06 rev. ed., 6
B Heisman, Dan; Back to Basics: Tactics, (ChessCafe Back to Basics Chess), Russell Enterprises, 2007/09, 3
B Kasparov, Garry; On My Great Predecessors Part I, Everyman Chess, 2003/08, 7
B Kotov, Alexander; Think Like a Grandmaster, Batsford, 2003/06 algebraic, 6
B Littlewood, Paul; Chess Tactics, (Batsford Chess Book), Batsford, 2003/03, 6
B Maza, Michael de la; Rapid Chess Improvement, Everyman Chess, 2002/06, 6
B McDonald, Neil; Chess the Art of Logical Thinking. From the First Move to the Last, Batsford, 2004/09, 6
B McDonald, Neil; The Art of Planning in Chess. Move by Move, Batsford, 2006/08, 7
B McDonald, Neil; Queens Gambit Declined, (Starting Out), Everyman Chess, 2006/12, 2
B Müller & Lamprecht; Fundamental Chess Endings, Gambit Publications, 2001/10, 7
B Müller, Karsten; Fritz Endgame Trainer Vol 1, 1*
B Pandolfini, Bruce; Beginning Chess. 300 Elementary Problems for Players New to the Game, (Fireside Chess Library), Fireside, 1993/08, 3
B Pandolfini, Bruce; Russian Chess, (Fireside Chess Library), Fireside 1987/03, 8
B Pandolfini, Bruce; Weapons of Chess. An Omnibus of Chess Strategy; (Fireside Chess Library), Fireside, 1989/11, 6
B Renaud & Kahn; The Art of Checkmate, Dover Publications, 1962/06, 7
B Rosario, Frisco del; A First Book of Morphy, Trafford Publishing, 2004/10, 3
B Sawyer, Tim; Alapin French, Thinkers’ Press, 1995/06, 3
B Snyder, Robert M.; Unbeatable Chess Lessons for juniors; (McKay Chess Library for Kids), Random House, 2003/11, 2
B Stean, Michael; Simple Chess. New Algabraic Edition, Dover Publications, 2003/1, 6
B Tisdall, Jonathan; Improve your chess now, Everyman Chess, 1997/12, 7
B Ward, Chris; It's your move, Everyman Chess, 2004/01, 6
B Weeramantry & Eusebi; Best Lessons of a Chess Coach, (McKay Chess Library), Random House, 1994/02, 7
B Chessmaster 10th edition, Ubisoft, 2*
B Chess Tactics for Intermediate Players, Convetka, 4*
B Fritz 09, 1*

* = not a book

100 Chess Book Reviews: Part 8

This is the final movie. Phew!

Soon I'll finish posting a few loose ends, and then it will be time to close shop. Thanks to Liquid Egg Product's mascot for making another appearance in this video, though the bastard sort of took me hostage so perhaps I shouldn't be thanking him.

I forgot to thank the Knights Errant in general at the end of the vid, and some Knights in particular-- especially Takchess, PMD,Sancho, Nezha, and Celtic Death. But especially Takchess, who should have been near the top of the list (though the list was in no particular order). Sorry about that bud. There's no going back now--I deleted all this stuff from my hard drive.

Damn it feels good to be a patzer

Sure, there are downsides to being a patzer. Like....well, sucking at chess. But there are a lot of perks that come along with sucking at chess. In no particular order:



1. You get to be a reckless gunslinger.
All that subtle opening advice meant for GMs? Fuck it. It's not meant for me. I can blithely play unsound gambits such as the Englund, and it is not a problem. Indeed it seems to actually be a good thing because it helps me get better at tactics (see #2) and throws my opponents off guard. Yes, playing unsound gambits is said to be a stage, but it sure is a fun stage, and also a helpful stage. If I were better, I'd have to settle into openings my grandma used to play. So, beginners, go ahead and play gambits. You won't be able to forever, so take advantage (and see #2).

2. Tactics is everything.
Sure, I learn other stuff to be well-rounded and all that, to gain an aesthetic appreciation for the game. But in practice 90% of my games are decided by simple tactics, and even more in blitz play. This was true even before I started playing gambits. So there isn't a lot of subtlety about what I need to work on, how I can improve. Until the pieces stop dropping, there is nothing else as important to work on. (Note as my rating approached 1500 at ICC, I noticed this percentage started to drop off significantly, and it seems to continue to drop off as you improve, until games are won by boredom--but by then you will think winning a game because someone dropped a piece to a two-move tactic is boring, so you will be fine).

3. Pretty much no matter what you do, you will improve.
When the temperature is absolute zero, the only way to go is up. Yeah, we bicker about methods for chess improvement here. I am a broken record about the importance of chess coaches, some like to write subtle treatises on motor control and implicit memory and 'knowledge transfer.' But when you suck, none of it really matters. You will improve when following either trendy or old-fashioned study methods, as long as you do something to improve.

4. The learning curve is very steep.
When starting out, you learn a lot of really cool things really fast. The better you get, the more slowly you improve, the less often you have mind-blowing insights into the mechanics of the game. It is the exact same way in any science. When I started out in my neuroscience training, there were these orgiastic insights nearly daily as I gobbled up all the basic facts I could about the brain. Now, even though I monitor all the journals, the rate of such major insights is much lower, very few things surprise me. As a beginner, you get an intellectual feast from the most elementary sources.

Those are the most obvious cool things about being a total patzer. So, fellow patzers of the world, enjoy it! If you can think of any others, let us know. Of course, the list would be much longer if the topic were 'Why being a patzer sucks.' But the up sides shouldn't be ignored. It makes me want to stay a patzer the rest of my life. Yeah, I'm a patzer because I want to be! That's it.

Pic above from one of the best movies of all time, Office Space (click for some scenes).