Chess for Zebras, Chapter One (Skill versus Knowledge)

Here is a summary of Chapter One of Rowson's Chess for Zebras, entitled 'What to do if you think there's a hole in your bucket.'

The main thesis of this chapter is that chess expertise is a skill or habit, not something you can acquire from reading chess books or listening to chess lectures. Rowson says, "Many players 'work' on their chess as if they were working on an academic subject, but improving your chess is much more like improving your driving, or improving your play on a musical instrument, than it is like preparing for an exam." Chess improvement is not a matter of filling your mental bucket with new facts.

Like learning to play the guitar, chess improvement is a gradual process of constructing skills and habits. It isn't at all like learning facts such as 'George Bush is the president.' Unlike fact-based learning, an instructor can only do so much to help you acquire new habits. You have to train on your own to improve to any significant degree.

The problem is that motivated adult players tend to be good at studying chess, but not so good at acquiring skills. They can spend hours going over an annotated game, coming to understand the strategic and tactical factors that shaped each move. However, this is of limited use, as they are developing a conceptual understanding of games that have already happened (hindsight). Such understanding does not usually give them the ability to anticipate and make such moves themselves in their own games (foresight). Rowson says, "such hindsight might give chess-players knowledge, but what we need is foresight."

OK, Rowson: give me foresight into how to develop chess foresight. Rowson has a few suggestions. One is somewhat mystical, the others form a nice tidy list.

First, the mystical. "Unlearn your chess, grasshopper."

We already have many habits and concepts that are likely holding us back. Hence, we should try to "unlearn" what we think we know about chess. If you "know" having the two bishops is an advantage, then you will be somewhat blinded to the idiosyncrasies of the position in front of you, you will have the habit of exchanging knights for bishops even if it isn't in your favor. Hence, Rowson suggests you look at each position "with fresh eyes, as free as possible from prejudices. Unlearning is really a way of constantly looking at the baggage you bring to chess positions and trying to work on the baggage that is most obviously problematic." Rowson suggests that you "surrender your dearly held notions of what chess is like and start to try to work things out at the board."

Aside from unlearning bad habits, Rowson realizes we need to develop good habits. You can never play free of habits, but you can steer the quality of your habits. Rowson says:

If you want to become a better player, you need better habits.

The best way to cultivate better habits is to try to work things out on the basis of your existing habits, and look closely at how you are falling short. You will find that most mistakes do not come from not knowing things, but from not seeing things, or not doing things.

You can work on this by
1) Playing and then analysing your games honestly
2) Solving complex chess problems
3) Trying to win won positions against strong analysis engines.
4) The intelligent use of blitz games--whereby you don't analyse the positions in depth, but compare your first impressions of positions with the way they actually developed.

With these approaches you are not taking in any new "knowledge" so you might feel that you are not growing as a player. However, if the arguments in this chapter make sense to you, and you can trust in that kind of training process, I believe you will find that your level of skill improves, and with it, your results.

While he didn't place much emphasis on improvement methods, it is useful to know which in the zillions of methods out there he believes meshes most with his 'habit not knowledge' slogan. [Note he didn't break them up into a numbered list, I added that to his plain text to highlight his suggestions].

Overall this is a fun and interesting chapter that touches on many themes we have been throwing around the blogosphere (Tempo and I have extensively discussed declarative versus procedural memory, know-how versus knowledge-that, habits and skills versus conscious concepts, etc). That is, the chapter was largely preaching to the choir, but it was nice to see a few suggestions about how to incorporate this into an improvement plan. Of course, the Circles are basically an attempt to build up better tactical skills.

I have some more critical comments about the chapter, but I will save them for another time (hint: this study).

I'll finish with some interesting quotes from the chapter:

For the Knights, Rowson gives a little mention of de la Maza's book:

I agree that until you are about 1800 "your first name is tactics, your middle name is tactics, and your last name is tactics." That said, if your aim is not just gaining rating points but deepening your appreciation of the game, then you shouldn't deprive yourself of aspects of the game that you enjoy more. For players rated below 1800 who desperately want to improve (and are willing to suffer for it!) I recommend Michael de la Maza's thoughtful and honest book, Rapid Chess Improvement.

And a quote that Rowson cites from Davies' wonderful article The how and the what:

I recently saw a newsgroup discussion about tournament preparation.

Everything under the sun was mentioned from openings to endings and strategy to tactics with everyone having their own idea about how it should be done. I just commented that “the how is more important than the what."

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.

Chess is not a game that can be learned from a book any more than tennis or golf. It may look rather academic and there are some scientific elements to it. But the truth is that wiles and playfulness count for far more than “knowing the book.” Interestingly my grandmaster colleagues tend to be quick witted, jovial and street wise rather than serious and lofty intellectuals. And most of us will recommend keeping a clear head both before and during a tournament rather than hitting the books.