Chess for Zebras, Chapter 5 (Building your chess muscles)

A summary of Chapter 5 of Rowson's book Chess for Zebras, which is titled 'Concentrate! Concentrate? Concentrate.' In this Chapter, he picks up on a point he made in Chapter 1, essentially expanding it into a general training method.

Recall that in Chapter 1, Rowson argued that the way to improve is not to gain more cognitive understanding or knowledge of the game of chess (e.g., knowledge that you should get your rooks onto open files), but to develop skills at chess. In that chapter, one of his suggestions for building chess skill was to take complex problems and spend about 20 minutes solving them. The present chapter unpacks this suggestion, both justifying it and describing how to do it.

In this chapter, he opens by reprising a theme from Chapter 1, saying, "I believe that the surest way to improve our results is to practice solving complex problems at home, and to do this as often as possible, in a timed and disciplined manner. This helps to make concentrating more habitual and therefore makes it easier for us to focus at critical points in our own games." Rowson feels very strongly about this technique, saying "One exercise completed with full application for 20 minutes is easily worth an hour of playing through games."

Rowson's suggestion is simple. First, find a good position. This can be done many ways, but the key is that it is a position you find somewhat confusing, that you feel you don't understand. It shouldn't be a simple tactics puzzle, for instance. You can find positions online, in master games, or puzzle books, but ideally the positions should come from your own games. Save them on your computer for later use (I save tough positions when annotating my own games, squirreling them away for later Rowsonalysis).

Second, get to work! Set 20 minutes on your timer and hack away. The focus should be on analyzing the position, working out potential solutions to the problems it poses, thinking through any sharp lines to quiescence (and one move more!). You want to read the position rather than write your biases and preconceptions into the position with counterproductive narratives.

Rowson's method has many positive consequences. For one, it makes you less likely to fall into the trap of being a 'lazy detective.' You see a couple of clues, they suggest one suspect, and instead of pursuing the evidence and alternative possibilities, you just go along with the story you wove from limited evidence. Rowson's method doesn't leave much room for this. He says, "It gets you away from all the storytelling stuff and makes you more focused on working things out over the board. It also makes you more attuned to your opponent's possibilities, because in the process of training you realize that to be accurate you must constantly anticipate your opponent's ideas."

When you are really concentrating on a position, you are totally immersed, focused on exploring the game tree, testing out ideas and plans, hacking away at the position. When you are in this focused state, it is what the psychologists would describe as 'Flow.' In the state of Flow you are immersed in the task, not thinking about irrelevant details (I'm hungry), or even about thinking itself. You are thinking about chess, the concrete position in front of you and the possibilities therein. Similarly, when reading you are not thinking about reading, you are just reading.

Rowson also discusses the importance of setting up conditions before a game so you are more likely to experience Flow. If you are hungry, tired, or distracted by general emotional worries, it is much harder.

Rowsonalysis isn't particularly unique. Something similar was suggested by Kotov as I summarized here, and sometimes goes by the name Stoyko Exercises. I did it before my tournament last week for four days, and it clearly helped a lot, especially when I was mentally fresh in my first game. One consensus many people seem to be reaching, though, is that blindfold chess is not a great way to work on chess concentration. You don't play blindfold in tournaments. Practice how you play!

That finishes the summary of Part I of Rowson's book. So far, I am quite impressed. The first five chapters form a helpful coherent story that I can summarize as follows:

To improve at chess you don't need more book knowledge. Such knowledge often interferes with your performance by blinding you to the position in front of you. What you need is skill, and one way to improve your chess skills is to analyze complicated positions with intense focus for approximately 20 minutes.