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December 29, 2005

The Tao of Chess

Just finished reading The Tao of Chess by Chess Master Peter Kurzdorfer. I'm not exactly sure what I expected, but the book was a bit different from what I originally thought it would be. It was a good book and easy to read.

It's really a book with a theme and the author does a good job of trying to stick to the theme. First he states a "Principle" and then gives an example of the principle from an actual played game. Once he finishes that, he restates the principle as it applies to daily living. It's a cute little theme. At first I was a somewhat disappointed in the section where he relates the principles to daily life. Maybe I expected more? I'm sure that as my chess experience grows, I'll find my own analogies between chess and life and they will be profound (to me). But, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the principles and how they were displayed in the examples. Then it hit me -- the life principles are not for chess to enhance your life, but known things about your life that you can use to remember the chess principles. Hey, maybe I'm just backwards, but that's how I saw it. Once that struck me, I liked the life section much more.

One of the things that tickled me was that the book confirmed many of the things I had already been doing or intended to do. It talks about analyzing your own games. That was already an idea that had been implanted from my studies so far. I know that I need to start recording my games so that I can analyze my own thought process to improve and learn. I downloaded two programs tonight to support that idea. One is called Chess Maker - and it's for creating pictures of board layouts. That will probably come in handy for later posts in this section. It would be nice to speak of an opening I'm learning and add a screen shot for illustration. The other program I downloaded is called ChessBase Light. It's a program for recording chess game moves. You can record a game move-by-move and save it to the database. Then you can replay and analyze it at your leisure. I also found that you can download databases of previously played games and view them in ChessBase Light. The internet has quite a few databases of games played by many Grand Masters and International Masters. It's really good to see what the pros did under this and that situation.

Christmas turned out to be an opportunity to add to my chess library. I bought two books on openings, one on the middle game, one on positional play and one on understanding pawn play. I'm hoping to finish the two books by Jeremy Silman that I already started reading before I jump into these. [Complete Book of Chess Strategy and The Amateur's Mind] The thing I'm enjoying about the chess books I'm reading is that they present ideas and concepts to you. They don't give you anything to really memorize - just ideas to understand. And I'm finding that chess is not something that you sit there and think 20 - 30 moves ahead... It's better to look at the board and assess the situation and formulate a plan. Then you put the plan in action through each move. Trying to think so many moves out is kinda futile. What if your opponent doesn't play his/her best move? What if your opponent makes a move that isn't really part of what you thought was going to happen? Then you'll have to rethink 18 or 19 moves all over again. If you look at positions and plans, then you can select each move independently and your moves will support your plan. It's much easier to adapt to the changing circumstances of your opponent's moves.

Another concept that I picked up from my reading is that it's okay to lose. You learn more from losing (if you analyze your moves). If you consistently pick players that you have a really good chance of beating, you'll never advance your game. Sure, your ego won't be as bruised, but you won't be moving forward. So I've given myself permission to seek out tough players and accept the learning process. Another thing that comes from consistently playing weaker players is that you develop sloppy habits. Something that might work well with weak players will become a habit and then it won't work well against a stronger opponent. But, you'll be so used to it working for you that you'll use it (to your detriment). After you finally realize it doesn't work for you anymore, you'll have to unlearn that bad habit - which will be much tougher than learning what does work against strong opponents and having those plans and strategies become your habit.

"If drink is the curse of the working classes and work is the curse of the drinking classes then chess is the curse of the thinking classes "
-- J. Ross

Posted by BlueWolf on December 29, 2005 02:10 AM