What Should I Do When My Opponent's Clock Is Ticking?

In his book, Think Like A Grandmaster, Alexander Kotov posed a similar question to Mikhail Botvinnik.

Botvinnik's reply was very insightful.

"Basically I do divide my thinking into two parts. When my opponent's clock is going, I discuss general considerations in an internal dialogue with myself. When my own clock is going, I analyse concrete variations."

What Botvinnik means is that a chess player must learn to analyse not just on their own time but also to keenly and conscientiously analyse as it if was their turn to move.

But what is a concrete variation and what is a general consideration?

Analysing on general considerations means that when you analyse a certain chess position, you think of a myriad of ways in which both you and your opponent are likely to respond in a standard manner. This means looking at basic principles like defending an unguarded piece or square, connecting your rooks, taking control of the center, activating your pieces etc. Kotov explains that this involves breaking a position down to its elements and formulating both a short-term and long-term plan. A short term plan can be a simple one like improving your worst piece while a long-term plan may be like establishing a blockade or establishing a winning endgame scenario.

Analysing on concrete variations means that your opponent has made a move and you start your 'tree of analysis' based on the current position of the board and you analyse by calculating each possible move and possible opponent's reply in turn. The tree of analysis can spawn multiple branches, sub-branches and in each branch, due care and consideration and thought must be given to the possible response that resides in each branch. If any replies in the sub-branches appear to be bad, either the sub-branch is removed from the tree or analysed further to see if the sub-branch warrants any further investigation.

There is no doubt that this is very strenuous mental work and for the improving chess player like myself, it is very important to know not just to manage time but also know what to do on my opponent's time.

Kasparov wasn't far off when he quipped,"Chess is mental torture."

Wolf Hunt

In chess, one of the hardest things to accomplish as a patzer like myself is knowing how to convert your advantage.

You know the game is won. You just don't want to let it slip or worse, give your opponent counter-attacking chances to salvage a draw or even turn it into a win.

Yet it is one of the most common failings in chess, one in which even Grandmasters are not immune to. After looking through my games, I find that it's usually down to a couple of factors.

One of them is "Over-enthusiasm to finish off your opponent quickly".

This weakness is very dangerous. You sense your opponent has been wounded, you smell the blood in the air, your adrenaline goes up, your muscles tighten and you get ready to pounce. Crazy as it sounds, this is also where you are in fact, at your most vulnerable.

In such a circumstance, it's wise to adopt the hunting and killing technique of a wolf. Wolves by nature sometimes hunt smaller animals but it is the skill in which they take down a large animal like a caribou that shows their true mastery of the hunt.

Wolves usually hunt for the weakest prey in a herd. In chess, you should also do the same, look for the weakest spot in your opponent's camp and target it. This may be a pawn, a square, a piece etc.

And back to the wolf analogy, so what does a wolf do when a prey is wounded?

Does a wolf lunge in straight for the kill? No, it does not. It stops, waits and never keeps its eyes off its prey. It looks to see if the prey exhibits further weaknesses or if the prey is still alive and kicking.

Caribous and deers are dangerous prey for a wolf because their horns and antlers can mortally wound an inexperienced wolf. The idea of "if I'm going, I'm taking you with me" is not lost on the minds of the prey. And it should not also be lost on you as well in a chess game. There's nothing worse in a chess (other than losing, naturally) than to be close to checkmating your opponent only for your opponent to get a perpetual check on your king.

What a wolf then does is very calculative and precise. If the prey starts to show a little weakness, the wolf does not go straight for the throat kill (wolves wisely stay away from these areas because that's where the prey's horns/antlers can be a source of problem), it instead continues to further weaken its prey, not by targeting the prey's throat or head but by launching further attacks against other vulnerable parts of the prey.

Likewise in chess, don't constantly attack a weakened position if you know your opponent has the resources to repel the attack. Instead, target another area or create a second weakness. In chess, we call this the Principle of 2 Weaknesses. Grandmasters have this technique down to a pat and it is this skill which is one of the most difficult to learn and acquire.

If your opponent is feeling stretched in defending one side of the board, many a time, quickly shifting a few of your forces to target the other end of the board tends to weaken your opponent fatally.

Likewise, a wolf will attack different parts of the prey until the prey collapses on itself from exhaustion from trying to defend so many different weak parts of the body.

And it is only then that the wolf moves in with the fatal kill.

In the same way, if you notice your opponent's king is on the verge of being mated (or need to spend inordinate resources/loss of material to repel the attack) and you have meticulously calculated that a direct lunge at the king will result in a direct win, by all means, go for it.

The CoffeeHouse Style Of Play

I love coffee.

You open a new pack of coffee beans, fill the grinder with coffee beans, grind it, then prepare it with your coffee machine and the thick aroma of freshly grounded coffee beans fills the air. You take a sip of the coffee and the bitter taste is just terrific as the caffeine enters your blood stream.

I usually have at least 4 shots of self-made cappuccino a day. Forget coffeehouses, the best way to make coffee is in the comfort of your own home.

So what has this got to do with chess, you might ask?

Well, the irrepressible Viktor Korchnoi once infamously called Viktor Bologan a "coffeehouse" player. Just what is a coffeehouse player? For one, it's definitely not referring to Bob Dylan (picture on the left) playing chess in a coffee house.

In a game of chess, different chess players are inclined to think differently. Some chess players look for wild complications, some look for positional advantage, some look for strategic advantage.

But one of the deadliest sins in a player's chess development is "impulsive thinking".

Alexei Suetin in his book is highly critical of this flaw:

"Impulsive thinking is characterised by the absence of a single strategic line, by playing 'from move to move'. At times, this affects highly talented players, who do not, however, have a proper positional training.

The course of their thinking is roughly as follows:

Some outwardly striking move or variation appeals to them, and the immediate reaction follows. Then they are attracted by something else, markedly different in content and direction, which leads to a similar impulse. The result is normally that, without investigating the true possibilities of the position (in this way, one can calculate fairly correctly, although not deeply, the immediate variations), the player takes a premature decision.

Such a 'coffeehouse' style of play, as it was called in olden times, is quite unpromising. Such a 'bustle' through the variations in search of an easy chance (to) success is in principle doomed to failure.

It would be incorrect to think that only weak, inexperienced players are susceptible to impulsive play; it is widespread even among masters. Practice has shown that at times the vice of impulsive thinking is highly 'corrosive' even with highly experienced players.

We are not thinking of play in time trouble, where such thinking is inevitable for even the strongest masters, but first and foremost of an organic defect of thinking under normal conditions. There are a number of specific causes of such 'misfires'.

Thus, for example, impulsive fits can result from nervousness, inevitably arising during the course of a game, especially if the play is of a highly tactical nature.....But most often the causes of impulsive play are a superficial evaluation of the position and carelessness in calculation, an inability or unwillingness to investigate deeply into the essence of the position."

It should be duly noted that Suetin is not talking about adapting to new changes in the board position or being flexible but is talking of the need to develop the ability to perform proper evaluation of the position and to analyse concretely, objectively.

I know this feeling personally because it applies to me and in OTB play, I still suffer from it from time to time, albeit with much reduced frequency than a year ago.

So the next time you play chess, ask yourself, are you playing a coffeehouse style? If you are, then do put a stop it as early as possible because once you've acquired that habit, it's hard to eradicate it from your chess play later on.

I Don't Know What Move To Make

Time and again, I find myself facing tons of problems with this question.

Someone taught me this. Where every move can make or break your game, the solution is to simply, make the following line of thought:

1. If I give a free move and it was my opponent's turn, what is my opponent likely to do?
a. Is my king under attack?
b. Are any of my other major/minor pieces under attack?
c. Would any pawn push cause me great difficulty in defence/attack/counterplay?
d. Would the movement of any of my opponent's pieces break my position?
e. Did my opponent's last 3 moves threaten to do anything?

2. If the answer is no, then you would consider how to attack.
a. What is the weakest piece in my opponent's camp?
b. What is the weakest square in my opponent's camp?
c. Will any pawn push cause my opponent great difficulty?
d. Is my king safe when I conduct an attack?
e. If I were to rearrange the board mentally, what position would I want to look like? How do I go about doing it?
f. If I exchange all my pieces (or mentally remove them from the board), can I win the endgame?

This sounds like a lot to take in but I am trying to do it. I still have problems with points 1(a), 1(e), 2(a), 2(b), 2(d).

And my position always turns up dreadful. Oh well, just practise harder.... I guess.

A Good Letter

Every month, I look forward to Bruce Pandolfini's column at ChessCafe. I find that I can identify with many posters with respect to their questions and concerns.

This month's ChessCafe's Q&A Session with Bruce Pandolfini article ends with a letter that struck a chord in me. I thought the post was very insightful and encouraging and I would like to share it with everyone. Taken from ChessCafe:

R. Surf (England) writes: I recently started up chess as a way to fill some time while I was doing a sabbatical traveling around the world, which turned into a never going back to the International Banking World in New York/London. I write now, but not nearly well enough to pay the bills like my previous job. In 2002, IM Malcolm Pein gave me the book: Tactics for Advanced Players, by Averbakh, with the not too subtle caveat, “You know everything about nothing. Learn tactics!”

As a very well paid London banker I did not take this personally, because, heck, he was a just a chess player depending on the patronage of terrible players with large checkbooks like me. But in 2005, I decided to play chess again after a fifteen year hiatus. Oh, and I actually read the Averbakh book cover to cover, I set up almost every position in the book and repeated this process several times. I then put his exercises into a database that I call Tactical Destruction. I added further exercises from Edward Lasker’s Modern Chess Strategy and Vukovic’s Art of Attack, and along the way I added all my terrible blunders and occasional successes from online games. Together with exercises from various other sources, I now have over 535 cards that I know.

But this has been a chess journey of over two years. In those years I can only give the following to justify my work: the FMs in a chess club that I occasionally visit (one of whom said to me in annoyance “You play like Morphy!”) are no longer willing to play for money at even odds and try to avoid playing me. But the best part of this experience, the other players say, with the hope I will share the secret, “They are scared of you.” Everyone thinks that I was faking my 1900+ rating. I take it with a smile and realize that I know nothing, except 535 positions better than anyone else in this club. As Malcolm said, “You know everything about nothing. Learn tactics!”

I know Malcolm Pein does not even know who I am and probably will never remember this incident, but if you happen to have contact with him at the higher levels of chess Nirvana, then please tell him “thank you” from a once well-to-do banker and now a poor but happy writer. In the meantime, I will continue building and refining my database, because I realize that until you can see the basics, all those books, from My System to Dvoretsky, are simply meaningless if you cannot see the tactics that are beneath the surface.

Regarding Blitz, it is unlikely unless you are some child prodigy or an adult who has played chess his entire life that you will ever be any good at it. I sincerely believe that it is the worst thing in the world for chess. But in fairness, I have no clue how to play this game. Still, I will venture the following thought to my detractors, that no other sport in the world turns their game from a contest of one hour to eighty-five minutes into a five minute debacle of who can move pieces faster than the other player. To paraphrase former World Champion Dr. Lasker, from his Manual of Chess, “Speed Chess will be the death of Chess.” (BP – I couldn’t have said it any better.)

© 2007 Bruce Pandolfini. All Rights Reserved.