"Show Me.... Wax On, Wax Off"

In the original Karate Kid movie, teen Daniel was hoping to learn Karate from Mr Miyagi but ended up doing all sorts of chores from waxing his car, to sanding his floor and painting his house.

In the movie's iconic moment, when Daniel finally gets fed up with the chores and threatens to leave, Mr Miyagi finally reveals what he was hoping to teach Daniel. Daniel was in fact, learning a very important fundamental skill in Karate - the art of self-defense. You cannot be good at Karate if you only learn about attacking. You must learn how to defend properly.

The same is true in chess.

By learning how to defend, you not only become more aware of your opponent's attacking possibilities, tricks and plans but you acquire the necessary knowledge of how to launch a successful attack. This skill is vitally important if you want to know if a particular attack is good especially when it involves a piece sacrifice.

As an example, in the position below:

Can White play the sacrificial attack 1. Qxf6+?

Another part of the game where defensive technique is vitally important is your endgame skill.

For example, do you know how to defend as Black in a K+R v K+R+P endgame as the one below? Is the position even savable?

Can Black save this position?

Or how to defend with the utmost precision in a K+R v K+Q endgame?

Do you know to win this position as White?
If you're Black, do you know how to give the most problem to White?

It is only by incorporating these techniques into our knowledge which forms a basis from where we can then build bigger memory blocks and know if a particular attack or a particular position can be defended.

That will ultimately, make you a better player.

The Legacy Of Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik

We have all heard of Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik - the Great Patriarch of Soviet chess and the 6th World Chess Champion.

I can't help but notice that quite a number of players express disapproval of both Botvinnik as a person and also of his approach to chess and to others, Botvinnik was the epitome of everything that was bad about Soviet chess. Some people have even accused him of being a lame World Champion and that he only kept the title for so long is because of the automatic right of a return match for a World Champion.

As anyone who has picked up any of his books, from his well known One Hundred Selected Games to his annotations of the World Championship games (published by Olms and New In Chess), his notes are often very brutal. Botvinnik spares no one, not even himself. And it is this attitude which seems to have turned a lot of players off him.

So what you may ask, is so great about Mikhail Botvinnik?

Despite the criticisms, what we know about modern chess and how we approach chess is largely due to Mikhail Botvinnik's influence and contribution. He paved the way to modern chess. He made important discoveries to opening theory (eg. the Botvinnik Variation of the Semi-Slav still holds up today in the face of computer engines).

Botvinnik was fearless to a fault. He would never back down from tactical complications when the position demanded it but it is his middlegame prowess that are the most impressive.

He helped established what is now the following rules that continues to stand up today to anyone who wants to improve their chess.

#1. Annotate Your Own Games
There's an interesting blurb about this. When asked about Kasparov who was a promising teen at the time, Botvinnik's first question was,"Do you annotate your own games?" As anyone who has annotated their own games (using computer engines like Fritz/Rybka doesn't count), it is not an easy subject and oft a laborious task.

#2. Maintain Objectivity
Botvinnik was pedantic to the fault in this and was his own worst critic. One must cast aside personal bias when it comes to ealuation of any given chess position. You must be impartial and must part with your pride and bias. These days, with the advent of computer engines, spotting tactical mistakes is as easy as flicking off a switch with strong engines like Rybka and Fritz.

#3. A Healthy Body, A Healthy Mind
Botvinnik understood the importance of being and staying healthy. Increasing your body's physical condition means that your body is operating optimally at all times. That means your stamina and endurance improves (vital for tournaments) and your mind becomes more focused on the task at hand. After the 1951 match with Bronstein, Botvinnik realised that his 3 years of absence in chess almost cost him dearly and he started putting himself into shape by exercising regularly, and focusing more on chess.

#4. Study Of Annotated Games By Strong Masters
These days, there's no getting around this. If you want to improve, you have to read through annotated games, not to only to understand how to play the game accurately but to understand the concepts, plans and strategies. For example, Kasparov was made to study Alekhine's games because his approach to chess was similar to Alekhine's.

#5. Thorough Opening Preparation
Botvinnik's opening preparation involved thorough analysis and a deep understanding of the resulting position all the way up till the middlegame. Such a scientific approach to chess was unheard of in the pre-Botvinnik era. Any new or valuable information of interest will be noted down and analysed. These days, all chess players (even beginners) need to develop a basic opening repertoire, and more advanced players typically would try to have a repertoire that that would lead to rich middlegame play.

I think the greatest compliment that I can say is taken from 9th World Chess champion Tigran Petrosian,"We all regard ourselves as pupils of Botvinnik and subsequent generations will learn from his games."

Chess Informant Website Hacked And The Kavalek-Short Affair

Warning: The Chess Informant website (http://www.sahovski.com) has been compromised. Their sale items including the latest CI 107 and ECO A, 4th Edition (if you follow the links from their main webpage) shows that the website has been hacked.


This only adds to the woes for Chess Informant considering that their Editor in Chief Zdenko Krnić was recently killed in a hit and run accident. I would urge caution on potential buyers from purchasing straight from their website for now. :(

Onto other news, Nigel Short has commented on Kavalek's piece in the Huffington Post (as reported by Chessbase). Kavalek has some serious axe to grind as can be seen in his older 1994 post on the Sentinel.

Short on his part has responded to his allegations and novelty as " It is the sort of move any decent player would find in his sleep." on Chessgames.com

Short also responded of Kavalek,"My objections to the "Kavalek Files" were and are manifold but the fundamental point is the highly unethical betrayal of trust by a man who was employed to help me, and to whom I paid a very large sum of money. What was the purpose of him publishing this series of revelatory articles? a) to puff up Kavalek's own importance b) to damage me professionally by revealing as many of my novelties as possible. As far as I am concerned, his spiteful actions are beneath contempt..."

Do I Have To Setup The Board Again?

Here's a question:

When doing tactical exercises, how many of you actually bother to set it up on the board? Or do you solve them straight out of the book?

I admit that I am one the laziest people on this planet. When I do tactical exercises, I use Chessbase/Fritz's 3D board setup to setup the position and then try to solve it from there on the screen.

Okay, I admit that it's not ideal, I don't get a true graphical representation and my hand doesn't touch the pieces.

From the various advice in Daniel King Powerplay DVDs to Arthur Yusupov's Boost Your Chess book series, many chess authors and trainers have recommended doing it over the board.

The basic premise is that by physically moving the pieces, your mind connects the events and this adds as a self-reinforcement tool so that you can better remember the lesson learned.

The problem herein is that when trying to solve 5 tactical exercises, you need to setup the position 5 times. Setting up a board is no easy feat, you spend at least a few minutes just to setup the board. And then once you figured out the tactical puzzle, you replay the solution and this involves going back to the initial board position at the beginning over and over again as you run through the variations.

Some others have recommended setting up 2 boards, one to do the analysis and the other to act as a "variation" board to work through the different variations.

At this point, doing 1 puzzle can easily take as long as 10 minutes in terms of just running through the pieces, if not more. Try it for another 4 puzzles and suddenly, the task becomes extra onerous and you seemed to spend more time setting up the board than doing the tactical puzzles.

By putting the position inside Chessbase/Fritz and seeing it in 3D, I can run through the variations pretty quickly (true the 3D is nowhere near photorealistic as an actual board) with the touch of a mouse click (okay, several mouse clicks).

The point is: how well has my memory recalled the position by doing tactical puzzles this way?

In my case, surprisingly, not too bad. I find that I'm still able to recall certain puzzles once I recognise the formation/pattern and the solution to them but not all. However, if I were to redo the puzzles again and again, I find that the memory of the position somehow got "stuck" in my mind. Run it through 2-3 more times a few weeks later and it becomes embedded somewhere between medium-term and long-term memory.

True, none of us can be a Magnus Carlsen or Alexei Shirov where these GMs don't need to physically see the board to calculate variations so until we are all super GMs, what other recourse is there for us?

So what is your method of doing tactical studies? :)

The Silicon Monster Annotations

When a player works with a chess engine, he/she has to understand the intricacies and the pitfalls behind letting the silicon monster do things like annotating the game.

Chess engines like Fritz and Rybka are enormously helpful in finding missed tactical combinations and how to create strategical plans arising from them.

However, where chess engines fail happens when a position is so incredibly complex that it requires a lot of processing power and time. So sometimes, it does not "see" the correct continuation until it enumerates all the various correct "tree" variations extensively before it finds the correct continuation. That is why in order for a chess engine to annotate properly, you must give it sufficient time to locate the correct variation. You cannot rush these things unfortunately (unless of course you happen to be Topalov and you have access to IBM's Blue Gene/P).

Chess engines can misjudge closed positions where sometimes, the moves suggested by the chess engine doesn't make any sense at all. It is particularly obvious to know the chess engine is floundering when it constantly sways its evaluation between 0.01 and 0.02 between different variations. This means that there is typically no advantage to be gained between choosing moves that gain a +0.02 or +0.01 advantage. This is where human evaluation takes over.

However, if the computer evaluation changes by more than 0.5 is where you must sit up and take note because it typically means that either you or your opponent has overlooked the position and either of you has made a slight concession/weak move.

In addition, in totally winning positions, chess engines may give you the best lines but as a human player under time pressure, if you know the position is winning, then you look for forcing moves to maintain your advantage.

Does the engine evaluations really matter for example, if you know the endgame is winning so you trade down to a winning endgame?

No, it does not (unless the engine is screaming checkmate in x number of moves). A difference between a +7.5 and a +8 advantage is going to matter little because the game is practically won.

So the next time you let a chess engine annotate your game, remember its flaws and its uses.

And one more thing, no player ever plays like a chess engine so there is no point beating yourself up over it if you miss a variation that changes by say, 0.02.

In the end, one must note: Chess engines are after all programmed by humans and humans do err.