Semi-Real Chess
Dan Heisman's most excellent ChessCafe.com article The Secrets to Real Chess describes thought process differences along the development path of the club player. You can refer to his article for the details on the different thought processes involved, but basically a chess player can be defined by one of three categorizations. Either a player is a flip-coin player, a hope chess player, or a real chess player.
I know from my games, that I tend to be somewhere on the continuum between hope chess and real chess. There are times I make a move that appears to address the needs of the position, but I'll only have done a cursory calculation of variations on the move played. That's more like playing hope chess. Other times, I take the time to work out specific variations for all reasonable replies to my moves. That's more like real chess.
I have set thought process as my primary improvement goal this year, even above tactical study. So, my goal is to be playing real chess in 100% of my slow time control tournament games by the end of the year (hopefully sooner). I know that this takes discipline, so I have to force myself to get back on track with it, especially since I can link most of my losses this year to poor thought process.
I know from my games, that I tend to be somewhere on the continuum between hope chess and real chess. There are times I make a move that appears to address the needs of the position, but I'll only have done a cursory calculation of variations on the move played. That's more like playing hope chess. Other times, I take the time to work out specific variations for all reasonable replies to my moves. That's more like real chess.
I have set thought process as my primary improvement goal this year, even above tactical study. So, my goal is to be playing real chess in 100% of my slow time control tournament games by the end of the year (hopefully sooner). I know that this takes discipline, so I have to force myself to get back on track with it, especially since I can link most of my losses this year to poor thought process.
posted by CelticDeath at 10:25 AM
4 Comments:
I have similar problem, I play very carefully most of the time but usually at some point I get carried away. Yesterday I forgot to follow the basic principles (develop all your pieces, make your worst piece better etc) and let my opponent back into the game by unnececessary checks and queen moves. And finally I even forgot to look for my opponents possible checks and lost my queen...
So proper thought process is clearly what I lack. A simple check list would do fine but trouble is how to get myself going through it on every move. I believe that after a while the thought process would become unconcious.
After yesterdays game I made a list on paper about what I must check before I move my piece. On the rest of the online games I'll go the list through on every move (I'm not sure if this is cheating?). Hopefully I can stop giving away my pieces this way.
- bahus
bahus, here is one thing you might try that I have done in the past to help ingrain those checklists into my head. I have gotten out my Chessmaster 8000 program (although I suppose any chess engine that you can set to a strength just above your own would work) and played against a personality with a playing strength slightly higher than my own. Then, I have played it on a slow time control, usually 40 moves in 2 hours. Then I go through the checklist on each move. One good game of this is usually enough to ingrain the checklist into my head (my personal preference would be not to use the checklist during actual internet play as I tend to consider this outside assistance).
Yes you're probably right. It's been a while since I've tried to play against Fritz so It'll be nice to see how I'll do against it now.
Another good thing about training this checklist with computer is that I don't have any respect for it. I often played too fast and made much poorer moves than against a human player. Somehow when handicapped Fritz at some point turned the game from equal to winning I used to think it's ok, Fritz is supposed to win.
Thanks for the advice and hopefully this way I'll get rid of some bad habits.
- bahus
I've tried to organize my thought process a while ago, and implemented a checklist for every move my opponents makes, something like:
* Where was this piece before? What was it doing there? (discovered attacks? was it defending another piece? preventing another piece from ocuppying this square, etc)
* Which squares is the piece attacking in this new position? Which threats is it imposing me?
* Possible replies to my candidate moves
This was a very easy list, and I was hoping to remove blunders from my game, but it turned out to be killing my creativity. I decided to forget the ideia, and let this "checklist" comes naturally as my game improves.
Maybe checklists are not for me.
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