Move First, Think Later: Sense and Nonsense in Improving Your Chess
Willy Hendricks
Language: English
Pages: 179
ISBN: 2:00261967
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The chess playing mind does not work like a machine. Selecting a move results from rather chaotic thought processes and is not the logical outcome of applying a rational method. The only problem with that, says International Master Willy Hendriks, is that most books and courses on improving at chess claim exactly the opposite. The dogma of the chess instruction establishment is that if you only take a good look at certain ‘characteristics’ of a position, then good moves will follow more or less automatically. But this is not how it happens. Chess players, weak and strong, don’t first judge the position, then formulate a plan and afterwards look at moves. It all happens at the same time, and pretending that it is otherwise is counterproductive. There is no use in forcing your students to mentally jump through theoretical hoops, according to experienced chess coach Hendriks. This work shows a healthy distrust of accepted methods to get better at chess. It teaches that winning games does not depend on ticking off a to-do list when looking at a position on the board. It presents club and internet chess players with loads of much-needed no-nonsense training material. In this provocative, entertaining and highly instructive book, Hendriks shows how you can travel light on the road to chess improvement!
inspired by the deliberate practice theory of K. Anders Ericsson. Ericsson has devoted a lot of study to expert performance in several domains. One of his well-known conclusions is that it takes a lot of (good) study to reach expert level, often quantified as somewhere near 10 years, or 10,000 hours. I have already discussed the issue of talent versus practice. Some followers of Ericsson tend to believe that all this hard work is sufficient to reach the top and that talent is an over rated
should constantly try to overcome his limitations. This is a rather trivial conclusion and sportsmen or experts in other areas have been doing this for ages. Garry Kasparov ‘Pushing back your limits’ is an old expression for this, but if you like to show that you’re well on top of things, you might use sayings like ‘stepping out of your comfort zone’, ‘leave the OK plateau’, ‘thinking out of the box’, ‘make it challenging’, ‘stay in the cognitive phase’, and so on. As a method of training,
32.Qh3 Qc7 33.Qh4 1-0 (Exercise no 119) Podolny Vasily Panov Moscow 1939 Again, a straightforward win is available. 33...Ng3+! 34.Nxg3 Qxh2+! (but not 34...fxg3 35.Rxh7!)0-1 Did you solve these two? Very good, but what about the next one? (Exercise no 120) If you saw 1.Rxh7 Kxh7 2.Ng5+, followed by Qh3 with a mating attack, you did a good job. Not much is changed by 1...Nxf6 2.exf6, since 2...Kxh7 3.Ng5+ is still mating. But full points go only to those who saw 1.Rxh7? Qxc2+! and
didactics. Several interesting reviews and discussions centred around these difficult themes, with the chicken-and-egg problem always lurking around the corner. The hindsight problem Part of the inspiration for Move First, Think Later stems from my interest in the developments in cognitive science and I do think that these support (to some extent) my views on the chess-playing mind. But these views are also dependent on my experiences as a trainer, and, I have to admit, on my impressions of my
respectable order of chess didactics is, to my mind, partly based on this delusion. In Die Kunst des klaren Denkens, Ralf Dobelli notes how we can easily deceive ourselves in this way: ‘Why is hindsight bias so dangerous? Because it makes us believe we are better at predicting the future than we actually are.’ Dobelli uses the credit crisis as an example. There are about one million economists and by now they can all quite elaborately explain to you why the crisis had to happen. But in 2007 all