Monday 9 July 2007

Thinking about thinking about chess

While there are a huge number of books that tell you how to play chess, there are very few books on how to think about chess. "Think like a Grandmaster" by Kotov is certainly the most known, while Silman's "Reassess your Chess" is a more modern example.
To this list I can certainly recommend the addition of "Teach yourself Better Chess" by William Hartston. While the book appears to be a standard "Improve your chess" kind of book, it is in fact filled with a a huge amount of advice to improve your thinking. In fact most of the advice is designed to challenge "lazy thinking" and "accepted wisdom", which is hardly surprising, given Hartston's background as a psychologist.
The book is divided into 3 categories (Basic, Advanced, Mastery) with 25 short chapters for each. Each chapter has a heading describing the problem, and then a fuller explanation. For example the chapter titled "Playing with Blinkers" contains the following observation. "Good ideas interfere with better ones". And to demonstrate the truth of this he provides the following example.
In the diagrammed position it is White to play and mate in how many?
Without giving the to much away I'll suggest that the obvious answer is probably incorrect.

So if you seem to have hit a brick wall in attempting to improve your chess, you might want to try working through "Teach yourself better chess".

7 comments:

DeNovoMeme said...

Hey, even I know that mate.

Qe6+ Nf5+ Nh6+ Qg7+ Nf7#

..... or is there something even sexier.

DeNovoMeme said...

Hey, even I know that mate.

Qe6+ Nf5+ Nh6+ Qg8+ Nf7#

..... or is there something even sexier.

Shaun Press said...

Is there any way of forcing mate in fewer than 5 moves?

Anonymous said...

Just a guess

Qe6 Bd6

Anonymous said...

Mate in 4 by:

1. Qe6+ Kh8
2. Nf7+ Kg8
3. Nd8+ Kh8
4. Qe8++

Brian

Shaun Press said...

Thank you all for playing! The answer that Matt gave (Mate in 5) is the one that almost everyone gives, and that is the point Hartston was illustrating. Because we "know" the answer, we don't think about alternatives. In doing so we may miss a better solution.

DeNovoMeme said...

:-) fair enough.

Without having read the book - ignorence being a great advantage when criticising - I note that there are two ways that chess writer try to tall us will improve our chess.
1. Spend more time thinking deeper about higher quality moves.
2. Spend less time thinking about lower quality moves.

Well, derrr.

Where is the epiphanic book that gives us the three golden rules for determining which move is which?

:-)