I am Dan Văsieșiu, aka LazyPawn. Neurologist. Chess International master and coach.
I don’t know how you landed on this page. I just hope you like chess. I am writing this first page in August 2024. I will try to add content on a regular basis, and make it interesting. Feel free to comment, criticize, make suggestions including topics you would like me to cover in future posts.
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The third world chess champion, José Raúl Capablanca, believed that chess would be played out in a few decades, with draw being the inevitable result at top level. He came up with his own chess variant, played on a bigger chess board and incorporating 2 new pieces, trying to turn the chess fight into something more complex.
The eleventh world champion, Robert James Fischer, expressed similar concerns, envisioning the “draw death” of chess caused by the incredible development of chess theory. His solution? Another chess variant, where the position of the pieces on the first rank would be randomized. His style of chess was initially known as “Fischer random”. Currently most people refer to it as “chess960”, since there are 960 different starting positions. Other names for it are “freestyle chess” or “chess 9LX”. The idea is simple – the rules are essentially the same, but the entire “home cooking” part in the opening is rendered useless and the game would be decided by pure playing strength.
The 5-time world champion and strongest chess player of all times, Magnus Carlsen, decided not to defend his title after his 2021 victory against Nepomniachtchi, and started to focus more on fast time control games and chess960. The main reason was the same – the fact that modern opening preparation has become so powerful and deep that a well prepared opponent can basically “kill the game” and reach very dry equal positions by force – a strategy used by many of his opponents. The stronger player has only 2 options – play a more complex but objectively inferior opening line, or play principled best-move chess just to test the opponent’s preparation and memory.
Top engines, much stronger than any human player, paint the same picture. Any mainline opening, if played correctly, leads to complete equality. Capablanca’s intuition was right.
It comes as no surprise that Magnus and other top players are trying to make chess960 more popular. With the right sponsors, they might succeed. Some people love the idea, others hate it, and most are somewhere in-between.
PROS
No opening preparation. For most players, it’s already a daunting task to memorize their current opening repertoire, and that would be just one starting position out of 960.
Since everything about the starting position feels new, the fight starts very early in the game. There are important strategic decisions to be made as early as move 1.
Early tactics are common. It’s not unusual to see even top grandmasters losing a pawn or even a piece in the opening stage of the game, because they cannot rely on the tactical patterns they’re used to.
There is a lot of room for creativity. Playing a gambit in a chess960 game is a matter of intuition and feel for the game. Playing a gambit in something like the poisoned pawn variation of the Najdorf is a matter of spending weeks trying to understand engine novelties at move 30. As they say, nowadays we all have the same coach and read the same opening book, authored by Stockfish.
Even if the starting position is sometimes “weird”, as the game progresses it looks more and more like regular chess. The concepts we are familiar with regarding king safety, piece activity, space, pawn structures and so on are still valid, the importance of being able to calculate correctly is still the same. The strongest chess players in classical chess are still on top in chess960.
The percentage of draws is much lower. There is no safe way to reach an equal middlegame or endgame. There is no well known move repetition in the opening. Mirroring white’s moves usually does not work, on the contrary.
Very often the games are wild and double edged. Without the safety blanket provided by the opening preparation, both players feel uncertain about what’s going on in the initial stage of the game, and that simply makes it more fun to play and watch. The fact that players lose orientation early can be seen as a disadvantage as well.
CONS
Some starting positions simply look very “ugly”, there is no piece harmony, both sides are struggling to get developed.
Certain starting positions are objectively better for white. However, the advantage is probably not more than +0.6, at least according to Sesse.
Since white’s edge can be bigger in some positions compared to others, it would be fair to play pairs of games (one with each color, same starting position). That leads to other problems, since in the second game the player with the black pieces already has an idea of what to do (or what not to do) – even more so if there was enough time to check with an engine.
Most chess players have spent a huge amount of time studying current opening theory. Was all of that in vain, wasted time? They would feel betrayed. Part of the rich legacy of the game of chess would be lost.
Given the complexity of a fresh opening position, fast time controls lead to way too much randomness and silly blunders. To get something that resembles decent chess, long time controls are needed.
There is a lack of continuity, it’s hard to learn from opening mistakes, because it’s unlikely to ever reach the same opening position in the future.
The ability to spend countless hours trying to find new ideas in the opening can be seen as a chess skill. That would no longer be the case in chess960.
I confess that I enjoy watching chess960 played by strong GMs. I find even the ugly positions or early mistakes more entertaining than another boring draw in the Berlin defense. But I don’t think it will replace classical chess any time soon. Any other opinions are welcome, feel free to comment.
It’s one of the questions I get asked a lot. Most of the times we face players close to our rating and playing strength. But, occasionally, especially in large Swiss style events, or in team competitions, the opponent could be rated 3-400 points higher. Maybe you are rated 1600 and your opponent is 2000. Or you are 2000 and the opponent is 2400. When the difference is that large, you are a huge underdog. Most likely, your opponent is better than you are in every aspect of the game, and is going to win most of the times, no matter what you do. However, upsets happen, and it’s quite instructive to go through such games (I’ve done that a lot). The main thing that such games show is that our intuitions regarding the right approach are completely wrong.
No, you should not avoid theory!
Most players believe that it’s best to get “out of book” as early as possible, because the opponent has a much deeper opening knowledge. It seems to make sense, since even if you play your main repertoire lines, the other guy will probably know a little more. Maybe your knowledge ends at move 10, and his ends at move 13. So let’s do something weird at move 3, and the opponent will lose that opening edge. Right?
Wrong! There are at least 2 reasons why this strategy fails.
The first one is that in a completely unknown position, the much stronger players will usually find better plans, they will still find some features of the position to be familiar, they will be able to find transpositions to systems they know, sometimes with a gain of tempo, and so on. I can tell from my personal experience facing players rated much lower, than nothing makes me happier than a completely unknown position. The point is made very clear in Fischer Random chess (chess 960), where the top world class players are ahead of the field even more than in standard classical chess.
The second reason is how much “room” left there is to outplay the opponent. If the lower rated player goes for a well established book line, all those moves are very good, engine approved, and they lead to positions that are very close to equal. So, the actual fight begins at move 15 (let’s say), in an equal and sometimes simplified position. The higher rated player has to be very creative and very accurate in late middlegame or endgame to outplay their opponent. If they are both out of book at move 5, there is a lot more room and more ways to outplay the weaker player.
No, you should not play a quiet/safe position!
An even more common misconception is that the right strategy is to play a very solid/safe position, with little to no tactical play, because the other guy is so much better at calculating variations in complicated games. That is true, but the other guy is also a lot better in quiet positions. Superior understanding of pawn structures, plans, long term strategies, endgame technique – all of those factors make such “dry” positions difficult to hold against a player rated 3-400 points higher.
Sharp, tactical battles, have a “randomness factor” embedded into them. The higher rated player could calculate 2 moves deeper than you can, but he could be simply unlucky, as very soon after that you get to play a lucky shot (that was almost impossible to foresee). Almost every time I go through one of the big upset games, the picture is that of some sort of wild battle. I don’t see games where the weaker player slowly outplayed their opponent in a quiet game, it simply does not happen. Even if we take the very few games lost by Magnus Carlsen to players below 2600, we see exactly the same thing – some kind of tactical fight, sometimes an irrational position, where the lower rated guy just “happened” to have some unexpected tricks. They didn’t beat Magnus by playing the Carlsbad pawn structure better than him, or by outplaying him from an equal rook endgame.
I am going to illustrate the above points with 3 of my own games. I have decided to pick games that had some meaning at the time – my first victory against a national master, then first win against an international master, and against an international grandmaster. In each of those games I was outrated by hundreds of points.
It is common nowadays to have some chess engine running while analyzing a game, an opening line or even following a live GM event. We all know how strong chess engines are. As an example, the very popular Stockfish is around 800 rating points higher than Magnus Carlsen, the best chess player of all times. The difference between Stockfish and Magnus is similar to the difference between Magnus and a random club level player. It makes sense to have almost complete faith in the numbers provided by the engine when evaluating the position from a game in progress.
Indeed, the numbers are right. But that’s only if we assume perfect play, something that we, as humans, are not capable of. The “patzer with the engine running” might see a score of +3 and assume that white is easily winning, then laugh when the grandmaster playing that position fails to win it (or even loses). The most important thing to understand is that the score does not refer to the current position on the board. The +3 evaluation is what the engine thinks about the position reached after a certain number of moves, if both follow what the engine deems to be the correct path (best moves for both sides). Strong chess players are very good at assessing quiet positions, where not much is happening. They can fully understand a pawn up position where the other side has no significant counterplay, and would win that game most of the times, even if the current engine score is just +1. But the same strong chess players can have a very hard time winning a position where the score is a lot higher, because they fail to find the very narrow path leading to that big advantage. This should be easy to understand if we take it to the extreme. Imagine a position where white is a full queen down, but there is a forced mate in 8 moves. If the player doesn’t see the (potentially difficult/hidden) path to checkmate, he would regard his current position as dead lost (queen down).
So … whenever I hear someone say things like “I lost a +5 position”, my question is “what kind of +5?” Was it a rook up in an endgame? Then it’s really sad, the player did something terribly wrong. Huge time trouble, horrible technique, rushing … could be a number of things. But if that +5 score only flashed for a brief moment and was predicated on finding a particular tactic, it can happen to anyone.
I will take one of my games as an example. I think it shows quite clearly the difference between a static and a dynamic advantage, and how the engine score given at various points of the game does not tell the full story.
Lessons to learn?
In very dynamic positions, the engine score can paint a picture that has little to do with what the players see and feel during the actual game
“Understanding” is overestimated in master games. In general, all master level players have a good grasp of the fundamental notions of positional play. But some masters are 2100, and others are 2800.
The ability to calculate concrete variations quickly and without missing important candidate moves was, is, and always will be the most important chess skill. It’s a point made by my favorite book as well.
Good time management is essential. The game is often times decided by a tactical sequence. It has the bad habit of occuring when players have only a few minutes left on their clocks.
This post is meant mostly for players in the 1600-2000 rating bracket, who oftentimes struggle with the dragon move orders in their games.
Of all the options black has after 1.e4, the most ambitious one is definitely the Sicilian, 1…c5. White’s most common reaction is to play 2.Nf3 followed by 3.d4, known as the open Sicilian. The pawn structure is no longer symmetrical, and a lot of imbalances soon become apparent. As a general rule, white will be able to develop quickly and expand on the kingside, sometimes even open lines early in the center leading to powerful attacks. In return, black tends to have good long term prospects, starting with more central pawns, a half open c file, and a flexible position that is ideal for people who like counter-attacking. The positions can become really sharp, especially when white castles long.
One of the most intriguing ways for black to play an open Sicilian is by developing the dark square bishop to g7, the so called fianchetto. This is known as the dragon variation, and has always been seen as risky, or even dubious. Very strong modern engines show that the dragon is viable, it is definitely not losing by force, but black is walking a very narrow path. If black plays perfectly, a draw is likely, like with any modern main opening line. But the type of fun that people used to have playing the dragon a few decades ago (I was guilty of that too!) is no longer there. Essentially, nowadays black either goes for razor sharp complications where a well prepared white player is ahead, or accepts slightly inferior endgames. The risk-reward ratio doesn’t look too good, which is why the dragon has become a rare guest in top level chess.
There are 3 move orders for black to choose from.
In the classical (standard) dragon, black plays 2…d6.
In the accelerated dragon, black plays 2…Nc6
If white still wants to play a setup with 000, the only way to do it is by developing the LSB to c4, leading to systems that are less dangerous for black.
So why would anyone play the standard (classical) move order, when the accelerated dragon avoids white’s most dangerous setup? There are 2 reasons.
In the hyper-accelerated dragon, black plays 2…g6
Clearly, there is no perfect way of playing the dragon and it’s not advisable to have it as the main (or the only) weapon against 1.e4. But it can definitely be used every now and then, especially when it comes as a surprise weapon. The great Kasparov did that against no other than Vishy Anand, winning 2 crucial games in their 1995 WC match. And yesterday we saw one more time that the dragon is not to be underestimated. Top level encounter, classical (slow) chess.
In a helpmate problem white and black cooperate in order to reach a checkmate position in a certain number of moves. Traditionally, it is black playing the first move and also black getting checkmated. In other words, a helpmate in 3 means that black makes the first move and gets checkmate by white’s 3rd move. Black would play the worst possible moves for that to happen.
Many consider that solving such puzzles is a waste of time, since in practical play we’re never trying to find the worst possible moves for one side. Why would they ever play so stupidly?
My opinion is slightly different. I think it helps players develop their creativity and imagination. It’s useful to be aware of potential mating patterns, even if they currently seem to have a low probability of occuring on the board.
The 2 helpmate problems that follow are special for 2 reasons:
It is white to move, so white is the one getting checkmated
The position is the same for both, and it is one that we all know, the starting position!
The first puzzle was given to us by a GM, during a training camp. I discovered the second one a bit later, online.
Puzzle #1
We have the normal starting position on the board, the one you are all familiar with. White plays 1.e4, popular move. On move 5, black will checkmate white with a knight. It is not a discovered check from a different piece, it is not a promotion. One of black’s 2 knights checkmates white’s king on the 5th move.
Puzzle #2
Again, the normal starting position, but we do not know white’s first move. What we know is that black will promote a pawn to knight on the 5th move, delivering checkmate. So again it’s 5 moves, again a black knight, but not one of the ones black start with. It is a black pawn that becomes a knight.
Both are very interesting. I have this crazy idea that at some point in time, somebody will find this post and even try to solve the puzzles. I know chances are slim. I feel like those guys throwing a bottle with a letter inside into the ocean. If my bottle is found, a message with the solution(s) might show up on the blog. If I cease to exist, like Monty Python’s parrot, my sons are instructed to click a secret button that will publish a post with the 2 beautiful helpmates.
Whenever students ask me what modern chess book I like most, my answer is Willy Hendriks’ book called Move First, Think Later. It is one of the very few chess books of the last 10-15 years that brings something conceptually new, a paradigm shift. It is not a small thing to have the “insolence” to prove that so many ideas deeply rooted in chess literature are mere myths. They keep being taught and passed on to new generations of chess players, usually by people who know very well that it is not how they actually think themselves during the game.
The major theme of the book is that chess is much more concrete than we like to think. Any sort of theoretical concepts, guidelines, rules, evaluations make little sense if they’re not backed up by concrete variations. We would like things to be different. Chess would be so much easier if all we had to do was to memorize a few pages filled with nice chess ideas, and based on that list we could come up with the right moves every time. We learn chess by being exposed to good chess moves, we don’t improve our chess by reading some texts. That is why going over GM games helps so much, and it is how my own chess journey began. We learn by imitation.
Some of his ideas and even entire paragraphs are so close to the way I understand chess, that sometimes I feel that most likely I met Hendriks at some point and he had some kind of revolutionary mind-reading device. It is the book I would have liked to write.
Hendriks may not be right in everything he says, and no doubt his ideas have irritated many, but he presents arguments and examples that are hard to ignore. It is written in an alert, accessible style, has hundreds of well-chosen and thought-provoking examples. I recommend that all serious chess players go through the book, even those who have completely different points of view. I am going to list some of the most interesting ideas, without going into details or concrete examples.
The thought process does not start with a pure static analysis
There is a widespread idea that a serious thought process would begin with some sort of static analysis of the position, trying to understand all strengths and weaknesses. After that, based on those findings, a plan would be formulated, ultimately arriving at a move to serve that plan. It makes perfect sense, but in the real world no serious player does that. From the moment we see the position, almost involuntarily, our mind begins to test different moves, to follow possible scenarios, and it is from the outcome of those scenarios that we realize which positional features are relevant. It is useless, for example, to notice that one particular square is weak, if you have no concrete possibility of getting there. A beautiful lead in development means nothing if there are no concrete ways to open the position and attack. In most cases there are a lot of positional factors that can be “asymmetric”, imbalances are very common. But it is only the concrete analysis of moves that reveals which of them matters. Most of the time, there is no temporal separation of the concrete analysis of the moves and the strategic findings. They run in parallel (as we examine different moves we get a deeper understanding of the characteristics of the position). As Hendriks says, “you can’t have an important positional trait that isn’t connected to an effective move.” When people see the title of the book, their first reaction is something like “What is this guy trying to say, that you just play a move first, and then start thinking? It makes no sense!” Obviously, that is not the meaning of the title. The idea is that you have to analyze (not play!) specific moves first, before you determine what types of chess thoughts make sense.
Verbal protocols do not help
A widespread myth is that one could arrive at the correct move by following some verbal protocol, some general rules that can be learned from textbooks. For example, if the opponent attacks you on the flank, react with a counterattack in the center. The problem is that very often the best reaction is a move on the same flank, which slows down the opponent substantially. And other times, just as frequently, it’s effective to attack on the opposite flank, because you’re faster, you win the race. Again the same conclusion is reached – it is the concrete analysis of the existing possibilities that leads to finding the appropriate strategy. You don’t find the correct move by starting from a rule, because in almost any position you can find different moves that satisfy different rules. Once you’ve determined which move works, you can triumphantly state that it’s rule X that’s highlighted here. From a didactic point of view, it is very tempting to take a position whose concrete best move or solution is already known to you, the coach, and pretend that you arrive at that solution by following the verbal protocol that is the theme of the lesson. But you would have arrived at a different move had you followed the verbal protocol of a different lesson. Today the student learns that in positions with an extra pawn it is good to trade pieces, and goes over nice clean examples where the extra pawn has been elegantly converted. Tomorrow the exact same student is criticized for trading pieces in his own pawn up game, because it lead to a drawn rook ending. The day after tomorrow the student trades instead of finding the idea of an attack on the king, where he had superior forces. And the third day he gets trashed because he tried to attack the king, took some risks and lost, instead of trading pieces and playing for two results. 🙂
General rules don’t tell us what move to play
Also related to general rules, there are many that contradict each other and as a result are absolutely useless from a practical point of view. There are examples where, in the same book, one page reads “don’t defend passively when you are worse, look for counterplay, even if it means investing material”, and just a few pages later “be patient, prolong resistance, don’t make things worse by reckless actions.” Obviously, both rules followed by game examples. It can even get funny – actual book – on page 120 we find “don’t stress about finding the best move; be pragmatic, just find a good move”, after which on page 124 we learn that “if you found a good move, look for an even better one!”.
There is no big plan
The books are full of examples where one side follows a certain plan from the beginning until a decisive advantage is obtained. In reality, this is extremely rare when players are close in strength. It could happen when Capablanca or Alekhine defeated someone much weaker. In a modern game it’s more common to have a number of small plans, and sometimes have to be changed along the way, because the opponent reacts to everything we are trying to do. The illusion, however, is maintained at the didactic level, even if we know today that many of those classic games often cited only describe what the author already knew. The annotations were produced with the power of hindsight.
Critical moments are not obvious during the game
There is a very widespread idea that in every game there would be 1-2-3 critical moments, where the player should spend a lot of time to find the right move. A game viewed from the outside, after it has been completed, appears to consist of long sequences of simple, natural moves, interrupted by critical moments when either white or black made a mistake or found an exceptional move that changed the balance of the game. But the way players perceive the battle, during the game, is the complete opposite. They feel the tension and weight of decisions at almost every move, with very few being seen as obvious, or simple. The proof is that mistakes can be made at any moment of the game! It’s easy to come back later and say – look, this is where you should have thought more. Most of the time it is difficult to determine the so-called critical moment while playing, it only becomes obvious later.
It is not always bad form
Most people have a complete lack of understanding of natural statistical distributions. It just doesn’t match their intuitions. Out of a large number of throws, a perfectly balanced die lands on each face with approximately the same frequency (1/6 of the total). But this does not mean that there are no series in which a number appears much less frequently or more frequently. It is perfectly possible that out of the first 60 rolls, the number 1 will not come up 10 times, but 4 times or 18 times. In the same way, two players with exactly the same rating and strength will have asymmetrical results in a match. It is possible that from the first 10 games one of them leads 7-3, without it being proof of the other guy’s lack of form. By playing more games, the score will even out. A 2200 player will have tournaments where the result corresponds to a 2000 level and others where it is similar to a 2400. This is completely natural.
It is not always about psychological factors
There is an exaggerated tendency to explain mistakes by psychological issues, instead of the real technical reason. Too often we hear explanations like “I was afraid of the opponent”, “I was obsessed with the clock ticking down”, “I was still thinking about the previous opportunities”, etc. instead of actual chess reasons (not enough familiarity with the idea behind the tactic, calculation too slow or not deep enough, bad selection of candidate moves, etc.). The main reason people lose games has little to do with psychology and feelings. Those negative emotions are the result of losing control over what’s happening on the board (and not the other way around).
Hard work is not enough
The role of talent, which is genetically determined, is incomparably greater than most people realize. There are players who will never get past 2000, or 2300, or 2500, regardless of the amount of work and quality of instruction they receive. It’s a topic I have talked about at length on other occasions, I’ve even added an example to the blog. I’m glad Hendriks and others have reached the same conclusions.
The game took place in 2000. It was a team event, we were playing the top board for our respective teams. GM Volkov was already known as a very strong player, and he proved it during the entire event. When we met, he was on 5 out of 5, a 100% score. He was a very active coach on ICC during those years, advertising his lessons aggressively. Clearly a much better player than I was, but not a very likable guy. Details in private. 😉
My dad taught me the rules when I was 9. He had no formal chess training, but was strong enough to beat most amateur players. For the next 6 years, the only games I played were against him. And that didn’t happen often. Maybe once a month. Also, the games were not pretty. I would either get checkmated early (usually on f7/f2), or lose all of my pieces.
Probably getting crushed by my dad, as usual
The second chess-related activity during those years was to watch 2 neighbours playing. They seemed to enjoy it a lot. It was a rivalry that lasted for years. On almost any non-rainy day, they could be found on the exact same bench, furiously moving pieces on the same ancient board. Never taking more than 5 seconds on a move. One of them was around 75 years old. The youngster around 60. With the power of hindsight I can say that the level of play was not great. The younger guy won many games by using sleight of hand techniques. For example, when both had pawns rushing to promotion, his pawn constantly jumped 2 squares ahead. He would always queen first, regardless of where the pawns started the race.
The third chess activity, the only one that I really enjoyed in fact, was to watch a weekly TV show called “Șah-mat în 15 minute”. Those of you with very high IQs will probably realize that it translates as “Checkmate in 15 minutes” and 15 minutes was the duration of each episode. The host was WGM Elisabeta Polihroniade, who did a lot to popularize chess among Romanians back then. The most interesting part was going through famous games of the past, such as Morphy’s brilliancies. I didn’t understand much as a total beginner, but I liked the stories and the final checkmating positions.
Hey, that’s a chess book!
On the day I turned 15, something really special happened. My mom bought a book (it was one of the birthday gifts). The title was “Secretele marilor maeștri: Fischer, Gheorghiu, Karpov”.
If your intuition is good, you should guess that it means “Grandmaster secrets: Fischer, Gheorghiu, Karpov”. Gheorghiu was, of course, the best Romanian player at the time, at some point reaching top 10 in the world. Fischer and Karpov were also decent players, quite popular among chess aficionados. The book had hundreds of games played by these guys, many of them annotated. For some reason, I decided to actually go through the moves of the first game, playing them on my own chess board. The young generation will find it very hard to understand the process – it all had to be done manually, without screens, without clicking, and on a board without coordinates. That was a big problem. Today I could probably write a 200 page book about the f5 square, including games, tactics, strategies, plans and so on. But back then, I had to use my little fingers and sharp eyesight to determine what they meant by f5. And things didn’t always go according to plan. It took me around 3 hours to reach the end of a 50 move game. It wasn’t just that I didn’t understand the reason behind many of the moves, it was mainly because I kept running into illegal moves caused by misplacing a piece earlier.
100 games and a few weeks later I became quite competent at placing the pieces on the right squares, I could do an entire game in 2 minutes if I wanted. Shockingly, even the moves started to make sense. Maybe not all of them. I discovered amazing things. To list just some of them:
It is not necessary to capture all of the opponent’s pieces in order to win a game
In fact, sometimes these guys even lose material deliberately and the author would use strange words to justify it (attack, initiative, compensation, development, space, coordination)
The move 1.e4 is not the only legal first move!
Even when 1.e4 is being played, black is not forced to play 1… e5, and when they do, developing the queen to h5 is not popular at all
There are very few games ending in checkmate, usually at some point one side hates their position so much that they just resign the game
The early stage of the game is called the opening, and they have names and are easy to learn after seeing the same sequence over and over again
I loved studying these games so much, that I decided to buy another chess book. I chose the thickest I could find and I knew it had what I wanted, because it was right there in the title, something about 300 games played by a guy called Alekhine, supposedly a famous player of the past.
With Alekhine, it was love at first sight, there is no doubt about it. I liked his attacking style so much, that I finished the book in less then a month, and then I did it again. This time, using a technique I still advocate to this day, “guess the move”. Being the genius that I am, I handcrafted a cardboard device that would neatly cover the bottom part of the move list, and try to guess Alekhine’s moves. My guess rate kept creeping higher for months, reaching insane levels of around 70%. Probably it was also because I already knew some games by heart, but the truth is that I started to think like him. For many years to come, my style of play was heavily influenced by my first months of chess that I spent studying this book. The good part is that I developed a great sense for building an attacking position, playing on both flanks, setting up deep traps. The not so good part is that I didn’t enjoy playing dry positions or being forced to defend passively.
What you see on the left is a 15 year old nerd who spends 8 hours a day trying to guess moves played by some world champions. And he did that for 6 months. How is that possible? Wasn’t there anything more interesting to do? Short answer – there wasn’t. We’re talking about communist Romania in the early 80s. There is no internet. No mobile phones. Only one TV channel, black and white, 3 hours/day, most of it being an ode to president Ceaușescu, north-korean style.
But that ridiculous (according to modern standards) way of studying chess came with unexpected benefits. By studying huge collections of games, many of them annotated, I managed to get a wide understanding of very different openings, plans, structures, endgames and so on. Without playing a single tournament game, I felt that I already knew a lot. Today, after decades of teaching chess, I realize how lucky I was to start that way.
Today, a common scenario is to start working with a 10-14 year old, who already had another coach, sometimes for years. And I discover that he/she doesn’t know anything about typical ideas for white or black in an open Sicilian or a Ruy Lopez. Doesn’t know how an h file attack works against a fianchetto formation. Doesn’t know what we mean by Benoni or Gruenfeld. Has no idea how to play positions with a big dynamic advantage, down a pawn, has never played a gambit or studied such games. Why? Because the ex-coach only taught him/her 2-3 plans of the London system as white and another 3 for the Caro-Kann as black. And all the games he/she ever played or analyzed followed the same patterns, anything else is completely foreign.
I am not the weakest player in the world
The big day arrived. I discovered a local chess coach and club, it was some sort of scholastic chess program. I got there first in the middle of an endgame session. There were kids between 9 and 16 years of age, boys and girls. Some of them had already been playing chess for years. My heart was pounding, seeing the Coach himself, who was supposed to be something like a 1900 rated player (that felt like a chess god to me), and those young players who could probably beat me 10-0 in a match. They were staring intently at a chess board, with the next position on it:
It was a white to move and win type of puzzle. Every kid had a piece of paper in front, where they were supposed to write down the solution as soon as they find it and hand it over to the coach. I started to think about the position myself, and found the win in 1 minute or so. I didn’t say anything, I was new, didn’t even have the piece of paper like everybody else. I was just looking in disbelief at the others, not understanding why they were still thinking. After a few more minutes the coach said something like “so? … noone? …”. I gathered enough inner strength to say “I think I have it!” and then proceeded to show the solution.
The coach didn’t react the way I expected. He looked at me as if I had broken some rules. His remark was “You said you were a beginner!?”. Then he immediately asked me to play a training game against their star pupil, a bit younger than myself, a game that I managed to win.
When I finally played my first tournament games, I realized that I knew more chess than most of my opponents, some of which had been playing for many years. I was very surprised to see that some of them couldn’t tell what I meant by the classical King’s Indian pawn structure, or the Sozin Sicilian, the outside passer or the smothered mate. The excuse was always something like “oh, I don’t play that opening … I don’t like closed positions … I have my own style”.
That same year, when I played the national U16 junior final, I was the only player starting with a national rating below 1200. Most were around 1900. Some of them already had FIDE ratings, there was even a FIDE master playing. Around 100 participants. I finished second, same number of points as the winner, who had a better tie-break score (Sonneborn-Berger).
Can I get to 2000 in 2 years?
In the next 2 years (high-school years, or years 2-3 of my chess career), things started to change. I played a lot. I started to win games against players around the 2000-2200 level, and even won some games against national masters (2200+ level). I discovered strategy books, endgame books, but what I loved most was … solving puzzles. I started to get the Chess Informants to prepare my opening lines. For those too young to know, the Chess Informants (Šahovski Informator) were like ChessBase plus Chessable on paper. Very heavy paper I must say. There were 2 (later 3) volumes per year, covering all the important games and opening novelties of the last few months. When playing team tournaments, there was a specially designated team member carrying a bulging suitcase with the last 10 years of chess novelties. Being young and strong, the honor of making all that chess wisdom available to the rest of the team fell on me more than once.
I can still hear my mother’s voice in my head: “Your football matches are now once a month instead of almost daily like a year ago … you spent our seaside holiday with that stupid puzzle book of yours instead of swimming … why don’t you find a nice girl to go out with instead of staring at the chess board all day long?” I think she had a point there. But I did break the 2000 level, so it wasn’t in vain.
Decision time
Then, at the age of 17, I had to make a tough choice. To put things in perspective, I should mention that I was at the top of my class. From day 1 at school, at 6 years old, until graduating the medical school at the age of 25 – always the highest marks/grades/scores. I didn’t care much about grades and didn’t spend as much time as others learning/studying/doing homework, but I think I had an innate ability to grasp new concepts and learn with ease. My teachers knew that, and (unfortunately) my parents also knew it. They put it bluntly – “You’re very smart. You can become anything you want. How many rich chess players have you met? Start working on your future, prepare to become a doctor or a lawyer, you have time to play chess for fun when you get a real job”. I also met IM Mihai Ghindă, probably the best Romanian coach, the one and only ”GM Maker”, who after 2 hours of testing me and going through my games said something along the lines of ”You are very talented, you can be 2600 FIDE in a few years … but only if you forget about college and do this professionally”. I reached a point where heart said “study chess” and brain said “be a doctor”. Flipping a coin didn’t look like a good idea. I ended up making a deal with my parents. I was supposed to play an event in Poland in a month’s time. Strong U20 players from all over Europe. Finishing among the top 3 in that tournament meant I could do whatever I wanted, including the chess GM path. 4th or worse meant thousands of hours memorizing boring biology and chemistry texts. The third school subject was physics, but I was already quite good at that. Why all that? Because admission to the University of Medicine in communist Romania was very tough. Being a doctor was one of the very few things that was respected by the entire society and also paid well compared to other professions. It would typically be something like 100 available spots and 1500 well prepared candidates (including expensive private tutoring) fighting to get one of them.
So … what happened? There is only one way to describe it. I got played! 😒 Unbeknownst to me, my parents had already talked to some knowledgeable people working for the Romanian Chess Federation, and they guaranteed that I had no chance to finish among the top 3 players. My optimism generated by fast improvement was no match for the experience and playing strength of some of the players that showed up. I ended on a +1 score (5 wins, 4 losses, 4 draws), a decent result (even gained rating points), but nowhere close to top 3. That sealed the deal and I guess you know how I spent my year. Not studying or playing chess. To make matter worse, that was followed by another non-chess year – compulsory military service.
College years – tough, but the IM title is in sight
The college years were interesting. We got rid of communism. For the first time, I had a PC, and soon the first versions of ChessBase landed on it. It’s hard to describe the elation I felt when I discovered that it was possible to find opening positions and games played by various players by using a mouse, instead of spending hours searching through books. I tried to study and play whenever possible, but that had to be mostly during the summer breaks. It was not the kind of place and time where you could tell a university professor something like “hey buddy, sorry I can’t be here next week for the physiology of the heart lessons, I want to test my new Ruy Lopez repertoire instead”. Plus the exam sessions were tough. But even with so little time, I managed to gradually raise my level of play. I started as a freshman rated 2150 FIDE and 5 years later I was a confident young doctor and international master rated above 2400 FIDE, happy with my love life, professional future and hobby. Does the picture convey that feeling? 😊
What about GM? Life got in the way
The plan was clear in my mind.
Choose a branch of medicine that suits me, definitely not surgical (didn’t want to spend my life in operating rooms). Something logical, interesting, such as Neurology.
Any amount of learning, any exam necessary to get there – I can do that.
Then find a nice cozy job, and outside Hospital hours keep working on chess.
Take weeks off to play tournaments, maybe aim for the GM title.
The first part went according to plan. I got stuck somewhere between 3 and 4. Started to teach Neurology to med students, as a professor assistant. More exams. Long duty hours. Started to work on my PhD. Taking weeks off whenever I wanted? LOL. Not even close to that. I met my future wife. Guess what, she was a chess player as well (WIM), and we met during a chess event. Many things changed, especially after we had our first child.
I kept playing for a number of years, on and off. I even came close to scoring the GM norm twice, but it was very clear to me that with my schedule and the non-professional approach I had, it would be impossible to get the title. Of course, I won tournaments, I won games against GMs, I played many beautiful games, but the consistency was lacking (as expected). I stopped playing in 2007, then played a few more events in 2013-2018, simply because I wanted to travel with my son Victor, who became a FIDE master himself.
Teaching chess from home? Amazing stuff!
In the late 90s I also discovered that I enjoyed teaching chess. I worked with some talented local juniors, and not without success. For example, Szabo Gergely later became a GM and a very successful coach himself. I would argue that by coaching a future GM coach, who has students who have become titled players, I am entitled to the Final Boss title in coaching. Or I’m just very old, not sure.
Since I’ve reached the coaching part, I should definitely talk about the defining moment. It happened in 1999. Online chess was in its infancy. The best place to play online (by far) was ICC = Internet Chess Club = chessclub.com. At its peak, ICC had tens of thousands of subscribing members and pretty much any titled player with an internet connection was there. I was lucky enough to play blitz games against superstars like Morozevich, Grischuk, Short, or a very young Hikaru Nakamura. Please don’t ask about the score.
It was a nice Saturday night. September 1999. I couldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t know why. Today I know, thanks to Ismo.
Since counting sheep didn’t help, I thought it was a good idea to play some games online. I’m sure I am the only person in the world playing chess instead of sleeping. Normally, my seeks had rating limits (e.g. opponent had to be above 2300), but I forgot to set those limits, and a random 1900 guy accepted the challenge. We played 2 games, I won as expected, and then he had some questions about the games. I started to type my answers (voice communication came much later) – chess stuff, that felt quite basic to me, but the guy seemed to be very happy. He told me that I had exactly what it took to become a vendor on ICC. I didn’t even know what he meant by that. He told me that as a titled player, I could apply to become a chess coach on ICC, and get paid for that. After quickly going through some help files, I realized that he was telling the truth. I also started to notice that some GMs were advertising their vendor services (technically it was called sshouting). I clearly remember people like GM Pablo Zarnicki (garompon) or GM Sergey Volkov (volkov) doing that. By the way, exactly one year later I managed to defeat Volkov in a very interesting otb game (let’s call it the battle of vendors). 😉
I did apply to become a vendor, and was accepted. It felt a bit too good to be true. Just think about it. I can teach people who are not from my city. I don’t have to travel. I can keep my normal day job at the Hospital and in the evening help a guy from Delaware understand the Carlsbad structure? And then even get paid for it? Who’s going to do that?
It quickly transpired that many people were willing to do it. My results were quite good, people seems to like my style, many said that they finally saw rating improvements after years of being stuck. I didn’t have to do the sshouting thing, the students were doing the advertising by playing well and talking to their opponents after the game. It gradually dawned on me that this was “the thing” for me. I didn’t have the time, the energy or the right age to become a great chess player. But I still loved chess. I had a gift for teaching, or at least that is what my med students were saying. Both parents are teachers, could it be in the genes?! I’ve always been punctual, well organized, perfect health, decent English (learned on my own, just like chess).
Some of the questions I get asked a lot have to do with the never-ending nature vs. nurture debate.
Do we have equal potential to become IMs, GMs, or even world champions?
Is there something that we could call talent when it comes to chess abilities, or it’s all about training the right way?
If my son/daughter gets the best chess tuition and works really hard, will he/she become one of the best in the world?
I wrote an article on this topic a few years ago (in Romanian), and I am posting most of it below. My position hasn’t changed since then.
Opinions on the relative importance of native versus environmental factors (where environment means everything else, including training, coaching, etc.) vary widely. Traditionally, very strong chess players have been seen as the ideal example of special native endowment, as have great composers or mathematicians. This picture makes sense intuitively. It is very easy for anyone to learn the rules of the game and the basic ideas, but it seems extraordinarily difficult to achieve the performance of winning dozens of simultaneous games or crushing opponents without even looking at the board. Besides, what else but genius could explain the astonishing performances of child prodigies like Morphy, Capablanca or Reshevsky?!
Reshevsky crushing opponents and the age of 8
The opinion was shared by most past champions. You might enjoy hearing the voice of the great Alekhine, who seemed to be very convinced that great chess players are born, not made (around second 35).
The widespread egalitarian fallacies that have become prevalent in the last decades did not forget or forgive chess. An important contribution was made by some studies published in the 90s, but even more so by the success of the Polgár experiment, which proved (in the view of many) that directed, sustained work, from the youngest ages, leads to exceptional results. More on this later.
From the point of view of serious research, a very important moment was represented by a study published in 1993 by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his team. It introduced the concept of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice (DP) is defined as sustained work aimed at improving performance in a specific domain. The authors make a clear distinction between DP and two other forms of activity: work , assumed to be an effort motivated primarily by external rewards, and play , respectively, seen as inherently pleasurable activities lacking a long-term goal. In the original paper, the authors were able to find a correlation between the level achieved by a group of violinists and the number of hours of DP. The best violinists had somewhere over 10,000 hours of DP, compared to mid-level violinists who were around the 7500 level and the not so good ones at 5000 or less. This is the origin of the infamous 10,000 hours myth – supposedly enough to achieve excellence in a field. In later work, the authors extended their research to other groups (pianists, chess players!), maintaining the position that the only difference between those who excel in that field and the rest is the number of hours of DP. However, even these authors agreed that it is entirely possible that the willingness of individuals to engage in DP for very long periods of time is a genetically determined characteristic. Thus, in their view, there is no talent or genius as such in any field, but there might exist a predisposition towards sustained work. This is the only concession they made.
Ericsson’s ideas quickly caught the public’s imagination and were followed by a wave of popular science articles in which various authors sought to show that the only thing that differentiates individuals is the amount of work put in to achieve a goal, and as a result any parent can make their child a genius in any field they want. The practical results, however, are still awaited. However, negative reactions followed, highlighting serious deficiencies in the methodology used by Ericsson and in the interpretation of the results. One of the biggest problems is that he never took into account the very numerous cases of individuals who gave up on their original goal after long periods of DP precisely because they couldn’t get anywhere close to the desired results. In other words, DP seems indeed to be a necessary condition for success, but not a sufficient one! Other obvious problems stem from the difficulty of accurately estimating the number of hours of DP, which is based on some rough approximations made by the subjects. Also, it is impossible to determine the quality of DP (one person could do more in one hour than another person in 3). Finally, it is highly unlikely that the same threshold (10,000 hours) is universally valid, regardless of activity or goal.
Strictly related to the field of chess, there are at least 6 studies that sought to find a possible correlation between the number of hours of DP and the level reached by the player (expressed by the ELO coefficient). They are listed below (the excerpt is taken from a paper published in 2013 by Hambrick et al.):
The above authors are generally psychologists and chess enthusiasts at the same time. Guillermo Campitelli, for example, is an Argentinian with a maximum rating of around 2200, which intrigued him precisely because he had been striving for many years, including during his junior years, to reach an international title. Despite the large number of hours of DP he failed to do so. Once he became an internationally known researcher, he aimed among other things to find explanations related to his failure. After thoroughly questioning a large number of chess players he discovered “strange” things that contradicted the official DP dogma. His findings confirm that training is indeed important, but at the same time suggest that the speed of progress varies a lot, plus there is an individual ceiling. Let me quote him:
The problem is that among the players who reached master level, some did it in 3,000 hours… while others took 30,000 hours and reached the same level. And there are people who have trained well over 30,000 hours and have not reached this level.
I do not wish to go into technical detail details regarding the statistical methodology used to analyze the results of the above studies. A meta-analysis is graphically represented below:
What the figure shows is particularly important. It appears that, at least among the chess players analyzed to date (nearly 1100 players!), DP contributes only 34% to the level achieved by the player. The remaining 66% cannot be explained by this element, being very likely the contribution of what we could call talent.
I am attaching another interesting graph from Gobet & Campitelli’s 2007 study.
The chart has intermediate level players (below 2000) as white bars, expert level players (between 2000 and 2200) as gray bars and master level players (over 2200) as black bars. It’s easy to see that the black bars (stronger players) tend to cluster to the right, corresponding to a greater number of hours of study, while the white bars (modest players) seem to be more frequently on the left (fewer hours of study). That makes perfect sense, but the anomalies prove that the number of study hours (DP) does not explain everything. Hambrick’s remarks:
There is a major overlap in the distributions, for example about a third of masters had fewer DP hours than the average of the expert group, and a few masters even had less DP than the average of the intermediate player group (players 2 classes below!).
Among intermediate players (below 2000), a quarter had more AD than the expert average and a few had more practice than the master average.
The number of hours of AD, in the case of masters, varies greatly, between 832 and 24,284 hours – a difference of almost 3 orders of magnitude (!!).
A detailed analysis published in 2011 by Robert Howard regarding the Polgár phenomenon leads to interesting conclusions as well. The 3 sisters are known to have undergone an intensive training program from an early age with their father and later with various high caliber trainers. Even if we ignore Sofia, some interesting differences emerge between the two more famous sisters. Judit reached a peak of 2735 after about 60,000 hours of DP, while Zsuzsa had a much lower peak of 2577 after much more training, about 80,000 hours! Equally interesting is the fact that the average number of hours required to reach the maximum rating, for the top 10 players in the world at the time, was only 14,000. So, again, it can be said that a targeted, intense, and long-term training is necessary for high performance, but there are very large differences between individuals related to both the speed with which they progress and the maximum level they can reach. In addition, we should consider the following element: the sisters were already performing amazing feats at very young ages (for example Judit beat a master without seeing the board at 7), when they were not even close to the magical threshold of 10,000 hours of training. It is logical to assume that in the Polgár family there is a set of genes allowing the owners to learn chess with great ease.
Another key factor that several studies have highlighted is the particular importance of the age at which DP begins. It seems that to achieve excellence in chess, it must be as small as possible. A child manages to progress much faster than an adult, and furthermore, it seems that those who start after childhood do not make it to the top, regardless of the number of hours of DP.
There are obvious differences between kids trying to learn chess, clearly visible as soon as they see a chess board for the first time. Some of them grasp everything quickly, others need additional explanations, multiple repetitions and forget more. I have personally witnessed kids who couldn’t master the technique of checkmating with king and rook vs. lone king in 2 hours, while other kids get it in 5 minutes. Long before we can talk about thousands of hours of training, we can see how absurd the blank slate theory is. The same has been reported in all fields, whether it is piano, football or mathematics. The signs of genius are obvious long before the number of hours worked or the quality of any coach can be suspected of having an influence. At the age of 2-3, Magnus Carlsen could solve problems and play games designed for much older children. At 5, he would read geography books and could name all countries and their capitals. His father tried to teach him chess at that age, but he was not interested initially. At the age of 7 he took up chess again, on his own, and within a year he was stronger than his older sisters, who had been playing chess for years. Does anyone think that Magnus is where he is just because he studied a lot?! How many hours of study had he managed to accumulate by the age of 13, when he was already giving Kasparov a very hard time? Was he a product of the powerful Norwegian school of chess? If Agdestein took any other child and trained him, would that kid reach 2870? We all know the answers.
Some have fooled themselves by doing retrospective studies, just like Ericsson. A retrospective study is one that looks at past events. For example, we can compare champions and low-level players, and find that, in general, champions trained more – hence the conclusion that training explains their level. WRONG. This conclusion has been proven false in all cases where prospective studies were used instead. Such studies start with a group of individuals at the same level and track their progress into the future for years. What we find is that the number of hours is actually a poor predictor for the level a student reaches (students who studied exactly the same amount of time ended on vastly different levels, and others even dropped out along the way, precisely because they realized that they were not making progress).
Why are there so many top chess coaches who downplay the importance of talent? How come they don’t notice what any kindergarten teacher, or any parent with two or more children notices? There are several reasons:
Some coaches are acutely aware of the reality that certain players are untalented and say so in private, but not in public or when discussing with their students or their families. The reason is obvious, they don’t want to lose their customers. It is a source of income. Car mechanics will find something wrong with the car, doctors know another checkup is needed, lawyers want you to appeal every time.
Very good coaches manage to maximize the genetic potential existing in each individual. They manage to get more than the student could have achieved on his own. They notice that, in general, students who work harder get higher, and automatically assume that it’s just the number of hours that makes the difference. In reality, even the disposition to work long hours is likely genetically determined.
Very good coaches get to train the best students, precisely those who are the most talented of their generation. There is a serious pre-selection. Kids who don’t like chess don’t even make it to a club or a coach. Of those who like it, a large proportion have no talent and are quickly lost. Of the few who do get to play serious tournaments, an even smaller proportion goes on to win titles and medals, becoming leaders of their generation. And of those, only the most promising end up working with an internationally renowned coach. Being used to such children with an obvious gift for chess, the coach may wrongly extrapolate what he sees to the general population.
The egalitarian model is that at some point, by chance, student X begins to prepare more than student Y, and as a result in a few years there will be a clear difference in playing strength between them. The model closer to reality, however, is different: X and Y come into contact with chess, X understands and learns chess a lot easier; as a result X works harder than Y because he enjoys it, and because some positive results show up (rating, medals), which in turn stimulate him to prepare even more. A positive feedback is in place.
I understand that the fact that talent plays a role can feel disheartening to many. They are probably asking themselves “What if I am not one of the lucky ones? Am I just wasting my time?”. The good news is that, for most people, the “ceiling” is way higher than they think, and definitely higher than their current level. As I keep saying, chess has to be fun. Yes, maybe you don’t have 2700+ genes. But you can gain another 200 points, and I hope the path will be enjoyable.
