Playing chess post-COVID

[Jonathan Bryant]

Short Version
As mentioned in the queen vs three pieces thread (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10760), I’ve started a blog dedicated to Beat the Masters. This was a series of articles published in CHESS during the late 80s/early 90s* that gave you a set of positions to analyse and the chance to compare your thoughts with those of a dozen or so IMs and GMs.

I’ve found these articles to be a preferable alternative to online bliz/rapid whilst waiting for normal chess to come back.

I’ve published four positions on the blog so far:

1: https://theabysmaldepthsofchess.blogspo ... eally.html
2: https://theabysmaldepthsofchess.blogspo ... ers-2.html
3: https://theabysmaldepthsofchess.blogspo ... ers-3.html (this one is the position that is shown in the queen vs three pieces thread)
4: https://theabysmaldepthsofchess.blogspo ... ers-4.html

My aim is to publish two a week at least for the rest of the year at least.

I’ve done over 70 of these puzzles over the last 5 or 6 weeks or so. After a while it occured to me that other people might enjoy them too.


Longer Version
If you’re not of an age to remember these articles they work like this:-

• every month CHESS would publish 9 positions
  you chose your move
  the follow-up article a panel of Masters (IMs and GMs) would give their choice and offer a few comments and lines of analysis
  if your choice matches the most popular panel choice you got 10 points
  If your choice wasn’t the most popular but still matched some of the panel you got points in proportion to the number of Masters who agreed with you.
  If you didn’t match any Masters you still might get 1 or 2 points
  If you were way off you got zero.
  
At the end of the 9 positions you’d have a score out of 90.
  The next month you’d do it all again and could kind of track your progress.

The positions were mostly middlegames and mostly not with a single clear best or outright winning move. Sometimes the panel were unanimous in their choice, other times you might get up to 6 or 7 suggestions.

I find it more fun and easier to stay motivated to keep going with these problems rather than studying annotated games. I like the range of feedback you get with so many Masters involved. I also find the fact that you get a 'score'. It’s a bit silly in someways (you score maximum points if you choose the right move whether your analysis is entirely accurate or complete cobblers) but it somehow makes it feel more meaningful than looking at random positions.

I’ve also found that comparing scores between sets of positions adds a bit of pressure too. If I happen to do well in the early puzzles and am heading for a record score out of 90 I really start to feel the extra tension when doing positions 7, 8 and 9 not wanting to mess up. On the other hand if I start badly I have to push myself to work as hard in the later positions and not just feel "well this set is beyond hope, I might as well knock them out quickly and get on to the next set".

Which is pretty close to how I tend to feel during real games.

I usually spend about 30-45 minutes looking at each position without moving the pieces - time enough for 5 or 6 blitz games. Doing Beat the Masters’ puzzles feels like a much better use of time.

I’m sure this sort of thing won’t be attractive to everyone but please do have a look at the blog if you think it might be something you’d like to try.



* I’m sure they started earlier/went later but this is the period to which I have access

[ben.graff]

Good for you Jonathan. I remember very much enjoying these features in Chess Magazine, when I was a kid. It was always fascinating to see which positions generated a range of opinions and which produced a broad consensus. Most readers would have considered at least some of the possibilities that the experts discussed, so the articles always seemed to me to be a good way of bringing chess players at different levels together. I seem to recall the computers of the age would sometimes be on the panel. I owned a Kasparov Stratos (I probably still have it in a box somewhere) and I vaguely recall that might have guested once, but I could be wrong.

[Jonathan Bryant]

I owned a Kasparov Stratos (I probably still have it in a box somewhere) and I vaguely recall that might have guested once, but I could be wrong.

No, you’re right. I’ve just finished the set of puzzles in which it appeared. I’ll have to do a Beat the Kasparov Stratos post for the blog.


THe other thing I’ve done recently is have a look at a few of the puzzles from Jacob Aagaard’s Excelling at Positional Chess. There’s over a 100 and I’ve only done a small number. I’m sure they’re very good. The downside of the book is that the solutions (that I’ve seen so far anyway) are of the "This is the game continuation and this is why it’s good". It makes sense for the book - JA selected positions in which he felt there was one clearly best move. The problem is if you don’t choose the best move (I’m 0 for 3 so far), you don’t get any feedback at all.

So I choose ... c4 but Kasparov played ... Qc8 against Gelfand. Fine, I missed the plan. But how bad was my move? Was it OK? A blunder? Almost as good? I’ll never know.

Not that Excelling at Positional Chess is a bad book. It’s a very different learning experience though. And when you need to stay motivated to keep going it can be tough to feel beaten up and not know how or why.


You get a better range of feedback from BtM. The most interesting positions, I think, are the ones that generate the wider range of suggestions from the panel.

[Jonathan Bryant]

Yesterday The Abysmal Depths of Chess had twice the number of page views (nearly 300) as the previous highest daily total and passed 1,000 page views in total. I’d thought a few Forum folk would be interested in Beat the Masters but I didn’t expect it to attract that much interest.

[MartinCarpenter]

I always liked the corresponding things in the Bridge magazines for bidding.

I suppose that the logistics and/or modern computers led to the extinction of such things, but you're quite right about how they're much more interesting than straight right/wrong answers.

[Jonathan Bryant]

I always liked the corresponding things in the Bridge magazines for bidding.

I suppose that the logistics and/or modern computers led to the extinction of such things, but you're quite right about how they're much more interesting than straight right/wrong answers.

They used to run a post-your-answers-in competition with prizes. Clearly you couldn't do that anymore.

I don’t think it would be affordable for a Chess magazine to do anything similar even if engines weren’t a problem. Changes in publishing have lead to a very large drop off in the quality of chess magazines which becomes extremely evident when you look at what was being published 30 years ago.
On the upside, of course, there’s an enormous amount of very good free stuff on the internet now, but chess mags are just not what they were.

You could still do the "how good is your chess?" type column when one master takes you through a game and gives different points for how well you analyse various positions - but then you miss the feedback from a range of people and that’s a real strength of the BTM series, I think.

[Jonathan Bryant]

I owned a Kasparov Stratos (I probably still have it in a box somewhere) and I vaguely recall that might have guested once, but I could be wrong.

Today on The Abysmal Depths of Chess: Are you better than a Kasparov Stratos?

https://theabysmaldepthsofchess.blogspo ... ratos.html


There’ll be another chance to pit your wits against the Stratos on Friday/Saturday.



Any future updates for the blog i’ll put in the adverts section but for this post it seemed relevant to link to Ben’s comment.