Studying Chess Made Easy E-Book

Andrew Soltis

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 299

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

It's a fact of chess life that if you want to win, you have to put a bit of study in. Every chess player, from near-beginner to experienced tournament player, needs to learn the openings and keep on top of current theory. But studying doesn't have to be dull. This indispensable book contains foolproof ways to help the information go in... and stay in. Acclaimed chess author Andrew Soltis reveals the key techniques: - Why you can't study chess the same way you study school subjects - How to acquire the most important knowledge: intuition - The role of memorizing (it's not a bad thing, despite what people say) - How to get the most out of playing over a master's game - Adopting a chess hero as a means of learning - How great players study - Computers as a study tool - How to train someone else

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www.anovabooks.com

First published in the United Kingdom in 2010 by

Batsford Old West London Magistrates’ Court 10 Southcombe Street London W14 0RA

An imprint of Anova Books Company Ltd

Copyright © Batsford 2010

Text copyright © Andrew Soltis 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

first eBook publication 2013 ISBN 9781849941358 also available as paperback ISBN 9781906388676

This book can be ordered direct from the publisher at www.anovabooks.com, or try your local bookshop.

Contents

Foreword

Chapter One:   Chess isn’t school

Chapter Two:   Cultivating your chess sense

Chapter Three:  The biggest study myth

Chapter Four:  The right way to study an opening

Chapter Five:   Two-and-a-half move chess

Chapter Six:    Overcoming endgame phobia

Chapter Seven: Learning to live with TMI

Chapter Eight:  How to learn more from a master game

Solutions

Foreword

Instructional chess books promise a lot. Most promise to make you a better player. Some promise to make you a master – if you study the proper techniques.

But very few books say anything about the technique of studying. This leaves the poor student floundering about as he tries to cope with the masses of chess literature and software that confront him. He is deluged with Too Much Information.

The student begins to think that the reason he has difficulty improving is that he doesn’t have natural talent or the right computer or books. Or he believes that he can’t get much better because he isn’t willing to study five, seven or ten hours a day.

But these are not the problems. Every student can improve – and improve significantly. What he needs to learn is how to learn.

He needs to find the right methods that will enable him to study more efficiently and productively. These are not sophisticated methods and they do not require you to devote your life to chess. A student needs to make better use of the tools he already has, such as computers and books. He needs to set the right goals, such as how far ahead in a position he should try to visualize. He needs to know how to budget available study time appropriately. Most of all, he needs to make studying chess enjoyable.

Chapter One: Chess isn’t school

The reason studying chess is so hard for so many is simple: We make it hard.

We try to study chess the way we were told to study school subjects. We make chess into tedious, mind-numbing homework.

I know. I wasted hundreds of hours studying the wrong way.

I took studying very seriously when I was young. To learn the openings I got a copy of ‘the Bible,’ as Modern Chess Openings was called. I sat down with a board and pieces and tried to go through it page by page, column by unfathomable column.

On the first page I found a variation of the Four Knights Game that began 1 e4 e5 2 f3 c6 3 c3 f6 4 b5 b4 5 0-0 0-0 6 d3 xc3 7 bxc3 d6 8 g5.

There was only one comment up to there and it said Black could have equalized with 6 … d4. I was already confused.

Why should White play this opening if he has no chance for advantage after six moves, I wondered? And why should Black play anything other than 6 … d4 if it equalizes?

Not knowing what to make of that, I played through the rest of the page, four columns of recommended play for White and Black. I made notes on sheets of paper, just like in school.

But I had a lot of questions and no answers. It got worse as one of the columns continued 8 … h6 9 h4 e7 10 d2 d8 11 d4 g4.

I tried to make sense of this as I would an English grammar rule or a math equation. But there were no notes to any of these moves. My list of questions grew longer.

Why does Black retreat his knight to d8 when it wasn’t attacked? And what if White plays differently? If I were Black and my opponent played a common sense move like 10 b1 or 10 e1 – instead of the book’s 10 d2 – what would I do?

I became more confused as I played through the rest of the column, which continued with increasingly strange moves, such as 12 d5 and then 12 … xf3 13 gxf3 xe4.

The column ended with a string of moves that were a mystery to me, 14 xh6 gxh6 15 xe7 xc3 16 xf8 xf8 17 c4 b5 18 b3 b7.

This is where the first comment in the column appeared. The note said Black had compensation for the lost Exchange.

White to play

It wasn’t just that I didn’t understand how Black had compensation. I didn’t understand anything about this position.

More important: What was I supposed to do with this information? Should I memorize all these bizarre moves? And was I supposed to understand why they were good?

Trying to learn chess this way set me back months, if not years. Maybe I would have become a stronger player if I had studied differently. Maybe I would have become the same player faster than I did. Whatever the case, I was trying badly to learn – and learning badly.

There are better ways to learn chess, as I discovered over the years. They follow a few elementary principles:

Learning chess should be fun

Let’s face it, getting better at chess is hard. It’s like learning a foreign language. It takes repetition, memorizing and book study. A lot of repetition, memorizing and book study.

There’s so much that if you aren’t enjoying yourself, you will become discouraged, frustrated and bored. You will study less and less. Or you’ll give up entirely.

Fortunately, unlike many, if not most, school subjects, chess can be fun to study. This book will try to identify some ways to make it so. This leads to another principle of good studying …

It has to include hands-on learning

There’s a formula for improvement in chess and many other things as well. You probably know it already:

Theory means the technical material. It is opening theory. It is the principles and finesses of handling the middlegame. And it is the ‘exact’ positions and techniques of the endgame, the good and bad pawn structures and so on.

Most of the time that you spend studying theory you are relatively passive. You sit back and receive information. This happens when you are watching videos or listening to a teacher. You are only slightly less passive when clicking through games on a computer screen or reading a book.

What makes this worse is that much of the material being presented to you will be fairly abstract. Teachers and authors like to talk about subjects like ‘the strength and weakness of an isolated d-pawn.’ But students usually get bored because they wonder how they can apply the esoteric material to their own games.

Abstract themes and passive learning aren’t necessarily bad. But whatever you learn has to be underlined in a more active way. Otherwise you will forget it, the way to you will forget trigonometry once you stop using sines and cosines.

This is where practice comes in. Practice means playing games against humans and machines in various formats and time limits. When you get to apply – in a real game – what you’ve learned from a book or computer screen, the information is reinforced in a powerful way.

Black to play

This position comes from one of the practice matches I played with other young players at the Marshall Chess Club when I was just starting out. I was beginning to spot some simple mating patterns. Here I saw 1 … xh2+! and then 2 xh2 h8+ mates.

This is a basic tactical pattern. It’s not very hard. The rook controls the h-file and a bishop controls the king’s escape square at g1.

I had read about this kind of combination in books. I’d never gotten a chance to use it until this game. But after I got to play 1 … xh2+ it was indelibly etched in my memory. It was no longer an abstract idea out of a textbook. When the pattern recurred in later games, I never missed an opportunity to exploit it.

The more active the learning, the more fun it can be and the more motivated you will be. Vishy Anand, the future world champion, chose chess over tennis because of these factors.

Anand became serious about chess about the same time he was serious about tennis. He took early morning lessons at a tennis training camp. But the lessons consisted of drills. Just drills. No games. It was theory without practice. He hated it.

“It just drove me nuts that at 5:30 in the morning I couldn’t even play tennis,” Anand said in a recent interview. “I liked the chess scene simply much more because I got to play as much as I wanted.”

Another principle of good chess study is …

It should be mainly independent

The lessons that will stay with you are the ones you learned on your own. They can be buttressed by talking to other people, such as a teacher or friends. You get more out of looking at a game, an opening, an ending, whatever if you follow it up by talking with others.

But working alone works best. As Grandmaster Nikolai Krogius said, exchanging opinions is fine. But “one must first form those opinions.” We’ll talk more about this in a few pages. Another principle of good study is …

It’s often subliminal

This sounds strange, but the fact is you learn a lot about chess without being aware of it.

Just flipping through the pages of a magazine and looking at diagrams, or analyzing random positions with a board and pieces, is beneficial. If you were lucky enough to have been born with the ability to absorb information well and to focus your attention, this kind of casual reading can be nearly as good as more intensive study.

World Champion Jose Capablanca famously boasted he never read chess books. He was known as the player who didn’t have to study to become great.

But he was studying in his own way. After all, Capablanca flunked out of college after about a year and devoted his time to chess. He rarely played serious games during the next few years. Yet when he began to enter tournaments and matches he turned out to be among the world’s best players.

Capablanca may not have thought that what he was doing was studying. But he was doing something right.

And the final point about good chess studying:

You have to be well motivated

You won’t retain what you try to learn if you feel that the subject matter isn’t worth learning.

In school you may wonder whether it matters if you know the year of the Battle of Waterloo. Well, after you’re finished taking history exams, it probably won’t matter. And once you realize that, you’re likely to forget the year.

But in chess there’s a better chance you’ll retain what you learn – provided you know why you’re learning it. Take the example of how to mate with king, bishop and knight against a lone king.

White to play

Primers tell beginners they need to know this ‘because it’s a basic checkmate.’

Well, that is a reason. But not an honest reason. Saying that this is a ‘basic checkmate’ suggests that it occurs often. In fact, most players will go through their entire career without getting a chance to play either side. (I’ve never played it.)

But if you are given an honest reason, learning how to mate with king, bishop and knight turns out to be one of the best lessons you will ever have.

The real reason to study this endgame is it teaches you techniques that you can apply to a much wider range of endgames. What you learn from practicing it is that you can’t deliver mate just by checking the Black king. Instead, you have to restrict the king until the net is tight enough for a mate.

You’ll discover this quickly if you play the White pieces against a computer. In fact, every player below expert strength would probably benefit by playing out versions of this ending against a machine.

This particular position offers a dramatic example of restricting. After 1 b5! Black’s king is caught in a net of six squares. It can’t escape because a6, b6, c6, c7, d7, e7 and e8 are controlled by White’s minor pieces.

Even if White’s king were at h1, the net would still hold. Mate would just be delayed a few moves until the king arrives.

As it stands, the game should end in about a dozen moves. For example, 1 … c8 2 f6 d8 3 e6 c8 4 e7 b7 5 d8 b8.

White to play

After 6 a6! a7 8 c8 Black is limited to three squares, a7, a8 and b8.

The end comes when the knight goes beyond just restricting the king – 8 … b8 9 e7 a7 10 c7 a8 and now 11 b7+ a7 12 c6 mate. Note that only one check was given and it came just before checkmate.

The point here is that an aspiring player will benefit most from this kind of exercise when he understands why it is useful: It teaches him an extremely valuable and common technique.

The same goes with every other aspect of chess lore. It’s simply not enough to lecture to a student, “You must understand how to triangulate because it’s good for you.”

Even players with so-called natural talent need motivation. Tony Miles was a promising math student at the same time he was becoming very good at chess. But he gave up his math studies in college. He wanted to apply his knowledge immediately. Only chess allowed him to do that.

“I can’t study something abstract that does not have practical significance for me at the moment,” he recalled many years later, after he’d become a grandmaster. “I could find no impetus whatever to study for an examination that I would have to do in three years’ time.”

Too much information

You can pass some school tests by cramming. You concentrate on a fairly narrow range of subject matter for a brief period and remember it until the exam is over. But you can’t do that with chess.

Chess is a classic case of TMI: Too Much Information. There is too much opening theory, too much endgame theory, too many middlegame themes, too many tactics, too many strategic patterns – just too much to store in your head and retrieve when necessary.

TMI is not new to chess. Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau encountered it when he learned the moves more than two and a half centuries ago.

He was taught by an amateur at the legendary chess hangout, the Café de la Regence in Paris. “My progress was so rapid that before the end of the first sitting, I gave him odds of the rook – which at the beginning he had given me,” he said.

Rousseau left the Cafe and threw himself into chess, buying a set and the best book on the game. What happened next was so frustrating that he wrote about it in his memoirs:

“I went frantically mad with chess … I shut myself up in my room and spent days and nights there with a will to learn all the (openings) by heart, to cram them into my head willy-nilly, to play alone without end or remission.”

We don’t know how much theory poor Rousseau tried to absorb. But we can make a good guess based on the state of opening knowledge of a slightly later era. A standard treatise, written by J.H. Sarratt in 1807, devoted an enormous amount of attention to 1 e4 openings. Its extensive analysis of the Muzio Gambit, 1 e4 e5 2 f4 exf4 3 f3 g5 4 c4 g4 5 0-0 gxf3 6 xf3, included several pages on lines such as 6 … f6 7 e5 xe5 8 d3 h6 9 d2 e7.

White to play

The book then runs off in one direction to show that 10 c3 c5+ 11 h1 is no good. Its analysis continues with 11 … g8 12 d2 d5 13 h5 d6 14 b3 g4 15 h4 bc6 16 ae1 0-0-0.

It also analyzes 10 c3 c6 11 e4 and shows that Black is better well into the endgame that follows 11 … d5 12 c3 dxe4 13 xe5 exf3 14 xh8 fxg2 15 xg2 e6 16 ae1 xc4 17 dxc4.

Some other variations of the Muzio were analyzed to move 25. No wonder Rousseau felt overwhelmed.

A few months of intensive studying later, he returned to the Café. He found the amateur who had taught him how the pieces move and they began to play. “He beat me once, twice, twenty times. My head was all of a muddle with those chess combinations, and my imagination had become so dull that I saw nothing more than a cloud before me,” Rousseau confessed.

That was more than 250 years ago. Since then the amount of chess information that’s available to learn has grown exponentially. Today it’s TMI squared. Trying to master the material the way you would a school subject is impossible. That’s another reason why so many A-students in school are so helpless at chess.

Below your consciousness

Perhaps the most important difference between chess and school is this: For most players, chess learning can be somewhat subliminal.

They can absorb information without trying. It happens when they look at a position – either on a board or a computer screen or in a printed diagram – and think about what they would do if it were their turn to move. They are studying and learning without knowing it.

When Vishy Anand was young he read every chess book he could find, often more than once. “I could read the same thing ad nauseum. But I think this deepens your understanding. Because you are reading about chess, you improve. Imperceptibly, but you keep improving.”

This method won’t work if you are trying to learn how to spell. Or to master the multiplication table. When you nail down nine-times-seven you are very aware that you learned it and how you learned it. But chess is different, as I discovered when I was a post-beginner.

Vidmar – Nimzovich New York 1927Black to play

I remember seeing this position while playing through a book of Aron Nimzovich’s games with a set and pieces. I was very confused by what happened next.

I could see that White has the two-bishop advantage. He also dominates the only open file. His queen is better placed. Yet Black won quickly.

The book didn’t explain why this happened. So I thought about it for a while before I moved on to something else.

A few years later I picked up the book again and browsed through the pages. This brought back memories of the game but no specific recall of individual moves.

When I came to that diagram, two things struck me. First, I realized that Black should be better. White’s heavy pieces look impressive. But it seemed to me they don’t have targets to attack.

In addition, White can’t improve the position of his pieces much or favorably change the pawn structure. But Black can do those things, I realized. That makes the difference. Play continued 1 … g7! 2 f1 e4!.

White to play

White can’t save himself with 3 fxe4 because 3 … xe4 4 d7 xb2 will threaten a decisive 5 … xf2+.

Instead, he tried 3 e1 exf3 4 c3 as a sacrifice. But 4 … e7! and the threat of … xe3+ soon won, in view of variations such as 5 xf6 xe3+ 6 h1 fxg2+ 7 xg2 e1+! and mates.

The second thing that struck me was that the position in the previous diagram was much easier to understand than it had been the first time when I looked at it, a few years before. I had learned something subconsciously.

It surprised me that I couldn’t tell how I learned it. I expected that there would be ‘Eureka!’ moments in my chess education. I thought there would times when I would suddenly grasp some previously unintelligible bit of chess theory, like how to handle ‘hanging pawns’ or play knight endgames.

But the Eureka moments usually come much earlier in your career. They come so early that you rarely remember them.

This is a Russian exercise for beginners: What is the shortest number of White moves it takes to play a7?

“Any strong player can guess that you have to start with 1 d5,” said Yuri Razuvaev, a veteran grandmaster and teacher. “But for children it’s a big discovery.” In other words, it’s a Eureka moment – and a very rare one.

Absorbing ideas

Most players who become good at chess go through a period when they are simply captivated by the game. They make their biggest strides just by entertaining themselves.

When Nigel Short was a beginner his mother brought a book written by Alexander Alekhine home from the library. “Nigel settled down on the settee at 9:30 one Saturday morning to read it,” his father recalled. “He had his lunch and tea while he read and finally put the book down at 8:30 p.m., complaining of a headache.” He was simply fascinated.

Anatoly Karpov recalled a similar experience, when he was given a copy of a book of Jose Capablanca’s games. “I read it not because I had to,” he recalled. “But because I wanted to. I was learning and studying without realizing it.”

Another Russian, Konstantin Sakaev, devoured a collection of Tigran Petrosian’s games: “I was very proud of it and told my mom. She decided to test me. So she opened the book to a random page, and it was a moderately thick volume, and I had to tell which game it was and how it proceeded. I had not intended to memorize it, but somehow I knew it by heart.”

This doesn’t mean it was important – or even useful – to remember what Petrosian played on move 27 against master so-and-so. But Sakaev, like Short, was absorbing ideas. To some degree, all students absorb this way.

Take the following, a position from a Petrosian game that never fails to catch a student’s eye the first time he sees it.

Petrosian – Smyslov Soviet Championship 1951White to play

White has sacrificed a pawn for a lead in development. He has a number of logical moves that he can consider playing. We call them candidate moves. But none of them is obviously strong.

White would like to play e4 followed by g5. Then he can make a strong knight check at d6 or f6. But 1 e4?? loses a piece to 1 … xe4.

Instead, Petrosian played the stunning 1 d5!?!.

It’s not hard to see why White would want to play such a move. He would love an opportunity to continue 2 dxe6 or 2 d6. But Black has three pieces and a pawn trained on d5. How can such an ‘impossible’ move as 1 d5 make sense?

Well, it makes sense when you appreciate some of the possible outcomes. One is 1 … exd5 2 e6! when Black’s king becomes suddenly vulnerable (2 … fxe6 3 xe6).

Another continuation would be 1 … xd5. Then White plays 2 d1 with the idea of f3 and/or e4. By opening the d-file, White creates a pin on the bishop at d5 that makes the desirable e4 possible. If Black gets out of the pin, say with 2 … c7 3 f3 0-0, he allows a very dangerous 4 xd5 xd5 5 xe6! fxe6 6 xg6+.

Instead of 1 … xd5, the game went 1 … xd5 2 d1 and then 2 … c7 3 e4!.

Black to play

Again it’s dubious to castle (3 … 0-0 4 xh5) but Black can cautiously play 3 … f8 and … g7.

Instead, he replied 3 … 0-0-0?. White followed up with 4 g5! and a trade of bishops that set up a strong d6+. He eventually won.

It’s impossible to know what young Sakaev learned when he first saw the previous diagram. But it’s safe to say he didn’t consider 1 d5 as a candidate move.

It’s also safe to say that the next time he saw that game, he did consider it.

And, what’s most important, the next time he saw a position like it, he considered the pawn push. By the time he was a master he was finding himself in situations like this.

Sakaev – Neverov St. Petersburg 1995White to play

Sakaev considered 1 d5, a la Petrosian. He saw that 1 … exd5 would allow 2 ef6+!, winning the queen.

If Black takes the other way, 1 … cxd5 then 2 ef6+! still works. The key variations are 2 … h8 3 xd5!, forking Black’s queen and bishop, and 2 … gxf6 3 xh6+ with a winning attack (3 … g7 4 f5+ or 3 … h8 4 h5).

In the end, White chose a different move order, 1 ef6+ first and then 1 … h8 2 d5. He won after 2 … e8 3 d6.

But the main thing is he looked at a move, d4-d5, that would seem to be “impossible” but which struck him as quite playable – thanks to his absorption of remarkable ideas.

Rugged individuals

The most famous chess school in history was founded by Mikhail Botvinnik during the glory years of the Soviet Union. It had some of the best teachers in the world and it attracted the most gifted students. Its graduates included Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik, all future world champions.

Botvinnik greeted each new class of students in the same way: “Boys, remember,” he told them, “Chess can’t be taught. Chess can only be learned!”

His point is that the most progress a student makes occurs when he’s alone. He may learn best with a book. Or he may learn best with a computer. Or just with a board and a set. But in any case, he learns best what he learns independently.

Botvinnik recalled that early in his teaching career, “I decided that the main thing was developing self-dependence … In general, it’s best not to teach youngsters but to let them teach themselves.”

But wasn’t the Soviet School of Chess the result of great teachers educating talented students? Well, yes if you take a liberal view of ‘educating.’

A teacher can answer your questions when you’re stumped. He can ask you questions to see what you need to improve. And he can push you to work in the areas where you weak.

When Dimitry Andreikin was seven he was fascinated by combinations and hated endgames. (In other words, he was like almost every other newcomer to chess.)

Then his teacher, Viktor Pozharsky, showed him this:

Kasparov – Short World Championship 1993Black to play

He explained that Black played 1 … e6??. This lost quickly (2 e3 d6 3 d4 d7 4 c4 followed by b4 and the advance of the a-pawn).

The teacher then pointed out that 1 … c5! would have saved a game that everyone thought was hopeless.

Black draws because he threatens … c4xe4 and … c3+/ … xe4. For example, 2 a3 c4 3 a5 xe4 4 a6 and the rook gets back in time to block the other pawn, 4 … f4+ followed by … f8-a8.

“I’m afraid Grandmaster Short will have a hard time becoming world champion if he doesn’t work on the endgame,” the teacher said.

His student got the message. He began studying endgames alone that evening. Within three months, he had gone through 250 instructive examples. Today Andreikin is a grandmaster and plays the endgame very well indeed.

Most of all, a good teacher can show a student how to absorb and evaluate new information. As another young GM, Dmitry Jakovenko, put it “One needs a trainer to know what to work on and to learn methods of study. But the hard work should be done alone.”

Bear in mind that no great player has ever been able to raise one of his children to be a grandmaster. This should tell you something about what a teacher can do – even when the teacher and student are highly motivated and the student has the right genes (if chess genes exist).

Botvinnik, the great teacher, never had a teacher. Instead, he devised a system of improvement based on going over his own games after he played them.

Abramovic – Botvinnik Leningrad 1924Black to play

He was 13 when he played this, his earliest known practice game. He had learned the moves one year before.

Here he played 1 … xf3!. This would lead to a quick mate after 2 gxf3 g6+ 3 h1 g5!.

White averted that with 2 xa6. Black replied with obvious attacking moves, 2 … g6 3 g3 g5. He threatens to mate by means of 4 … h5 followed by … h3-g2 or … h6/ … xh2.

White’s king can’t flee the kingside. He can only try to bring his bishop back for defense. That seemed to be working when the game continued 4 e1 h5 5 e4.

Black to play

White can answer 5 … h3 with 6 f1!. Better is 5 … h6 and then 6 h4 g5. But best of all was 5 … h2+! – which prompted immediate resignation in view of 6 xh2 h6+ 7 g1 h1 mate.

If you had won that game – and with a pretty queen sacrifice – you would probably be content to congratulate yourself and move on. Few players as new to chess as Botvinnik would act differently.

But he was constantly trying to improve himself, to refine his calculating skill and his tactical vision. No doubt he subjected this game to a thorough analysis – and discovered how much he and his opponent had missed. For example, 5 e4?? was a blunder. White could have put up more of a fight with 5 f1. Moreover, Black shouldn’t have allowed him to get that far because there was a much better move for him, 3 … h4! rather than 3 … g5?.

White to play

Black is ready for 4 … h3 and 5 … g2 mate, and he can meet 4 e1 – intending 4 … h3 5 f1 – with the same idea that won the game, 4 … xh2+!.

Botvinnik must have looked further and found that there was a faster win even after 3 … g5? 4 e1. It’s harder to find, but if you work on your own games you can find things like 4 … h4! 5 f1 h6! 6 gxh4 g6+ 7 g2 xg2+ 8 h1 g6 mate or 8 f1 xh2 and wins.

It was games like this that enabled Botvinnik to perfect his calculating skills. He rarely missed a forced win like 3 … h4 again.

The school that Botvinnik made world famous was primarily a correspondence course in which his 12 students did the bulk of their work at home. Botvinnik met them only two or three times a year. This was in group training sessions where the students would show off their games, play one another and take boards in a simultaneous exhibition.

At the end of each session Botvinnik handed out homework assignments to be completed over the next months. Karpov, for example, was told to come up with new ideas in the 4 a3 variation of the Nimzo-Indian Defense. Kramnik, who liked to play 1 e4 c5 2 f4 as White, was instructed to study the Dutch Defense as Black. He found he liked it:

Tataev – Kramnik Belgorod 1989

1 d4 f5 2 g3 f6 3 g2 g6 4 f3 g7 5 0-0 0-0 6 bd2 d6 7 c3 h8 8 e1 c6 9 e4 e5! 10 dxe5 dxe5 11 b3 f4! 12 gxf4

Even though he soon dropped the Dutch from his repertoire, Kramnik had expanded his knowledge of how to handle certain semi-open positions. He finished off with:

12 … h5! 13 f5 f4 14 f1 xg2 15 xg2 gxf5 16 exf5 xf5 17 g5 d7 18 g1 e6! 19 b5 d5+ 20 f3 xf3! 21 xf3 g4+ White resigns

But the magic ingredient for all successful instructors is not specific advice like “Play the Dutch!” It is being able to get students excited about chess.

Students of Bela Papp, who was called ‘Hungary’s Greatest Ever Chess Teacher,’ remembered the little things, like how he encouraged them to study the games of Mikhail Tal and Bobby Fischer and to try to solve miniature ‘mate in two’ problems. “But indeed the so-called secret was his enthusiasm,” said one of his students, Andras Adorjan. A veteran Russian chess trainer, Vitaly Gorelik, said, “The main task of a teacher is to fascinate the students. Fascination is the foundation of all successes.” Fascination and fun.

Fun factor

Even in the super-serious Soviet approach, the teachers tried to make chess fun. Some, like Alexander Nikitin, started a group lesson with what he called “warmup exercises for the mind.” Nikitin had his students, who later included Garry Kasparov, solve some not-too-hard quiz positions that had pretty solutions. Other Soviet-trained trainers would start a class by showing off a spectacular combination or whole game. Yuri Razuvaev liked to start with an Alexander Alekhine masterpiece. Mark Dvoretsky preferred the sacrifice-filled brilliancy Gufeld – Kavalek, Marianske Lazne 1962.

The goal was to open the students’ minds to analyzing chess that day. GM Yasser Seirawan said that any analyzing you do is good – but you benefit more from it if it’s entertaining. “I want to have the feeling that I’m enjoying it,” he said.

I had the same experience. When I was starting out I headed to the Marshall Chess Club after school and met up with other young players. We would analyze some sharp new variation, such as in the Modern Benoni Defense, for hours.

Of course, we argued. I would try to find traps and tricks for Black in the Benoni, and my friends would try to prove White stood better.

Black to play

If I had tried to learn how to play this position by myself I would have read that 1 … a6 and 1 … e5 were the only good moves. That’s what all the opening books said. But I wanted to analyze 1 … b6 instead.

It seems totally out of character with the position. After all, it blocks the b-pawn that Black is supposed to be trying to push two squares. My idea was purely tactical. I wanted to play 2 … fxd5!?.

“But that’s not really a threat,” one of the other Marshall juniors would say. “If I were White I’d give you a free move – as long as you used it to play 2 … fxd5.”

And off we’d go analyzing 2 … fxd5 3 exd5! xc3!. My idea was that if White recaptures on c3, Black plays 4 … xe2 and remains a pawn ahead.

So we analyzed 4 b5! and then 4 … xd2 5 xe8 xc1 6 xf7+ xf7 7 axc1, which kept us entertained for hours.

We knew we were having fun. We thought we were perfecting our opening repertoire.

But in reality, I only played the Benoni a few times before giving it up. What I didn’t realize is that those sessions were the best lessons in finding tactics I ever had.

Many years later I discovered Aron Nimzovich had written a booklet called How I Became a Grandmaster. One of his bits of advice was this: “Analyze an opening that interests you with a colleague …” In other words, he was recommending just the kind of study that I had stumbled into when I was just trying to have fun.

Fun, motivation, practice, subliminal and independent. These are the key words of good study. In the pages that follow we’ll consider specific steps using those words that should make studying chess much easier.