Interviewer: ...About the chess masters...over the past century, who do you think is the greatest? Apart from yourself, of course, I don't know about your own estimate of yourself, but...I'll be honest.
Fischer: Well, chess, you know...so much depends on opening theory, so the champions of say the last century, I mean the century before last, they didn't know nearly as much as, say, I do and other players know about opening theory. So, if you just brought them back from the dead and they played cold, they wouldn't do well, because they'd get bad openings...or they might not do too well. But of course, if they learned the openings, which they would very quickly...so...my point is you cannot compare the playing strength. You can only talk about natural ability, cuz now there's so much more opening theory, so much more memorization. Memorization is enormously powerful! So I mean, some kid of fourteen today, or even younger, could get the opening advantage against Capablanca or especially against the players of the previous century, like Morphy and Steinitz...so you definitely get the opening advantage, easily! And maybe they'd still be able to outplay the young kid of today, but maybe not, because now it is when you get the opening advantage, not only do you get the opening advantage, but you know how to play the opening advantage. They have so many examples of what to do from this position. So it's really deadly, it's very deadly. That's why I don't like chess anymore.
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400 Points in 400 Days - Part 1
http://www.masschess.org/Chess_Horizons ... Part_1.pdf
Quote:Shortcomings of Standard Chess Instruction:The Study Plan
- Chess knowledge is not the same as chess ability.
- When I was researching chess coaches, one comment I heard again and again from students was: “I have been studying openings, endgames, middlegames, weak squares, knight outposts, etc. and feel that my understanding of the game has improved greatly.” I would always follow these statements with the question: “So, how much has your rating improved?” Time and again, students told me that their ratings had not improved in the three months, six months, or year since they had started their coaching. Why did these students’ ratings fail to improve? Class players who spend their time on openings, middlegame strategy, and endgames are doing an excellent job of increasing their chess knowledge, but they are not increasing their chess ability. For a class player to study openings, middlegame strategy, and endgames as a way of increasing chess ability (as opposed to chess knowledge) is the equivalent of fixing a car that doesn’t have an engine by polishing the exterior: the car looks better, but it still doesn’t go. A Class-player’s chess ability is limited first and foremost by a lack of tactical ability. As GM Jonathan Levitt wrote, in a recent KasparovChess.com article, “At lower levels of play...tactical awareness (or a lack of it) usually decides the outcome of the game.” [Nathan: This is making me wonder if spending time reading books about entrepreneurship may actually be holding me back from making more progress, because I could be spending my time in much more effective ways.]
- You can perform an experiment with any chess-playing program: create two personalities, one without any positional knowledge (no opening book, no understanding of pawn structure, etc.) and with the maximum tactical knowledge and the other with the maximum positional knowledge but no tactical knowledge. When these two personalities play against each other, the tactical personality will win every game.You can refine this experiment further by creating two personalities, one that can see three moves ahead but has no positional knowledge and the other that can see two moves ahead and has complete positional knowledge. The tactical personality, which can see three moves ahead, will win the vast majority of the games. This is a key lesson: all of the positional knowledge in the world is worth less than the ability to see one move [further ahead than your opponent].
- GM instruction is sub-optimal at the class level.
- GM’s, however, have two characteristics that make it difficult for them to communicate effectively with adult class players.
- First, almost all GMs were master-level players by the time they became adults. A corollary to this fact is that virtually no GM has experienced rapid chess development as an adult player.
- Second, GM’s are so far removed in playing strength from class players that their advice is often misguided. For the same reason that a university mathematics professor will probably not be able to teach addition as well as a first grade teacher, a GM will probably not be able to teach the basics of chess as effectively as a pedagogically inclined player who is much weaker.
- Quick fixes work at the class level.
- Strong chess players like to talk about the many years of dedication and hard work that are required to become a master-level player. Unfortunately, they often confuse this hard and time-consuming path with the relatively small amount of work that most class players need to do to experience significant improvement in their playing ability.
Once I understood the importance of studying tactics, I created a three-step plan for improving my tactical ability. If you are an adult class player and you follow this plan, I believe that you will experience an improvement in your rating similar to the one I experienced. The first step of the study plan involves exercises that pound very simple tactical notions into your brain. The second step, which I call Seven Circles, is to go through a set of about 1,000 tactical problems seven times over the course of 127 days. The third component is to learn how to integrate your newfound tactical ability into your OTB play. All three components require dedication. You should study every day even if you are sick, are traveling, or are playing in a tournament.
400 Points in 400 Days - Part 2
http://www.masschess.org/Chess_Horizons ... Part_2.pdf
How to Get Good at Chess, Fast
http://www.gautamnarula.com/how-to-get- ... hess-fast/
Quote:I did two types of tactics training. The first was “Chess Vision” and “Knight Sight” exercises, as described in this article. They may sound stupid, but they work. I did these exercises every day for two weeks initially, and then would do them the day of a tournament and once in a while as a refresher.
My primary method of tactics training was using Chess Tactics for Beginners, which is absolutely fantastic. If you only buy one thing to help your chess game, this should be it. I did 50 puzzles per day, every day, and once I finished the entire CD I repeated the process six more times.Online tactics sites usually don’t cut it, because they aren’t structured so that you learn based off previous ideas and many don’t incorporate the pedagogical features of Chess Tactics for Beginners. Trust me, paying for CTB is worth it.
[...]
Chess psychology can be distilled to two simple rules:Simply following these rules will add hundreds of points to your rating.
- Don’t ever be afraid of your opponent.
- Fight as hard as you can until the game is over.
[...]
The tl;dr of this training plan is: play a lot, analyze your games, and primarily study tactics. Your knowledge of openings, endgame, middlegame, etc. will come from analyzing your games and going over grandmaster games. Only study one of those specific topics if it is clear you are specifically losing because of that topic.