SC Week 4/7: How to Choose Games

 "… I have used a selection of such games as a medium through which to put across the fundamental principles of simple chess. These games are not of the type to capture the limelight of chess literature …"

Michael Stean

"Study master games" must be one of the most common snippets of advice given to (and by) those of us who are wanting to improve at chess. Which is all very well, but which games?

There are some games in Simple Chess that are encounters of the very highest quality. So far we’ve seen Games from the World Championship (Weak Pawns/3) and Candidates Matches (Introduction/2, Weak Pawns/2) as well as a duel between a past and future World Champion (Weak Pawns/5).

More often, though, it’s not like that. The games Stean chose for Simple Chess are much more likely to be ones like

Karpov - Uhlmann 1973 (Open Files/4)

Hutchings - Keene 1973 (Weak Pawns/4)

Botvinnik - Donner 1963 (Outposts/3)

By which I mean games between players in which one side, although they might be good  by most standards, is still clearly the inferior players. Hutchings, for example, was no slouch. He played in a zonal tournament - the first eliminator stage of the World Championship cycle -  in 1975. Even so he was never in the same class as Ray Keene, who would go on to become England’s second ever grandmaster.

I like Stean’s selection of games very much. After a while it dawned on me that actually oftentimes the games that I found most instructive in his book

Botvinnik - Szilagyi  1963 (Introduction/2); Fischer - Gadia 1960 (Outposts/4) for instance

there was a particularly wide gulf in abilities between the two sides.

This, I feel, gives us a clue as to one category of game that we might want to look out for.