The Abysmal Depths of Chess

The strength of the Beat the Masters scoring system is its simplicity. Only the first move counts; you score from zero to ten points depending on how well you’d done.

Ho w should you use this blog? Well, any way you want to is the TL;DR / short version (delete according to your age group). Comments are always welcome. Especially if your choice of move is accompanied with a description of the thought process that lead you there.  I’m going to post on Monday and Friday each week. Each one will start with a position from one of those old Beat the Masters articles. There’ll be some wibble from me to follow and the points and a list of which Master chose which move will be at the end. If anyone comments with their choice of move, I’ll reply with what the article had to say about it. So, use this material however you find useful. In case of interest, here’s what I do:- set up the position on a real board; analyse without moving the pieces as deeply and thoroughly as I can manage; write down my thoughts as moves and ideas occur to me;   eventually decide on my choice and write that down along with the time ...

A few months ago, I advised a student of around 2000 strength to try to analyse one complicated game deeply and carefully. I asked him to keep on honing and revising his findings until he felt confident that I wouldn’t find any major mistakes in his analysis. I encouraged him not to use analysis engines until he had given it his best effort. He was not allowed to make generalizations about the position and not allowed to stop with the assessment that the position was 'unclear' unless he could demonstrate the effort he had made to find clarity.  He is a diligent student and keen to improve, but looking at a complicated game in depth until he understood it move by move, variation by variation, proved to be too much for him. He devoted a few study sessions to this task, a couple of hours at a time, but he came back to me and said that he was 'scared' to do any more. Whenever he tried to look at the position without prejudices he felt 'lost' and 'helples...

Hello. This blog is an homage to Beat the Masters , a wonderful series of articles published in Chess magazine when I started playing in the late 1980s Each month they would print nine positions. Mostly middlegames; usually from recent tournaments; rarely with a clearcut 'best' winning move available. The challenge was to decide what you’d do if it was your game. A couple of months later they’d run the follow-up article when they gave you the game continuation and the comments of some of the leading English chess players of the day. For the competition (you could post in your answers if you wanted), the more of the Masters’ choices you matched, the more points you scored. It was as simple as that. You would be up against a dozen or so Masters each month. A core group of regulars with one or two changes each time. GMs Flear and Plaskett were usually there along with I Ms Pein , Botterill and Paul Littlewood . Soon-to-become-GMs like Kosten , Conquest , Dav...