The Abysmal Depths of Chess

  March 1989, Position G Black to play Fedorowicz - Dlugy, World Open 1988 Contributions to the comments box are welcome. I’ll reply with what the Masters have to say about their choice to anybody who suggests a move. Scroll down to see some commentary from me and the Masters’ feedback. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . If 'What Most People Do is Not the Way to Go'   ( KMKY 8 Nasty, Brutish and not Short ) is true, it counts double with regard to studying chess openings. All that theory out there, all those courses and all those videos … and yet most of us still suck when it comes to actually playing the game. There has to be another, better, way. I think there is. Or ways, plural, perhaps. One of the things we might do when it comes to studying the Sicilian Defence, say, is take 100 positions where … d5 is potentially on the cards, going through them one by one and deciding if Black should actually play it. More of that another day. For this post I want to look at anoth...

March 1989, Position G Black to play Contributions to the comments box are welcome. Masters’ feedback will be published tomorrow.

April 1988, Position C White to play Short - Ljubojevic, Reykjavik 1987 Contributions are welcome in the comments box. I’ll reply with what the Masters have to say about their choice to anybody who suggests a move.

April 1988, Position C White to play Contributions to the comments box  are welcome . Masters’ feedback will be published tomorrow.

August 1988, Position D White to play Kuczynski - Schmidt, Gizycko 1985 Contributions are welcome in the comments box. I’ll reply with what the Masters have to say about their choice to anybody who suggests a move.

August 1988, Position D White to play Contributions to the comments box  are welcome . Masters’ feedback will be published tomorrow.

April 1988, Position J White to play Rivas - Luce, Berga 1987 Contributions are welcome in the comments box. I’ll reply with what the Masters have to say about their choice to anybody who suggests a move.

April 1988, Position J White to play Contributions to the comments box  are welcome . Masters’ feedback will be published tomorrow.

December 1988, Position B White to play Szalanczy - Gavrikov, Hungary 1988 Contributions are welcome in the comments box. I’ll reply with what the Masters have to say about their choice to anybody who suggests a move. Scroll down to see some commentary from me and the Masters’ feedback. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It is my firm belief that intuition does not develop as random pattern recognition, but rather the recognition of patterns previously investigated and understood. That is why looking through unannotated games from a database or playing through the complete works of Averbakh will not seriously improve your chess. Jacob Aagaard:  Excelling at Positional Chess It’s worth listening to Aagaard when he’s got something to say about chess improvement. For my money he’s one of the better chess writers of our time. A time that has given us, let us not forget, several dozen books by the Mrs B...

December 1988, Position B White to play Contributions are welcome in the comments box. Masters’ feedback will be published tomorrow.

June 1988, Position G Black to play Contributions are welcome in the comments box. I’ll reply with what the Masters have to say about their choice to anybody who suggests a move. Scroll down when you’re ready to see what the Beat the Masters panel chose and the points scored for each move. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I remember my friend Tom telling me that playing Open Sicilians was good for developing players back in 2008 around the time he wrote this blogpost . He was one of the best improved adult chess players in England that year, and I knew the idea originated from Rowson, so what he had to say was obviously worth listening to. Not that I did. In my defence, my objection was partly practical. You might want to play Open Sicilians, but in club chess - at my level anyway - you’re far from guaranteed to get 2 Nf3 and 3 d4 after you answer 1 e4 with 1 ... c5 . I don’t know the answer to the question raised by the title of ...