Effective Practice

This was the last week of the chess skill building project. The initial idea for my last lesson with Andrea was to play a couple of blitz games and then analyze them together. We did that, but decided to added something else: we would play the games without seeing the pieces (blindfold chess). There’s a setting on Lichess which lets you hide your pieces. You just need to go to Settings > Blindfold Chess (at the moment, you can find that all the way down in the setting’s page). It was a fun challenge, but very demanding at an intellectual level. Actually, it’s not recommended at all to play like this often.

To my surprise, in the blindfold games, I did much better than I thought I would. We played common openings, but Andrea tried to take me out of the books very early in the games so that I wouldn’t play automatically. I think having a good grasp of the coordinate pairs on the board (the name of the files, designated by letters from a to h, and the ranks, designated by numbers from 1 to 8) is essential to think your way through a game of this kind. Keeping in mind the pawn structures (your own and the adversaries’), as mentioned by Andrea, is also key to remember what moves are possible or not.

[Read more…] about Chess in Italian (Week 12) Playing Blindfold Chess

At the beginning of this skill building project, Andrea (my chess coach during these months) suggested I picked one opening to play with Black versus e4 and one against d4. For some reason, I’ve always enjoyed more playing king’s pawn games (those starting with e4). That’s why I looked forward so much to focus for at least three months on the French Defense when playing with black pieces. And that’s what I did. During the past three months, any time I played against e4 I went e6. Then I would try different variants within the French Defense, but I’d stick to that for a long period of time. I think that e4 is more popular than d4 and c4 (the main openings), and that’s probably why it felt like the past three months I did a deep dive in the French Defense. I simply had more opportunities to play that opening.

Even though I love playing a wide variety of openings (and I do know the first 8-10 moves of many openings, both with white and black pieces), I have to admit that ‘specializing’ in just a handful of openings might be more fruitful in the long run. When you do something over and over for long periods of time you have the chance of getting better at it. Of course, doing the same thing repeatedly is not sufficient. You must also do it the right way. In chess, playing the same opening over and over again doesn’t guarantee you’ll become a master at them. You need to know the ideas behind the opening, understand it a conceptual level, learn different variants, etc. But if you stick to it for a period of time and practice well, chances are that you’re going to see some improvement.

[Read more…] about Chess in Italian (Week 11) Deep Dive in the French Defense

Perhaps the most important trait a player needs is a warped sense of humor.
GM Tony Miles

The first time I read there was humor in chess I was skeptical. How could it be funny a silent game that required concentration, calculation, and was usually played by quiet (and maybe also serious) people? It didn’t make sense. However, as Jonathan Rowson mentions in ‘The Seven Deadly Chess Sins’, it’s not uncommon to see players commenting and laughing about a game. But that happens afterward (or during a game, if you play in parks!).

It turns out that there might be some connection between good chess moves and games and the punchlines in jokes. It’s the magic of the unexpected, a wicked turn that catches us off guard. And we love this kind of surprise. They can have a strong appeal to our sense of humor. The more you learn and know about the game, the funnier it gets. And this can happen in all phases of the game. Even as early as in the first few movements. In March 2021, in the Magnus Carlsen Invitational, Carlsen played the Bongcloud opening (1. e4 followed by 2. Ke2), against Hikaru Nakamura. As soon as Nakamura saw the movement, he busted out laughing. He didn’t expect at all that Magnus would play such an opening in a context like that (which was closer to that of an official tournament). Watch the video of that streamed game below.

[Read more…] about Chess in Italian (Week 10) Humor in Chess

A good part of how to learn something is unlearning our old ways. This is especially true with skills you learned many years (or even decades ago) in a not-very-effective way. We realize there are tons of things we could be doing better in a specific domain. That happened to me many times in my language learning journey. One recent example is the work I’ve been doing since 2020 to improve my English accent. Even though I started using the language as early as 2000 (and on a daily basis after 2006), I hadn’t properly learned the sounds of American English. Revisiting my American accent was (is!) hard work because of all the ingrained habits I need to correct now. There are tons of fossilized errors that keep showing up all over the place. In order to change those, I need to be extra careful to avoid getting into my old ways.

I noticed something similar could be going on in my chess learning journey. There are certain fundamental misconceptions that can make the learning progress much more difficult and uphill than needed. Why would we make it harder if we can make it easier? 😊

[Read more…] about Chess in Italian (Week 9) The Art of Unlearning

How do we know what to play next in a chess game? How can we tell which ones are the good movements? An interesting idea I recently learn about on ‘The Seven Deadly Chess Sins’, is talking to your pieces. It might sound strange and even a bit wacky, but stick with me for a moment. I promise it makes sense (or, at least, for me!).

Even though we play chess as individuals, we are leading a team of players: each one of our pieces. Just as in any team, we want to foster good communication habits among its participants. And therefore, we need to give them a voice, let them speak, express themselves. The team is much more than the sum of its parts, and in order to work well together they need to listen to each other. We need to take into account their needs, their aspirations, their potential.

[Read more…] about Chess in Italian (Week 8) Talking to Your Pieces

I always knew that chess is not a purely intellectual game, even though it looks like that: patterns, positions, variants, technical skills, etc. But there’s much more to that. There is a big emotional part that very often tends to be overlooked. If you have ever played online you know what I’m talking about. When you’re doing well you want to keep playing, you want to keep your winning streak, and increase your ranking. If you lose a game you want to “take revenge” and play another one. And then another one, until you break the losing streak. Sometimes I fall into that, but I do it carefully: as a rule of thumb, I never play two games in a row against the same player 😁. This helps me not to take things personally and to keep some emotional distance.

[Read more…] about Chess in Italian (Week 7) Emotional Thinking in Chess