Waking Nightmare, How Many Push-Ups?
I had a good session with my coach this week. We went over my awful loss from round one in the Indy tournament. This one:
While I often get bothered by an overall poor tournament performance, I generally don't get too troubled about the loss of an individual game. Shake it off, get back in there, focus on the next game. Study it later and learn from it. In fact I don't recall ever being being rattled by an individual game. Until this game. Two nights ago, I literally awoke at 3:00 am and couldn't fall back to sleep because I kept replaying the position after move twenty-six over and over again in my head. The next morning I felt hung over, even though I hadn't had anything at all to drink.
Going through my analysis with my coach was really helpful. First, because of the insights he gave me, but also not less because articulating problems and weakness—putting a label on them—turned them into something concrete I can work on and fix. It turns out naming and defining the thing that's keeping you awake at night goes a long way toward getting your mind back into a good space and ready to head into the next game.
After the lesson, my wife asked me "How many push-ups is he making you do?" My wife seems to imagine my coach as a kind of drill sergeant, yelling "You call that a game of chess? Down and give me fifty, maggot!" So when the missus asked "How many push-ups?" I answered, "3412." She looked at me funny, and I dropped Polgár's massive tome Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games onto the couch. "He wants me to do all the mate-in-two problems in this book."
I acquired this book on its initial publication in 1994 when I was in grad school. I'd worked through a fair bit of it at the time, but not all of it, and I'm looking forward to driving all the way through the mates in two. They're not at all trivial—many of the problems are less about "directly" forcing moves like checks, and more about quiet "zugwanging" moves, using pieces to control squares and cut off all lines of escape for the targeted king before delivering the death-blow on the second move—all while trying to avoid stalemate on the first move. They're very much about board geometry and vision, rather than "brute force," so to speak.
The point being that my biggest problem right now is—you've guessed it—board vision, calculation, and tactics. So I've dived into the Polgár book with gusto, working out the first sixty-six problems yesterday and this morning. I will continue to work them until I've finished them all.
In any case, they should be good priming for my next two tournaments. The first is the OTB Columbus Plus Score tournament this Saturday; the second is the online Dojoliga tournament for members of the Chessdojo training program, scheduled to start next week.
