101 Reasons I Hate Chess #22 - 46: How to Improve at Chess
This is all about love and hate. And where they intersect in my chess. And sometimes bisect.
We won't talk about everything chess. But we will give brief shoutouts to the following: Players, Bloggers & Streamers; Game Ending Conclusions; How to Improve at Chess; The Pieces; Openings; Endings; Variants that use a Standard Board; Variants that use Nonstandard Boards; and finish with Clocks and Time Controls.
How to Improve at Chess
22-25. Opening Books
22. Sheer Volume - Why, why, why are there so many opening books? I suspect at least one new opening book is published daily, and that is just in English. Can't we just go all alpha-Zero and push the h-pawn two squares on the first move? Preparing to promote from that outside passing lane. Surely Simon Williams, aka the GingerGM, would approve.
23. Updates - Then there is the continuing flurry of updates, revisions, software updates, videos, and authors who promise that if you forget about memorizing variations and focus on thematic ideas your forces will inevitably carry the day. As long as you buy whatever snake oil they are selling that day.
24. Trust Me - Each author promises that their work is the end all and be all of existence. That your enemies shall cower before your mental might and your followers shall heap praise upon thy victories, scatter rose petals before your path, and shower you with bitcoins. You shall be anointed with scented unguents and crowned with a wreath made with wild-olive leaves from a sacred tree. Riiiigghhhhtt.
25. An Unfortunate Truth - Sorry, folks. Between the opening and the end of the game comes all the important stuff. In the opening phase, you will occasionally benefit from an opponent slipping into a trap. But given that people of similar skills have access to the same materials and methods as you, what are the odds that your fifth, tenth, or fiftieth opening book will make a huge difference?
26-27. Middlegame Books
26. Sheer Volume...Again - Oh my. The sheer number of topics. Does anyone realistically have the time to read every book on all the following topics: pawn structures; mating patterns; thematic middle game ideas in your opening repertoire; classic games that illustrate a thematic concept such as prophylaxis or control of space or key squares; when to make an Exchange sacrifice for positional consideration instead of tactical considerations; what GM Suba means when he talks about "energy"; whether or not Bobby Fischer's "sac, sac, sac, mate" really demolishes the Dragon Sicilian; which gambits are sound, a bit queasy or pure gaslighting; and so forth. You get the point. The real question is, how do titled players do all that????
27. Not so Ageless - Books published before 2000, possibly as recently as 2010, are now all accused of failing objectively as computers spit upon the analyses of the analysts. Sigh. So, perforce, it is determined that I must hate all those books? Even though I am usually playing humans and not computers...as far as I know. Barring chess.com's bots of the month...except for that one that is always rated over 2600. Shouldn't what's good enough for humans still be good enough for us? Or must we drink only of the honeyed, yet silicon-tainted, evaluations of computer science and computer engineering? The worst part is I have degrees in both those majors. Sigh.
Why do they stare at each other? There are no other pieces. It's a draw!!28-29. Endgame Books
28. What's Missing? - I frequently ask myself why nobody has provided a list of, "Here are the endgame books you need at each level of proficiency." (Actually, I suspect Chess University has produced such a list.) Further, IM Silman has an endgame book that indicates which endgames you absolutely must know at each proficiency level. And he defined proficiency by FIDE ratings. Stopping at around 2000 FIDE if I remember correctly...I have not looked at his book in 5-10 years so am going on cloudy memories. But where's a simple list, in a blog, that offers reasoned opinions on which book(s) at each level and why. In two pages or less. Is that too little to ask for? Meanwhile, with the recent FIDE adjustment to ratings, how relevant are his recommendations that were based on rating?
29. My Ultimate Love-Hate Endgame Manual - So easy that it's impossible. I love and hate Dvoretzky's Endgame Manual. It stretches my mind, in much the same way as Douglas Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid scoured and renewed my synapses back in the 1980s.
Just one lagoon in an ocean if you were thinking of boiling the whole thing.
30. Study the games of the greats
Oh. That sounds like a reasonable piece of advice. Beware, pilgrim. You're talking about a lot of games. And even more games if you use the data that can be found at Chess Database with Master Chess Games - Chess.com. If you insist on taking a stab at some piece of this, then pick your favorite two or three players. I started with Morphy and went through every world champion until Alekhine. I'm about halfway through all his games. Beware. It's a habit-forming hobby that may not offer the best use of your time.
31-32. IM Silman and IM LakdawalaLove-hate earns them both a green-eyed devil named Jealousy. Their works are the bane of and the inspiration for my chess writing existence. They've written about everything chess. I've bought books that I didn't need, but their writing was so good I got the book anyway. Is there a category for throwing good money after great stuff? Anyway, my complaint is that their writing is so good that it was a constant background theme when writing my first and second chess books. Is this good enough to at least be in the same library as their stuff? Not on the same shelf, just allowed in the door.
By the way, if you expand the view enough and peer at the bottom of the pages of the book, you will find some devilish twists on the names of these hall-of-fame authors.
33. GM Sokolov
Wow. Talk about bruising my brain. For a while, I always carried a book of his with me on flights where I was not the pilot. Or when I was on road trips. Or sitting in some office for the seemingly mandatory hour before a scheduled appointment time. And my magnetic chess set has long since disappeared. So, when going through one of his analytic variations I often had to push my short-term memory far past its tenuous limits. Sure, I know that's "good for me." But what a pain!
34. IM John Watson
I knew John back in the day when he was one of the three masters in Colorado, USA. A great guy who ran chess tournaments on weekends and played blitz against the up-and-comers who were a few years younger than him. Little was I to know that a half-century later I'd be awarding him a green-eyed jealousy monster for his chess achievements. John earned the US and British Chess Federation "Book of the Year" awards for his classic Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy. And has penned other fantastic works. Yes, paint me envious.
35. All the other great chess writers
I'll start with Greco and Philidor, move on to Steinitz and Lasker, Capablanca, Romanovsky, Bronstein, Pachman, Nunn, Soltis, Kasparov, and skip over many prominent authors to stop with GM Mauricio Flores Rios. I consider his Chess Structures: A Grandmaster Guide to be a masterpiece, particularly for players looking to develop an opening repertoire that fits together. All of you earn a green-eyed devil.
36-37. Writing your own chess book
36. You can read about my painful growth experiences at Secrets of Trapping Pieces: My Experience Writing a Chess Book and My Experiences Writing a Second Book – "Secrets of Trapping Pieces: Foundations". Six months and a labor of love is far more hateful work than I expected. Only to be exceeded with the second book. Then again, it has twice as many puzzles and more than fifty, fully annotated illustrative games whereas the first book had fewer than twenty fully analyzed games.
37. The leftovers - On a final tragic note, I have material for at least another two thousand problems tied to the themes of trapping pieces. And rejected well over 20,000 candidate games while whittling my list down. Thank goodness I didn't boil any oceans! But all these factors leave me uncertain I want to write a third chess book. Maybe on a new topic? Break out of my niche? Okay. How to analyze a chess game without a computer, that's the ticket. I'll call it KIMPLODES!
Coaches
38. IM Attila Turzo - my coach
One two-hour session and often I find myself mentally done for the day, exhausted by the problems he set me to solve and calculations he asked me to perform out loud, without moving the pieces...what's not to hate about that? On the other hand, his lessons inspired me to write my first chess book. Indirectly. You see, I trapped his Queen in a simul he was giving that included a number of his students and fans. Then later that year I trapped a CM's Queen in an online tournament game. And suddenly started noticing a lot of Queens getting trapped at the titled player level in games that were annotated on chess.com. Next thing I knew, I had an idea 💡. Which turned into a book 📔. And now I've written a prequel, an introduction to the topic of trapping pieces, based on his feedback regarding the first book. His bottom line: the first book was written at too high a level. Ouch! Another bruise for me. Then again, I have improved. At chess. Whether the writing has improved is a far different matter.
39. IM Dvoretzky (or Dvortesky, depending on your source)
Anyone who has had that much impact earns a green-eyed devil of jealousy for the huge positive impact he had across the chess world. And I particularly envy all the students who knew him directly, and not just through reputation and books.
40-45. Analysis
40. Game of the Day on chess.com
Over 1,300 games. Let me say that again. Over 1,300 examples in their database. Holy shamoley. A lot of good material to go through. But there are only so many hours in one lifetime. And yes, I do have a full copy of their DB on my hard drive.
41. White/Black resigns because Black/White is clearly winning
"What?" I sputter. "What does that mean?" I count up the pieces. Hmm...equal material. I look at who has an initiative. Okay, got it. And clearly, I can see that unsafe king in that tiny corner with sweat beading his brow. But where's the actual win?
42. Hey! What happens if they grab that pawn? Or trade those pieces instead?
I have a growing problem with analysis that doesn't answer the questions that a titled player apparently considers too trivial to consider, but that my tiny little brain struggles with. All too often analysis offers zero or minimal consideration of what I consider useful questions. Actually, it would be the answers that would be useful. But I digress.
Is there a solution to this lack of completeness? Well, it's not realistic, but maybe if the titled analysts could submit their analysis to an amateur then that person could generate a list of questions whose answers would be useful to a broader audience. Then again, if I had all the time in the world I'd do many things differently. So, a partial pass for the cognoscenti, since we ignorami would always like to see more.
Of course, I could try to answer those questions on my own. But everyone needs a good whine cocktail now and then.
43. Evaluation (+0.37)
Huh? And you tell me that if I just let the engine of my choice run long enough the evaluation will probably drop to triple zero? So why am I chasing my tail in some scatter-brained attempt to play the "best" move?
44. Evaluation (+8.5)
The other side of the evaluation bar. What do you mean the GM who had an evaluation of +8.5 lost? Did they lose on time in a bullet game? No! Suddenly north is south and the sun rises in the west. So what good are these silly computer programs?
45. How to Analyze
No, really. How are you supposed to do that? Every coach and every book tells you, repeatedly even ad nauseum, how critical that is to your chess development. But do they tell you "How"? I thought not. So, where's the book? The only one I found is great for correspondence chess where you have days to think.
Out of sheer annoyance with this lack of guidance I created a blog series earlier this year. KIMPLODES! is an acronym to guide you through the process of analyzing a chess game based on factors such as King safety, Initiative, etc. Every week I posted another letter in the acronym. But why should you trust an untitled player who struggles with simple questions (see #42 above.) 
A summary can be found at KIMPLODES! Cogito ergo sum: An Explosive Analysis Approach, along with links to all the other blogs.
46. Opinions, everyone has one
I think that says it all. #asterisk #bs #rukiddingme #*.
