My Summer Camp Adventure
When I first heard that a selection of GMs were giving chess camps in Seattle this summer (courtesy of the Washington Chess Federation), I was just jealous. I figured they were for kids, like every other camp in Seattle. Then I re-read the ad, which said "All ages." Hm.
My husband said, "If you get your National Science Foundation grant written before then, you should go. It'll motivate you to work hard on the grant." He even offered to pay for it, as a birthday present (I'd turn 55 three days before the camp). But I felt, to be honest, a lot of social anxiety. What would the kids think? What would their parents think--would they find it creepy to have an adult with their kids? What would the GMs think, for that matter?
Then Davey Jones signed up. Davey's less than half my age but he is definitely an adult, and this comforted me hugely. So that just left finishing the grant. I worked every day during my regular vacation time (at the Shakespeare Festival in Oregon). I won't say I worked hard every day, but I did work. I'd have gotten the grant done, I think, except that the scientist I was working with had to leave town until August. I wrote most of a paper instead and decided that was good enough, because the idea of going to camp had started to sound like a really nice break. (Grant writing is my least favorite part of being a scientist by far.)
I was particularly eager because I'd heard GM Julio Sadorra lecture twice and found him both instructive and entertaining. He and GM Andrey Gorovets were tag-teaming this particular camp, and I think I'm not the only one who found this attractive, because it quickly attracted around a dozen students.
So I arrived, nervously, on Monday morning to find the expected crowd of little boys, one teenager, and Davey. My impression was that while I had all kinds of hangups about being there, everyone else took it in stride.
The following photo was taken on Friday, so shows a slightly different group--we had different players every day. Jason took Friday off so as to be better rested for the weekend tournament, at which he hoped to make NM.
A major teaching strategy for the camp turned out to be playing the GMs from set positions that illustrated the themes we were studying. On the first day, focused on attacking techniques, Owen Xuan and I tag-teamed Julio and quickly beat him, while the stronger players down the table made an early inaccuracy and struggled on to defeat. This was really fun, though we couldn't repeat in later games. Strong players in general often wriggle out of losing positions, but GMs take this ability to dizzying heights: playing them felt like wrestling a hydra.
We had heard "Bring all your pieces to the party" and "Don't allow annoying counterplay" before. Julio also offered a principle I had not heard before and am still thinking about: when "small combinations" pop up in your analysis, it's a sign you are on the right track.
Several things became apparent on the first day. The stronger kids, especially Jason Yu, calculate spectacularly faster than I do. I endeared myself to the GMs by being willing to admit I was lost--the weaker kids hated to say so, and would just glaze over instead. I was lost quite a bit; they often seemed to be teaching just a little below Jason's level (almost NM), which was a good stretch for me. The weaker kids had a tough time, but given that the camp was advertised for 1500+, it was reasonable that players rated below that were in over their heads.
They didn't allow us to move the pieces for most analysis, which was a good discipline that I should use more often. There was also a hard push for accuracy--players like Jason or Owen can produce a long variation in a split second, but is it actually correct? I busted one or two of those variations, which also felt good.
I noticed that many of us were intimidated by the GMs, but I have mostly gotten over that, and Jason has no fear. (This stood him in good stead in the Seattle Chess Classic a month later, but that's a story for a different blog.) Being afraid of your opponent seems to cost you around a hundred rating points; I'm pleased I seem to be licking that problem.
On Tuesday we were working on defense. Partway through an intense analysis session we heard a strange loud splashing sound, and looked up to see that one of the lighting panels in the club ceiling had turned into a massive waterfall. There was a long moment when we all just stared at it in collective confusion. Then we leaped about trying to move things out from under the water. I jumped up on a table and nearly made it collapse. We rescued my backpack and computer--a near thing--and a bunch of damp chess clocks. The water was now pouring out of several adjacent tiles. The adults banded together and herded the kids around it--we were afraid of electric shock--and Andrey took them out of the building while Julio and I tried to rescue more stuff.
I suddenly realized no one had told building management, and ran to their office. The manager and his assistant heard my account, came to look, and stared open-mouthed at the flood. Ceiling tiles, saturated with water, were bowing out and then suddenly breaking and crashing to the floor. They quickly turned the water off to the clubroom. (Why is there even a water pipe to the club? There's no sink. I guess it's for the fire extinguishers.) The manager told me it was a 60 gallon/minute pipe, which would imply that if the flood went on for 10 minutes it delivered about 600 gallons of water. I have no ability to estimate water volume, but it was impressively wet.
We moved to the skittles room and tried to continue the discussion. A professional emergency cleanup crew came in to bang around in the clubroom. After about 15 minutes water started to ooze under the wall separating the two rooms and we had to move everything again (this time my backpack got quite wet, but luckily the computer did not). The distraction level was quite high....
The general principles of defense didn't include anything unfamiliar, but the specific positions we looked at were quite interesting--unfortunately I didn't note them down. A point I took from the analysis is that in defending a difficult position you have to be very open-minded about what moves you consider, including being willing to give up significant material. It's hard to give up material when you are worse, as it feels like a slippery slope to defeat. Also, when you are definitely losing you should take any chance to change the nature of the struggle and force your opponent to adjust, because that's a breeding ground for blunders.
Andrey taught some opening lines and then asked us to play them against each other, which led to the following practice game:
I played 1...e5 as a teen but gave it up when I learned the French, and this did nothing to encourage me to return to it....
On Wednesday they split us into an upper and lower rating group, and had to deal with a parent who disagreed with their child's placement. My own parents were extremely hands-off about my chess and on retrospect I think they made the right decision. I was with the upper-rating group, which had borrowed a room from the church (the clubhouse was still out of commission). Unfortunately things went very poorly: the kids seemed scattered and distracted and Julio could not get them on track. The topic of the day was exchanging wisely and I couldn't muster any wisdom.
As an example of what was going wrong, Julio showed a position which he said was a Bluebaum game, but the top of his computer screen mentioned a Sadorra-Carlsen game. The kids became obsessed with this and disbelieved him when he said that the one game was simply embedded in the notes of the other. They wouldn't let it go and kept interrupting his attempts to analyze the position. We also had some bad dynamics with one of the kids egging the others to get into trouble. I remember that all too well from teaching kids' martial arts--it is hard to fix because the kid who is visibly making trouble is not the actual instigator.
In vain Julio tried to lay down ground rules--we are talking about this game, not other games, not tournament standings, not soccer. Watching part of the World Cup during the lunch break seemed to make things even worse.
I played the same (fairly obvious, in retrospect) position against Julio twice with zero success. The second time, the pair of kids next to me were literally spouting baby talk and goo-goo noises, and I totally ran out of patience. I got up on the verge of tears and said it was noisy and I was useless so I would go for a walk.
I went down to the skittles room, where Andrey was talking about openings to a quiet, somewhat overawed group of low-rated players, and sat in on that for about ten minutes. It was very pleasant after the relentless noise. Then the two nosiest kids from the other group came in and apologized, and I went back to my group.
I wish I could say that was the end of the problem, but it wasn't. Wednesday was pretty much a bust. I went home thinking that the friend who had advised me not to do this ("They may be good players but they're still kids, you know?") was right.
I noticed a pattern which is the bane of the Seattle Chess Club, namely that the local directors and organizers often make threats but seldom carry through. The kids have been trained by this not to take the threats seriously, and we have behavior problems at most events as a result. In my opinion, the TDs and organizers should issue a joint statement about the limits of acceptable event behavior and the consequences if these limits are crossed, and then rigorously apply the consequences. It will be hard and painful but the current situation is too, and at least the pain will fall mainly on those who misbehave, not the rest of us.
It's a shame, too, because I clearly had trouble with exchanging wisely, but I didn't get much work done on it. I thought seriously about not coming back on Thursday, but the first day had been good enough that I eventually decided I would. (And it's hard to blame people for being distracted on Tuesday. Sixty gallons a minute will do that to you.)
I don't know what had happened in the meantime--maybe parents were called after all?--but the group was much more focused and cooperative. The theme of the day was finding inspiration in games and transferring the ideas to your own. Julio showed several examples where he showed an inspirational master game and then a game of his own that had used that inspiration. This was more subtle than the themes of the previous days, and quite interesting. We looked at Carlsen pushing rook pawns up the board, which I had also noticed while studying his Stonewall games, and a manuver with retreating and regrouping your knights, as well as an endgame theme that I didn't fully grasp.
On Friday we looked at specific positions. I can't quite set up the position from memory, but we did a fascinating composed problem in which White needed to allow Black to make a new queen while setting up his own attack. I was working with Jason and Karthik, and we quickly came to a solution. I insisted that we check it carefully; we agreed that it was right. Jason took it to Julio and came back crestfallen. "Qb1" he said.
We stared at it some more. Qb1 indeed wrecked our combination. Jason rapidly found the fix to make it work. We were not touching the pieces, and this is one of the better bits of visualization I've done outside a tournament game.
I then got to coach Minda and her sister through the same position, and got a brief nod of approval for finding a way to help without giving away the solution. Incidentally, a local coach suggested that the sudden improvement in the boys' behavior was due to having girls in the camp. "I'm not a girl?" I asked. "No, you're a grownup. Totally different." I wouldn't have thought this would be a thing for boys as young as most of the campers, but maybe so.
We ended with a clock simul with Julio and Andrey playing tag-team:
As is too often the case, I lost my cool and the game near the end. I am almost as bad in my opponent's time trouble as in my own. Otherwise, a fun game!
Owen, playing next to me, got a substantially better position and then lost his nerve and offered a draw. "If you think it's a draw, fine," said Julio, "but if you think it's a win you should not take a draw." Owen took the draw. I think I would have played on--in a simul. If it had been a tournament game I would probably have lost my nerve too! GM Tarjan says that one of the great perks of being a GM is that people offer you draws just when their positions are becoming very promising....
This photo may be Owen's simul game, or an earlier training game. It shows off Julio's casual yet threatening body language nicely.
The camp ended with the GMs giving each player a report card. (From this I also learned that this was called the "Future Champions Camp.") Here is mine:
4 -- Exceeds Expectations 3 -- Meets Expectations
2 -- Slightly Below Expectations 1 -- Needs Improvement
Attitude: 4
Behavior: 4
Fighting Spirit: 2
Confidence: 2
Strengths: Focus, understanding the position, seeing forcing moves, attacking
Weaknesses: Defending, seeing counter-threats, calculating long forcing lines
Suggestions: Thoroughly check for enemy counterplay, solve and study "Recognizing Opponent's Resources" by Dvoretsky
About "Behavior" I can only say that it is easy to get top marks when you are being compared with eight-year-olds! The strengths and weaknesses seem spot-on to me, except that I think of myself as having decent fighting spirit, though I may not have shown it at this event. I think another frightening aspect of GMs is their ability to rapidly size up the opponent and exploit any perceived discomforts or weaknesses (this was also apparent in GM Khachiyan's simul last year). I did indeed buy the recommended book and am very slowly working through it.
Wednesday was the pits. None the less, I think I'd do this again if I got the chance. It was a lot of fun overall, and maybe I managed to learn something. I was certainly left feeling enthusiastic and slightly hopeful about my next tournament. The technique of having your students play you from set positions is a good one which I will remember for my own teaching: it's more directed than playing whole games, and more game-like than just solving puzzles.
