Chess Inferno: Seven Circles of Boredom
To be the best, you must be able to handle the worst.
- Wilson Kanadi
Hello, ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to Chess Inferno, where we busy ourselves with everything that's boring!
Chess is unequivocally, undeniably, and exceptionally boring. Even non-chess-player will be able to tell you. But we don't concern ourselves with those folks, and leave them to the desolate fields of oblivion. They are correct, however: boredom in chess runs so deep that even many chess-players describe various aspects of the game as boring.
Let's first establish what we mean by "boring." Generally speaking, we'll use what people indicate as boring, and use that for our purposes. A quick glance at this Reddit post and this forum thread on Chess.com gives a pretty clear idea what chess-players find boring. As it is, people often conflate "boring" with "annoying" because anything boring gets under their skin. Not everything annoying is really boring. Defending and theory are not boring, for example. They are hard to master, they are necessary, but they are most certainly not boring. In fact, as we will discover, even those "boring" things aren't really boring after all. Many will disagree, but that'll be their problem.
Before we begin our descent through these seven circles of Boredom Hell, I have to warn you. What we encounter may be confronting. You might find that much of what we do here will resonate with you. These flaws are not just your own, however. Many others feel these flaws as well. But it will be worth it in the end. The open mind can be forged in the flames of this hell, and emerge with a much stronger mental arsenal.
Alright, let's get going.
1. Studying
2. Doing the work
3. Radical symmetry
4. Setup-based openings
5. Early queen trades
6. The endgame
7. Quick and/or pre-arranged draws
Conclusion
Studying! There's a scare-word. Especially in the 21st century. In the 1990s the world saw the rise of the MTV Aesthetic, which meant that people's attention spans began to shorten. Today we have TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and commercials that last only six seconds. People just get bored and easily distracted these days, and so much is dealing with instant gratification, instant satisfaction, instant success. People rarely if ever take their time to really learn any crafts anymore and don't respect the process.
As it happens, studying is a necessary evil for those who want to become better at chess, and therefore it's the first circle of hell that we encounter. Everything that will follow can only be accessed if you open your mind and allow the slow-burning flames of boredom manifest inside you.
Recently I played 478 bullet games over the span of one week and flushed 187 rating points down the drain, because just like everyone else I tend to postpone my work and easily give in to the temptation of instant pleasure and satisfaction. Such a waste of time! How much better could I have spent this time on things that are much more boring but ultimately much more rewarding? Like, studying?
Studying? I wouldn't even know where to start! Like, I have 100+ books and vastly more digital ones at my fingertips. D'you really expect me to read everything cover to cover? No, instant gratification is much, much more alluring indeed! By orders of magnitude!
Yes, studying! You know, those gym exercises but for chess. Becoming better at chess isn't just fun and playing. It's important, yes, but your study work away from the board is no less important.
Opening understanding.
Endgame drills.
Puzzles.
Post-game analysis.
Reading.
It doesn't matter if you own 2000 books or have played 50 000 blitz games over the last twelve months. Owning them isn't enough. Having played them isn't enough. You have to do something with your material. Read your books. Analyse your games. Solve your puzzles. In other words: get to work and do your study chores. If you do a little bit regularly, you'll be able to get a lot of work done, and any later upkeep isn't remotely as tedious and time-consuming if you keep your skills sharp. Everything else depends on it. And the good news: there are a lot of resources out there, and you can do a lot of work on your own.
In order to do this, you'll have to be prepared to work, and that brings us to the next Circle.
It's no coincidence that sloth is among the Seven Deadly Sins. Laziness and refusal to work are part of the mental make-up of so, so many chess-players. It's much easier to just do nothing right now. But is that going to produce an enduring fundament for the future that you want to build?
Prioritise later over now.
- Jimmy Carr
But work is so boring! Yes, it is. It really, really is. I should know, because I am definitely not exempt from this. Far, far from it. To be truthful, I'm overqualified to tell you from my own experience that laziness and inaction are not really satisfying in the long run. Not at all. In choosing between the properties of pain and reward, I always chose the small pleasures of the moment and the large pains of the future, rather than choosing the small pains now in exchange for the higher pleasures of later. It's a waste of my time and resources, and at some point I could no longer reflect upon myself as getting the most out of my talents.
The reason why I started my whole Daily blog is my attempt to change exactly this one part of my mental make-up. I've been lazy for far too long, I've been putting off too much work. And not just off the board, no no no! Look at the following example:
This was the position I had in a tournament a couple of years ago. I was playing white and had 29 minutes left on the clock. There is an interesting possibility of a knight sacrifice on c7 following 57.Ne6, but it looks complicated and somewhat risky. Does it win?
In order to answer this, you have to sit still and do the calculation. You have 29 minutes in which to calculate whether 57.Ne6 followed by 58.Nxc7 wins or not. So please don't do the puzzle below until you've really done your work.
So, I allowed my opponent to escape with a draw here. The worst part wasn't that I saw the knight sacrifice but I opted not to play it for some reason. The worst part wasn't even that my opponent was an IM, and this could've been my first ever OTB win over an IM. The worst part was that there was another IM present at the time who asked me right after the game why I hadn't gone for the knight sacrifice.
The honest answer is that during the game I was too lazy to calculate it out. Had I spent these 29 minutes better, I'd have had the best result I'd yet achieved. Now I look back upon this game as one of my greatest failures ever, which could've easily been avoided if I had done the work. And to add insult to injury, I was congratulated for this result by several peers who thought that I had scored a big result.
This game taught me that I can beat titled players, and that I can up my game if only I put the work in. It'd take another several years before I actually started putting the thought into concrete action, but I got there in the end.
Your turn. Look in the mirror and answer this question: did you calculate the solution out, or did you simply guess your way through the puzzle? If you genuinely found everything: well done! But if you guessed your way through: Shame on you! You played better moves than I did, and you can be happy with that lousy fact, but you're almost as lazy as I was during the game.
There's another branch of lazy we don't understand. Why would anyone find it boring to have to convert the advantage? This is the apotheosis of the game, this is the moment where it really counts, the climax! You've worked your way to provide yourself with a winning advantage and now you can round off your game. What's more satisfying than that? It's much less fun for your opponent to look at this position. Stop feeling entitled to the result and just prove to the world that you're up to the task. If anything, be thankful for an opponent not resigning!
All warmed up? Perfect! Switch off your TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, and come along with me. Let's descend one step further down, where we start to make things really boring.
Welcome to the third Circle of boring chess! Here we'll look at a phenomenon that we'll call "radical symmetry."
The natural course of some openings leads to a completely symmetrical pawn-structure with one open file, like in the diagram above. Symmetry means that both sides fight with the same weapons. This might sound sensible because fighting on equal ground means fair chances for everyone. But we're not in Fantasy World. We're in hell.
In chess it's often understood that there need to be specific static and dynamic differences in a position to allow for an interesting fight. In other words: a position calls for action only if there exist imbalances in the position. A lack of imbalances typically means a lack of targets for either side, which in turn means an equal position. And the most glaring absence of imbalances is a symmetrical distribution of pawns across the wings.
The French Exchange is a perfect example of an opening that leads to such a form of radical symmetry:
Objectively speaking, black has nothing to complain about in the Exchange variation. Black has succeeded in gaining control over the light squares in the centre, which translates to great chances to equalise. And the bishop on c8 enjoys an open diagonal, which isn't the case in many closed French variations.
However, as I indicated in the note to 1...e5, black usually plays the French to avoid such symmetries. By presenting black with this variation, the position becomes very un-French, and smoke might be escaping your opponent's nose. Chances are that that smoke comes straight from the coals of hell that you just fed the opponent. But if you play the French, this symmetry is an occupational hazard.
Other variations that fall in the same category of radical symmetry are the Petrov variation (which leads to the same pawn-structure but this time because black opted for it) and the Exchange variation of the Slav Defence. The Exchange Slav has a slightly different pawn-structure, but just like the French and the Petrov it's very much hated for its symmetry:
These openings can be used to produce quick and uneventful draws: the French Exchange has 47 games in the ChessBase Online Database that ended in a draw in 10 moves or less; the Exchange Slav has 89 such short wastes of human effort. But enough about short draws for the moment. These exist in a lower circle of cringe.
Radical symmetry as a weapon
These radically symmetrical opening variations are among the most hated openings for players and spectators. They'll condemn these players to hell, and so they end up here. Carlsen, Nakamura, Caruana, Nepomniachtchi and Gukesh all visit these lairs every now and then; Gukesh even did so in the World Championship match against Ding Liren.
If you find yourself annoyed after the first few moves because you can't stand the calm before the storm, you're likely to lose your cool in the heat of the battle as well. Many players loathe symmetrical positions because they don't like to be faced with the task of having to try to squeeze blood out of a stone. You can use this fact against them. I stumbled on this more or less accidentally when I got rid of my fear of youth players:
By refusing to play a dry equal position, my opponent started to force matters, which backfired badly on him.
The Exchange Slav also has a reputation of being able to make your opponent's blood boil. I once had a game against someone who played this line against me with white and complained after the game that it was such a boring game. Well, it's not exactly my fault, is it?
However, the Exchange Slav is not as drawish and innocuous as it looks. Viktor Moskalenko actively recommends this opening as an attacking system for white:
These games reveal something about symmetrical positions. Many people judge the book by its cover and hate it because of its symmetry and nothing else. But the symmetry and the apparent boredom that arises from the opening is just another feature of the position, the calm before the storm. These games can explode into madness very soon.
Peace is that brief glorious moment in history when everybody stands around reloading.
- Thomas Jefferson
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London
Show you something to make you change your mind
- Ralph McTell, "Streets of London"
In the previous section, I ended with a game that referenced the London System. It bears several similarities with the Exchange Slav: the pawn on d4, the bishop on f4, and black players fuming within their skulls when you play it against them. As such, it's a great weapon to include in your arsenal, and an increasing number of players either play or hate it.
The London System is a setup-based opening based on the moves d2-d4, Ng1-f3, Bc1-f4, e2-e3, c2-c3, Nb1-d2, Bf1-d3, 0-0 and h2-h3. Those nine moves are always on the menu for white, almost regardless of what black decides to do.
The London is not known for its flexibility. White follows a rather rigid opening regime and often doesn't yield white a tangible advantage out of the opening. Black has a wide choice of setups and can play whichever setup suits their own style or repertoire.
Why, then, is the London such a hated opening?
- It's not as theoretical
- It's not tactical at first
- Anyone can play the London quite easily
- It's not easy to prove an advantage with black against the London
- Other people hate the London System too
In Trompowsky Attack & London System, Moskalenko indicates that the London was often referred to as "The old man's variation" or "The boring system." These prejudices still follow the London today, but make Ralph McTell's song all the more fitting for the name that the system has been given. However, despite its reputation, the opening is hardly as boring as it's made out to be. It's found its way to the world elite, with Carlsen and Nakamura both playing this opening on occasion:
And the world elite aren't alone in this. Romanian youngster Vladimir Sofronie (whom I mentioned in "Yikes") uses it as his main weapon with white and does very well with it. Here's a game from the young now-FM:
Setup-based openings as a weapon
I can recall two nightmares that marked my adolescence: one chess-related, one non-chess-related. The non-chess-related one was that I dreamt I was choking on a piece of chewing gum. (...)
The chess-related nightmare was called the London System.
- José Cuenca Jimenez, in his preface to The London System in 12 Lessons by Oscar de Prado
A club mate of mine once told me that the only reason he rose to an OTB rating of 2000+ was because he adopted the London into his repertoire, and his opponents started going crazy. They tried all kinds of nonsense in an effort to "punish" him for his "unambitious" opening play, and all he needed to do was just scrap up the points that his opponents threw at him. He exemplified the double strategy of giving your opponents enough rope to hang themselves and lulling them into a false sense of security before striking.
The reality of the matter is that the London System virtually guarantees white a solid position out of the opening without having to circumnavigate too many pitfalls. You might not obtain an advantage out of the opening every time, but the value of playing the London lies outside the need to prove a theoretical edge. Like most other setup-based openings, the London is a very practical opening to play, and you'll get a much better feel of the nuances of the position if you frequent this opening. Next to this, you virtually always fight on your own turf as white. Combine this with the possibility of boring and/or annoying your opponents, and you have a great weapon in your arsenal. Ding Liren used it to score a win over Ian Nepomniachtchi in round 6 of their 2023 World Championship match.
Pepe Cuenca ends his preface by stating that the London System contains some truly diabolical variations, and we love those vatiations here. Cuenca illustrates this by showing the following spectacular game. The bulk of the annotations and commentary is by Cuenca (PC) unless I felt to add something of my own (NS):
Not bad for "the boring system," is it?
We could spend another so-many aeons in this circle looking at the Jobava, Colle, Torre, Trompowsky, Veresov, English (yes, this too) and Hippopotamus setups, but we need to get going. I'll just briefly mention one more: the Four Knights Italian has a reputation of being even more boring than the London System, with Jan Piński noting after the moves 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Nc3 Nf6 5.d3 d6 "In positions like this you can beat even grandmasters. Obviously before this can happen, they will have to die from boredom..." (Italian Game and Evans Gambit, Chapter 1: "Italian Four Knights"). There's something very important that you can learn from these three games:
It won't surprise you that just like in the Radical Symmetry circle, here too the games exploded into melees after the calm phase was over.
Where does that leave us? If you can treat setup-based openings as just another feature of the position and one which requires that you have patience, you'll have great opportunities to outlast your opponents and make their impatience their own downfall. Setup-based openings can thus be employed as a form of mental judo with a deceptively harmless reputation.
Alright, moving on.
An entirely different Circle in the depths of the hell of boredom is reserved for those who trade queens at an early moment. Literally, how dare you! The position instantaneously loses all of its venom, doesn't it?
Doesn't it?
Or does it?
If you play against aggressive opponents who can't stand positions without queens, I can highly recommend this opening line for your black repertoire:
Carlsen has once used this line against Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş in Titled Tuesday and won. Although black's position doesn't look like much, there's a lot of play to be gained down the line. Look at this game for an example:
Early queen trades as a weapon
In the Rellstab-Schönmann game above, the early queen trade lead to an immediately decisive attack against black's vulnerable uncastled king. In the next game, white deliberately swapped the queens as a means of psychological warfare. The player on the white side of the game was Mark Dvoretsky, and he included the game in Training for the Tournament Player, Chapter 1: "A Chessplayer's Strengths and Weaknesses," from which I copied his annotations:
Dvoretsky spoke highly of his opponent in his discussion of this game and underlined that Sukhanov was indeed a very strong player. However, Dvoretsky was aware of his weak spot and thus catered his play against the opponent rather than seek to play the theoretically best moves. He consciously sought to trade queens early on to lure his opponent onto a battleground that he was ill-prepared for.
A chess master once told me that the best chess move to play is not the best chess move, it's the move your opponent least wants you to play.
- Stephen Fry
Let's explore this realm a little more in the next step of our descent.
Welcome to the realm of desolation. The summum of boring. The endgame! Here, not only are the queens off the board (which people already find incredibly aggravating, as we witnessed in the previous circle), but this is also the realm of the game in which you have to convert your advantage. In other words, you have to do the work.
Don't tell me now that you want to get back to the surface! You knew what you signed up for.
The best part about the endgame is that there's no escaping it. Once you get in, you can't get out. Boring until the game is up! Isn't that lovely?
Let's first address two of people's ridiculous and untrue notions: 2) endgames are much less tactical, and 1) having to convert your advantage into a win is boring.
If you remembered well, we already tackled the first notion in Circle 2, when I failed to lay the IM out. You have to be willing to do the work, even if just so that you have an achievement to look back on.
We saw in that same example that endgames are not un-tactical. Very much the contrary. Good endgame technique, as the saying goes, is a long string of short tactics (noted, among others, in Chapter 7 of Shereshevsky's revised Endgame Technique, a chapter that's aptly named "Technique: the mastery of short tactics"). That it's a fit subject to write about becomes very clear if you see the long list of books that exist on the endgame. Lakdawala wrote a 432 pages long book called Tactical Training in the Endgame. Van Perlo's Endgame Tactics is over 600 pages. There exists a book called 1001 Chess Endgame Exercises for Beginners, and I can only imagine that the 1001 series will continue with an endgame version for club players and advanced club players.
If you play over the following theoretical endgame (which I've decided to give in full without any annotations), you'll quickly realise how many short tactics exist in a seemingly simple endgame with very limited material:
This is no coincidence. If you work your way through the endgame of Queen vs Rook (as detailed by @JDchess121 in this blog), you'll come to the same conclusion. Everything in this endgame is about enabling and denying the tactical tricks that would allow the win of the rook or force stalemate.
Opposite-coloured bishops
The endgame that has the reputation of being the most boring and drawish one of all is the endgame with opposite-coloured bishops. And certainly, Vaishali used the trade-down into an endgame with opposite-coloured bishops in the final round of the FIDE Grand Swiss as a great means to force a draw from an otherwise unpleasant position (I've recently analysed this endgame superficially in my Daily blog).
Reputation is one thing. Praxis is something else. Carlsen has shown a great proclivity for these endgames because they're so often misunderstood. Check out these games in which he managed to squeeze blood from a stone against two players with 2700+:
In these games, both sides had an extra rook, which allowed the bishops to team up with their peers. You're up a piece on your colour complex, so an initiative on that colour complex is usually very dangerous.
This changes when all other pieces are traded off. The nature of the game and the role of the minor piece imbalance immediately changes. Because there's no checkmate to play for with just a bishop and a set of pawns, the only remaining way to win such an endgame is to try to bring your own pawn(s) across the board. And especially in these endgames, the stronger side's inadequate control over that other colour complex is often sufficient for the weaker side to hold the game, even if they're sometimes two or three pawns down.
But does that mean that such positions always end in a draw?
If this doesn't convince you that even the most boring-looking endgame is very tactical and interesting, I'm afraid that nothing will.
7. Quick and/or pre-arranged draws
This is the deepest, darkest pit of hell, reserved only for the very worst of our kind. This sin against everything that chess stands for cries out for punishment. These are the fighting scenes in your action-packed movies: everything is choreographed and planned out to the very last detail. Unlike all of the previous Circles, this is the only time that we agree with the popular opinion on how boring it is.
It only recently happened that two well-known Russian chess-players decided upon a Hokey-Pokey on the board and both got rewarded with a loss by forfeit:
It's hard to tell how many people have imitated this game to the letter, because the final position has been reached in over 143 milliard games on chess.com alone.
The Berlin Draw is a fairly common opening line that so far has seen well over 2000 manifestations:
If for whatever ill-conceived reason you decide that you and your opponent must sink to this depth of hell, which we don't condone, at least you can expend the effort to make it more entertaining. Take a look at this draw in 12 moves, which happened in the German youth championships but has appeared in one form or another in a total of 13 different games:
Strictly speaking, the next draw wasn't pre-arranged, but it deserves its place here anyway because it was quite blatantly a gentleman's agreement between two friends who weren't looking for a real battle. By doing so they gave the audience a memorable moment. Have a look at what these two relatively unknown players did while they were being kibitzed:
The gold medal for best pre-arranged draw belongs to two sisters who played at the Dutch youth championships. This pre-arranged draw has some artistic value:
Time's up. Let's move back to the surface.
There are a lot of things in chess that are labeled as boring. Many treat boredom as an enemy, and something to avoid or smash at all times. However, this boredom often only exists on surface level, and the qualification stems from people's impatience and entitlement: they want something to do, and they want it now. But life doesn't always work that way: boredom is part of life, and perhaps one of the most important and overlooked mental skills to master.
When you get deeper into the material and plough through the layers of yawns, you will find that many of these so-called boring matters are actually much more interesting than they might appear at first. Staying with the Hell analogy and the symbols typically used for the diabolical: even the most harmless snake contains venom.
The journey through the drugde may not look too appealing at first, but the rewards of mastering this skill will be more than worth it. And even that little Pokémon excerpt I used above can show this. The caterpillar goes through its cocoon phase to eventually transform into a beautiful sight to behold. At the end of that Pokémon episode, Ash's Metapod evolves into a Butterfree. The beauty follows the bore eventually.
