Learn From The GOATs

From MooseMouse, for use in scholastic clubs, feel free to share.

Learn from the GOATs

Many of the Greatest Chessplayers Of All Time played in New York 1924, considered to be one of the strongest tournaments ever, with three world champions topping a ridiculously strong field.

Expert Steve Lopez has graciously taken all 110 games of this tournament and explained them for us in terms that ordinary beginning chessplayers like you and me can understand and learn from.

There are different ways you can benefit from this treasure trove of wisdom:

• You could just hit the autoplay button and catch the flow of entire games in a minute.
• You can click through the game quickly, and make observations, like: Do masters actually castle most of the time? How did one side win or lose material? If it's an endgame, does the side with the more active king usually win? If it's a draw, how was it reached?
• You can just play through the move at a normal pace, reading and learning from Steve's notes.
• You can play "Guess the Move." Pick a player and take time to try to guess their every move. Then after you see the actual move played, read the notes and learn why they did or didn't make the move you selected.

Famous chess coach NM Dan Heisman recommends all of the above methods. He also gives three basic premises:

• "The more master level games you play over, the more you intuit how masters play chess.
• "The more text annotations you read, the more information about chess you receive.
• "The more times you play over the same game, you get diminishing returns on what you learn on each replay."

So pull up a chair, relax, enjoy and learn from the GOATs!

Who won? See the Wikipedia article on New York 1924.