GM Grigoryan on the "Myth" of Solving Puzzles

As for what is meaningless. For instance my father today is maybe a bit weaker than I am, after him not playing chess for years and years. At his best, he was probably around my level today (a bit weaker or stronger, I am not sure).

Do you know how he got there? He never had any resources we have today. He got there by playing games in person against friends and colleagues, and he never was in any club, never played tournaments, so he just played casual games, probably a lot less than people from chess.com do because he played OTB.

So anyway, what took me some effort, he achieved years ago just by playing games. It doesn't make what I did (tactical exercises, analysis and all the other things) pointless, it means that perhaps he is a bit more talented than myself, and it worked for him. If he would use the same logic, he could say that below some advanced level, there is no need to study anything, just play games and you will be fine. In a way you could say that the way you figured out openings he figured out to be on some ok level tactically.

If you figured out Maroczy setup all by yourself, it means you have some innate talent positionally, because when you first look at it, it seems as if white is giving away an important square in the middle of the board (but in practice that square is not easily exploited and white has a lot of space as compensation).

By the way, I wasn't speaking about pure memorization. Pure memorization is fine for the first few moves on this level. I was generally speaking of just looking at opening explorer after the game, to see if we did something really bad and plugging holes in our play that way. Along with it, looking at some master games on intermediate level, to see some ideas will not hurt either.

Even though people will not know a lot of theory on this level, I still got some thematic tactical stuff in some of my games, and some ideas were used as well.

Kartikeya - Let me show you a game that demonstrates just how useless theory is. The opening, in case you didn't know, is called the Double Muzio Gambit. It's something no sane person would play without knowing the theory because it looks absolutely idiotic. The thing is, there's a method to the madness, and in the Lichess database, white wins a huge percentage of games.

Now I castle on move 5 and my oppenent thinks I'm an idiot. If my opponent doesn't know the theory, they will think I am either a moron or accidentally premoved castling. I mean just look! I'm giving up a free piece! Idiocy. And yet, if black takes that knight, they will lose 57% of the time.

Let's continue. On move 7, I push a pawn giving up more material... still theory. It's to deflect the queen, and unless you're psychic and can calculate what is going to happen to you if you take it, you take the free pawn. So while I'm at it, let's sacrifice another piece. I mean I'm already an idiot and down a bunch of material, why not give up a bishop? The king takes the free piece and puts itself in line with the queen. White wins 60% of games from here.

I push the pawn to d4. How dumb is that? Not only am I giving up another pawn, but I'm giving up another pawn *with check*! Pure idiocy. If the queen takes that pawn, it loses 65% of games. This is still theory. White is down 8 points of material, and wins 65% of the time. Yep, people have found all of those over the board without the aid of theory.

Move 10 I move the bishop to attack the queen. I can do this because the pawn is pinned, so the black queen retreats to the most natural square defending the king. Move 11 I move out the knight. But you're hanging the bishop, you say! If black takes that bishop, that free bishop, they lose 81% of the time. My opponent takes the free bishop. Black is up two bishops, one knight, one pawn, and is dead lost. Still theory and Stockfish reads +8.2. I've done everything wrong and my opponent is dead because I know the theory of the Muzio to move 14.  The rest is just a series of windmills and black is toast.

Do I play the Muzio every time? No. That would be boring. But it's a hell of a lot of fun to pull off OTB and look at your opponent's face as they think you're some kind of moron giving up all of your pieces. If you're black, you need to know the theory to survive this, and you need to not make the most seemingly obvious moves.

Playing an opening like the KG without knowing a few moves is surely recipe for disaster. So I give you that you will get a few easy wins in this line against most opponents. The problem is that knowing those concrete moves will help you in this particular line only. Unfortunatelly (or fortunatelly)  you cannot really force an unprepared opponent to voluntarily stumble into a super sharp line that ends with +-. Some might be naive enough to do so, but many will play something like 1... d5 and then you will be on your own. On the other hand, while being harder to achieve, being tactically sharp, or knowing how to exploit positional weaknesses will guide you in basically every position and thus improve your overall playing strength. That's why in my opionion it's more useful for the average player to focus on these things... Of course, opening study, can be a part of that, if it's not just about memorizing lines, but understanding middle game plans and ideas.

I didn't just memorize these particular moves. I studied a bunch of Muzio games and learned a lot about tactical ideas, the importance of things like deflection, and the importance of initiative over material.

Studying games where tactics happened is better than doing puzzles. Puzzles can be random. Puzzles often come up in lines that you never play or in positions that you will never reach. If you study games in openings that you actually play, you gain the same advantages of doing puzzles with the added benefit of having them being of more practical use in the games you actually play.

Again, I don't play the Muzio. I've played it maybe three of four times since that game, because honestly, that's the perfect Muzio and will never be topped. Saying that the only thing I learned was a bunch of memorized moves is just wrong.

Besides, as I understand it, "useless" means of zero utility. That's dumb. Clearly there are many cases where the utility is non-zero. Getting a better position into the middle game because you know theory is not of zero utility.

I'll say it again even though I keep screaming it from the rooftops and nobody listens: studying openings is NOT memorizing lines. If you're just memorizing lines the applicability is limited. Studying an opening, which also involves reading and understanding the annotations, especially an opening with long lines, teaches you a lot about why certain moves are good and some are bad. It's as simple as that.

At the end of the day like @nklristic said - alot of it comes down to talent and style of play.

I have a friend who's 1700 and literally never learned opening lines or solved puzzles. Never. He's just talented. He was a casual 1200 before covid... His tactical vision and opening play is just sublime, he's super solid and never misses anything when we play, he could easily be 2000+ if he worked at it...

Very often he gets slightly worse positions out of the opening but he always fights back.

Me on the other hand, I was probably 800 for quite a while, and I needed to study tactics and opening theory to get to my modest 1550... (I started at age 28 and he is playing pretty much his whole life but very casually)

What's possible, and time will tell, is maybe I reach 2000 in a few years due to my work ethic and he stays at 1700 because he could never bother to do anything but play... Who knows? 

So yeah, studying tactics, opening theory, strategy, endgames and master games are ways to maximize your potential, and everyone has different potential, due to age, talent, motivation, life status etc... Like a previous comment said, someone with the potential to be 2500, can very likely reach 1800 without solving puzzles or knowing theory, but he may very well have no motivation to even approach maximizing his potential, cuz what's the point, actually?...

I for one just felt I did want to push myself, because my of an inner feeling of dissonance that my understanding of the game was similar to a 1500 and yet my play was sub 1000 for a while, so I was like "hey, I wanna be 1500"... and guess I'm happy... I see no point in naturally talented 1800s trolling people who had to work for it claiming "it's a waste of time and you can reach this rating just by playing and anlaysing"... it's childish and annoying. 

Ok so i tried my best to figure out how i would play against it and i did see that d4 move but understood that the idea was to activate the bishop so probably would not have taken the pawn.

Anyways, i think for blitz / bullet it can be very useful but in longer time controls this opening would likely be disastrous for white

I won't call d4 d5 c4 Nf6 an "opening" mistake since it's pretty obvious why it's not so good. cxd5 Nxd5 and white gets to play e5 with tempo... this is not really an opening mistake, it's more of a calculation mistake.

That aside, having a good position does not really matter much since tactical mistakes can happen out of nowhere. Just missing a single move is enough to lose the game. At lower ratings you can constantly be having a good position but u will just "miss" something and the opponent will win. It's more about who made their last blunder. Strategy, positoning, opening nothing really matters at sub master level, it's just wild west of blunders, weak moves and horrible tactics.

I mean the master who looked those games was constantly looking for if one player got a big advantage out of the opening and if that was the case then he put those games under the "opening mistake" category. It just doesn't happen often in longer time controls. We are talking about weak players here, do you think any of us could adequately punish 1.h4? i don't think so

Don’t matter much because they can come out of nowhere… again, this is dumb. It’s like saying wearing a seat belt doesn’t matter because you can die anyway. It’s like saying getting vaccinated doesn’t matter because you can still get sick.

Probability vs. possibility… look into it.

Wait. What? You just totally contradicted yourself! On the one hand you say that opening theory doesn't matter below Master level, and then you turn around and say it's a mistake that no master would make? Hello?!?!?! Duh! Someone who is lower rated is more likely to fall for a mistake that an opening makes possible. You JUST admitted that openings matter. Yay! I win!

By the way, you're just wrong about your facts. Nakamura beat Andreikin with the Muzio Gambit in 2010. Both players were over 2600. Sure it was a blitz game, but if Nakamura had 1 minute and you had an hour, you'd still get checkmated in the Muzio.

The way I see it: the more your positional play improves, the more tactics tend to work for you, and the less they tend to work against you.

And positional play doesn't have to be obscure, grandmaster-level ideas. In every main opening, there are common ideas to keep in mind, general pawn structures to remember, and thematic piece-placements to aim for.

These can start, at a basic level, as things to watch for in the opening. Then it can extend (at a more advanced level) to things to aim for in the middle-game.

A player who is aware of these general ideas is likely going to do better than the player who isn't.

And if you work on improving your knowledge of these positional ideas, you'll find that sometimes (not always, but sometimes) winning tactics will fall into your lap, because of it.

This doesn't mean that tactics are no longer important. Your tactical vision is still a main "weapon" of yours. Improving your positional understanding is simply a way to improve your knowledge of where and how to aim that weapon.

It's like a captain saying, "That hill is crucial to our stronghold! Make sure nobody gets to it!" The gunner has a plan to follow.

As opposed to another captain saying, "Just fire your weapon at anything that moves!" Then the gunner starts shooting at birds in the sky.

It was blitz and i have already said that opening memorization only matters in blitz / bullet.

Also, no... nakamura can't checkmate me if he had 1 minute vs mine 60 minutes in that gambit line

Ok. I went over to the Lichess database and looked ONLY at classical games, because you can do that there. The Muzio Gambit has been played in 2219 classical games and white has won 51% of those. In one of those classical games, a certain artem-us (rated 2311) defeated a certain TOMNS (rated 2099). In another, a certain Stop_rob (2315) defeated Vikas043 (2203).

2219 classical games and white wins 51%. Sorry, I've got numbers that directly refute your claim and you have wind.

And I still think you get checkmated by Nakamura....

Edit: even funnier: I looked at daily games! Even with all of that time to think, black only wins 51% of games. Your exact words were "it would be disastrous for white." Black winning slightly over half the time isn't great for white, but it's hardly disastrous. In the same time control, if white plays the Accelerated London and black responds with 1...Nf3 2...c5, black wins 55% of the time, so it's better than the London System. Disastrous would have to mean way more losses than wins. In the Muzio, a certain Yaskoetemovic (2173) defeated a certain Aleksi98 (2013) by checkmate in 15 moves... in a daily game.

Lichess ratings are very inflated so i won't look too much into that. 2100 in lichess is like 1800 in chess.com and i have said several times that anything below masters is fair game, nothing can be said about those games since people make blunders every single move.

I have never ever seen muzio but if u want we can play an unrated 45+45 game with u playing the muzio. U know the theory while i don't but i think it's still a bad line for white since white player is relying heavily on his tactical abilities.

One another thing is that in no titled classical games u will find muzio being played, not in a serious tournament... there is a reason for that.

kartikeya

Here is a game I played against a lower rated player in 25+5. Of course, white lost the game due to a tactical error, namely 28.Nd3?? but his position was lost when he played a4. 

However, my opponent let me equalize very, very easily early on in the game, and black had a very comfortable position. I used four minutes of my time, while my opponent was in time pressure (under 1 min) by the time he resigned. 

These kinds of mistakes make your position unnecessarily difficult, which increases the chances of mistakes occurring. In my game, white continuously traded pieces down, which is exactly what black wanted to happen. In the end, there were too many infiltration points into white's position due to his large space advantage.

I agree more with GM Grigoryan's perspective

I find puzzles useful, but my study is not exclusively focused on puzzles. Currently I’m reading Thomas Engqvist, 300 Most Important Chess Positions with the intention to complete the book in two months. Engqvist recommends a full year and already I have ample evidence that my rapid process courts trouble.

His 300 positions cannot be solved tactically. They require (and develop) positional understanding.

My strong suspicion is that if puzzles are used to try to improve, the opposite will happen. They are actually bad for our chess (including tactical vision) because they are marked wrong if you don't exactly follow the recommended line. Do a few occasionally, at the most.