Myers Briggs and chess

Does your personality type affect how strong u r?

I am an entp which means extrovert intuitive thinking perceiving

That means I like people. Big picture ideas and open minded

But I don't think that is good for chess.

I think Bobby Fischer was also an extrovert because he liked playing chess with people outside instead of being alone at his house and playing chess on the internet

I would say big picture ideas and being open minded are exactly what you want for chess. There are so many tricky concepts in chess where you have to question what you know a bit and find a creative solution. And so much of chess relies on planning ahead in one way or another.

I'm kind of in the middle regarding that. I don't think a testing system is likely able to summarize who you are as a whole with too much success, but it can give a noticeable impression of a person nevertheless. I think you have to pay money for the "real" myers briggs, with the free internet ones just crappy imitations of it :)

but the internet was invented by Darpa in the 1960s

Agree you have to be willing to challenge ideas, and somewhat agree on the big picture thing, but would you really describe them as tricky concepts? All the concepts I know I would call really simple and easy. The difficulty for me is applying them to make good moves :p

I would have guessed a personality that's more tunnel vision than big picture would be ideal for chess.

This I agree with.  They're so explicit that you can get any result you want (optimizing your chances for the job you want consciously.)  At least Rorschach tests go under the radar and you aren't aware of what means what. That's the one with the angels with big butts, imposing monster with a dragon, butterfly, coat of arms with guinea pigs, etc., (on different cards.)

Oh yeah for sure they're tricky -- I think I'm the opposite with you here. When to open the center, when to commit your pawns, where to put a piece, do I put it here right now or will it just get kicked away (premature), I'm thinking about subtleties pretty much on every move. Of course subtleties you already know will be easy to play, that's why we have good blitz players, but that simply means that a hard multiple choice question you previously got the answer to will not be a hard one anymore :)

And even the concepts we do have ingrained in us can always be used to come up with much more complex ones that requires you to use these concepts in relation with each other or multiple times. It can be quite an art form coming up with proper plans.

Chess was nothing like, say, physics for example for me. I never feel like I'm being bogged down by trying to remember formulas and put numbers into them. If I'm bogged down it's because I just can't grasp the concept, whether that means I can't find a candidate move, plan, etc. Like philosophy basically.

Chess and simplicity... I could never imagine that :) It's obnoxiously complex in almost every way.

If you have tunnel vision you get the problems of an engine without the calculating skill to back it up :)

Where to put a piece, and when to do it I agree is the hard part, but I don't think of these as concepts. I'd say piece activity and tempo are the concepts, and are easy. Using them to make good moves is the hard part.

You say where you get bogged down is the concept part. I'm guessing again we're using the word differently. What takes up most my time is trying to decide if this or that is better. All the time, this or that, this or that. Even against weak players in a nice position, which maintains the most advantage? (be it a move or general idea) So yeah, if you're pushing yourself (and your opponent isn't terrible), you're going to be confused a lot. But to me that's not for lack of a big picture.

Imagine analyzing a tough position for 30 minutes and being confused, feeling like you have no idea what to do, and then explaining everything you DO understand about the position to a 1200 player... it's going to sound like you understand everything, and you've spent 30 minutes agonizing over some microscopic subtlety.

And that's what I meant by tunnel vision. In retrospect it sounds like "dogmatic" but that's not what I meant. I meant the ability to agonize over these "little things" to the point you tell yourself you must be a clueless idiot

In my mind the "big picture" personality likes to get creative, and hey, I'll sac my rook for a pawn for a "psychological edge" ...

Well yeah, anything can be a this for that decision; the problem is actually finding a basis for the correct decision :)

I don't see why we can't make a lot of things that go into our decisions concepts. Deciding whether to put a piece into enemy territory has a lot to do with weighing the risk of losing time versus the benefits of hitting something in your opponent's territory before he has a chance to consolidate his position. You might think you have to do something active based on understanding other things in the position -- perhaps your opponent's plan doesn't have a way of being stopped by normal means. Even to figure that out you'd have to think of what goes into the opponent executing his plan. All of this is good old fashioned logic -- dozens of concepts connecting to each other all over the place. If it's not concepts that helps us understand these things I don't know what it would be -- we certainly don't calculate every possible line through until we come out a knight up in some line.

Yeah, we may mean different things when we use "tunnel vision" and "big picture." It's sort of a mix: You want attention to detail, but only insofar as it helps your whole position. Like, you may obsess over just one square, and very specific variations to get your piece to that square, but the only reason you're doing that is because you understand what that e5 square means for the position as a whole -- otherwise your calculations are a total waste of time -- like a beginner calculating the consequences of 1 a4. So I think of it as a lot of attention to detail... over how the position as a whole makes sense. Sort of like the examples I gave in the above paragraph.

Even in tactical situations, if you focus so much on just one very specific goal, for example, just insist you have to trap the guy's bishop, you may miss that even if you do trap his bishop, something more important happens that your opponent can take advantage of. Or maybe the time wasted in winning the bishop allows an attack (for the opponent) that previously was impossible. Not looking at the whole board is one of the easiest ways to make horrible mistakes, tactical or positional.

It is my beliefe that this is why kids can excel so quickly at chess. They have very few limitations in their thinking.

By the time you become an adult you've "learned all the things that AREN'T possible".

I don't even know what is an introvert/extrovert.

You don't have Google in Pakistan?

I thi.k detail oriented is better because u have to calculate

chessmicky wrote:

Not the internet, but the ancestor of the indoesternet: slow, very few resourses, and mostly restricted to military use. In fact, funding for DARPA and related programs was under constant threat in the budget-making process. But a young congressman named Al Gore Jr. had some sense of the possible potential for a large, generally available public network, and fought to preserve funding. 

Does that mean al gore invented the internet?

I think we're using the word concept to mean different things. It almost sounds like you're using concept to mean any idea. In that case I agree, you have dozens of competing bits of knowledge and you wade in trying to take what works and discard the rest.

i guess you have to be born with the right personality to be good at something in life