On “The Secret of Chess”

From the information he gave in the forum, "StockFish is blind", he gave some good evidence on the fact that the book was useful. However, he has also claimed the following:

The book is the best chess book in the world

The book will revolutionize chess

He is the best chess player in the world

He has beat StockFish before

He can beat AlphaZero if he were to play him

All of the grandmasters and chess engines in the world are weak

The facts he gave were:

He got some good reviews

He has an FIDE rating of 2100, which is not near enough to claim to be the best player in the world

He received a mildly positive, yet slightly nuanced review from a GM

Can he prove his claims with this information? NO! Either:

1. He's lying and doesn't realize that the claims are to fraudulent for anyone to believe

2. He's telling the truth, but is once again blind to realizing that his claims are too crazy to believe. He beat StockFish, but thinks that he doesn't need proof to convince people.

3. He is a troll

Doubt he's telling the truth, mainly due to the absurdity of the claims. He is also probably not a troll, cause trolls I have seen are much more immature. So my conclusion is that he is lying/bending the truth. And by bending the truth, I mean more like twisting the truth from a straight line to some sort of Gordian's Knot.

@Lyudmil_Tsvetkov , what is your view on this article?

https://www.chess.com/blog/Ginger_GM/computers-can-also-be-confused

Seems like your book could shed a lot of light on the issues raised by GM Williams!

I don't care what you say, just move the thread back, where it belongs.

So, your SHI**Y thread, completely meaningless, will stay on the main forum, while the instructive thread, where I am developing my theories, will be invisible?

And you will request me not to post here.

Just MOVE the thread back.

Only you could be twisting the truth.

In what way could this be twisting of the truth: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Chess-Lyudmil-Tsvetkov/dp/1522041400#reader_1522041400

I didn't twist the truth, and that link doesn't prove it. Where did I in any way twist the truth? I of the claims I said you made are claims you HAVE made, and all of the claims above have also NEVER been proven. The only proof you have is reviews of your book, a review that a GM gave (which never even HINTED that the book was the "best in the world", and was nuanced on how it could even be MILDLY revolutionary!), and that link you keep posting more so you can get people to buy the book than to give actual proof, since all that link has for proof is more reviews and the fact that the book exists to begin with

I didn't twist the truth, and that link doesn't prove it. Where did I in any way twist the truth? I of the claims I said you made are claims you HAVE made, and all of the claims above have also NEVER been proven. The only proof you have is reviews of your book, a review that a GM gave (which never even HINTED that the book was the "best in the world", and was nuanced on how it could even be MILDLY revolutionary!), and that link you keep posting more so you can get people to buy the book than to give actual proof, since all that link has for proof is more reviews and the fact that the book exists to begin with

Get lost, bunny.

Everybody, but absolutely everybody who has read the book says:

- the most extensive collection of chess terms

- extremely well ordered

- many of the terms are new

That is sufficient for me as a review.

It is not my fault someone is unable to understand the book.

The knowledge is there, the explanations too, it might not be the most intuitive, but the reader should put a bit of effort too.

"Most extensive collection of chess terms" and "many of the terms are new" does not mean anything. It means that you have made a lot of new chess terms. All this says that either:

1. You have made a book with very modern thinking

2. These terms do not have much significant and many are either redundant or useless

3. A mixture of 1 and 2

It does not mean that it is the best chess book in the world, nor that it is revolutionary. And for it being extremely well ordered, that also doesn't prove anything except that you can order things in chess book well.....

By the way, there is NO WAY EVERY SINGLE PERSON THAT HAS READ THE BOOK has said all of that. YOU ARE CRAZY to even THINK to say that EVERY SINGLE PERSON that has read the entire book has said that. What about the people that do not understand it? They won't say that it is well ordered!

Another example, among many, that you are bending the truth. You bend the truth into a pretzel, and then expect people to believe it is in the shape of a line. It's just not happening. People won't believe you. If I were to EVER say things like you, it would be to either make a joke or to be sarcastic. It would never be because I am blind enough to think that I might be able to convince people that the stuff I spit out is true.

I have a second strong titled player review, from IM Gerald Welling from the Netherlands.

It should soon appear on Amazon.

He sent me the text of the review in a mail.

That is what he writes:

Recently the Bulgarian chessplayer Lyudmil Tsvetkov has published a book with the intriguing title “The secret of chess”.  The title and introduction make clear that this is a very ambitious project, but the author is not a wellknown author or chessplayer.  So the first and foremost question may be if Mr. Tsvetkov has the credentials to write a book about chess secrets that have not been uncovered yet. A short journey on the net shows us that his last recorded strength ratingwise is that of a strong clubplayer (candidate master in USCF terminology) and that he has been involved in evaluation methodology for the modern strong chess engines.  That in itself is not an affirmation yet of that important question if quality has been guaranteed in this new and supposedly groundbreaking book.
It is not a surprise that controversy broke out as a result of this, with several sharp denials on one side, and the author stating his immense involvement in the last five years and putting that up is his credentials.  Both sides have their points but this still leaves the potential reader in the dark.

Until the Australian grandmaster David Smerdon, whom I know as a strong and openminded chess player, wrote a review on “The secret of chess”.  He has quite a few critical points to make but also writes that the book is 'a kind of work that legitimately has the potential to revolutionize how we think about chess”.  That is a very interesting statement and made me buy the book at Amazon.de.  This review is a result of collecting my first impressions, because working it through in detail is a herculean job, and will take much more time than I had thus far!

First of all, it is a book about pattern recognition, and we are all aware that this is a effective concept  in chess tuition. The world famous “Steps” method is built on pattern recognition, and many tutorials use this concept.  In this book, a strong club player, strong enough to understand what chess is all about, not strong enough to face titled players with success in a practical game, has done five years of research , methodically evaluating a multitude of positions, testing them (with the help of the strongest engines) and classifying the results in patterns.  Quite a few patterns are clearly new to me, that is I have never considered them before.

What about the method that Tsvetkov used to research the underlying 'secrets of chess' , does it make sense ?  He has used his brain to design a method and to draw up conclusions, and strong engines to help him to verify his evaluations.  Values have been added to the pieces and certain characteristics of the patterns he has researched. Besides he refines the system by adding bonuses or penalties , for example a backward pawn in a pawn structure, or a decentralized knight  is given a penalty bonus on the basic value. There is also a sharp division between middlegame and endgame, where certain characteristics may have a different impact on the evaluation of the position, this sounds very logical.  One of the conclusions that the author draws is that the bishop is a much stronger piece than the knight – except for blocked positions of course – and he really makes a point here. I remember Mikhail Gurevich after winning a game where he faced a so-called 'good knight' that he agreed with Victor Kortchnoi that “a bishop is 'always' better than a knight”.  A bit tongue in cheek, but most chess players may in fact underestimate bishops!  What I conclude about Tsvetkov’s methodology is that is largely empirical, he is finding results, not inventing them.

What themes have been researched by the author ?
material / piece values
mobility

outposts
imbalances
king's safety
general piece activity and coordination

Each theme is illustrated by a number of patterns, and these patterns have been evaluated by attaching values to them. Lyudmil Tsvetkov believes that the knowledge of these patterns will strongly improve the reader's strength in chess. He states that by these five years of intense chess research, he has gained quite a considerable playing strength, compared to what he understood about chess before he took on this task. That is possible, but can not be verified on games with engines alone, as games with humans require different skills.  But, judging the examples he used in the book, and the enormous amount of time spent on them, I am ready to believe this has been very substantial to his current chess understanding which must have improved considerably.  I remember books like Ziatdinov's “GM-Ram” claiming that there is a certain amount of 'positions' that you should know in order to play well.  In this book it is a number of about 1.000.

My general opinion on the book is quite positive but it has it's weaknesses as well. Layout and use of English language are important, but are not major issues in my opinion, and not being a native speaker nor being an expert in layouts I do not feel qualified to comment on that.  Could have been better, but not the most important aspects of the book.  What is clearly more important is the question if the goal of this book has been attained.  A chess manual like this should  inform and teach the reader about the (new) conclusions that the author has drawn up. The introduction stated that the book should be of use to a large range of potential readers, from weaker to stronger players and computer programmers. I clearly agree with Smerdon that the book is written like a mathematics textbook.  Which harms it's accessibility for the general reader and makes it quite a tough job to work it through.  What I am still missing is a good didactic method to transfer the revolutionary knowledge in this book to the reader in an easily digestible form. In this form I can imagine computer programmers are happy. But the other part of the potential customers would probably have liked to have seen the interesting conclusions in this book in textual form and generalizations which makes learning a lot easier.  It adds to acceptance of this new book to know how the author has worked and see proof of that.  For example in tables with values, but I do not want to remember hundreds of them...  Still, I think this book has a lot to recommend it, is a highly modern manual of chess patterns, but there is still a lot of individual work involved to formulate the knowledge to our own purpose (a form that we can memorize easily).