The Secret of Chess

Only thing fishy here is you. If it says I have been a career diplomat, then it is true.

Sometimes, I have also tried to give Stockfish 8 a pawn advantage, but that usually turns disastrous:

Of course, I made a huge mistake on move 21 with Qg2(leaving d4 unprotected) instead of Qf2.

After 21.Qf2, although Stockfish thinks black is substantially better, it is actually the other way around.

How do you guess this should end?

If that is not a draw, I think white should win, but lines are deep as this is a more closed position.

So actually, if one practices a lot, it is not that difficult to beat Stockfish with more time even without a pawn.

Anyone having beaten Stockfish 8 without a pawn?

I agree there's no need to be rude or insulting but not everyone has been attacking the author.  I haven't.  But I have challenged him to provide some independent evidence to support his claims.  For instance, he claims to be the only person alive able to beat the top chess engines.  You know those engines have ratings well above 3000.  Such a claim requires independent evidence in order to be taken seriously.  Otherwise people are justified for questioning the author's credibility.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about the book.  Just reading the book's preface posted on Amazon suggests to me that its claim, "learn chess 5 times easier" is much more than an overstatement.  If the book has any value at all, it's certainly not as learning tool for beginners and inexperienced players.

That makes you an 1800 then, doesn't it? Of course, I'm being generous: 13 years of rust plus 13 years of advances in the general standard of play might add up to more than 300 points.

According to him?  He didn't say that.  You did.  He didn't say or imply the book should be targeted at grandmasters.  He said he didn't see how anyone could improve by reading the book and he thinks it's useless as a learning tool.  

Indeed, it is not an overstatement. And I will tell you why.

When you put some hard work into it(mainly to remember the patterns), you will go over it in maybe a month or 2. After learning all available patterns, you will not have to study any openings, any tactics and any other chess-related stuff, as the patterns in your head will decide easier what openings to play, which middlegame positions are preferable and when there is some tactical solution available.

If you decide to take an openings course or study a particular opening, you will need years to learn and perfect. So, indeed, pattern recognition is the vastly superior approach to learning chess. As the books also contains terms not covered by others, this makes it even more vaulable, as your chess moves are going to be based on more sophisticated evaluation/patterns recognised.

So, what I have written is true. You need a month or 2 to remember all concepts in the book and then apply them on the board. Of course, one must be open to new approaches to learning chess.

If you are willing to believe the concepts are true and valid and just memorise them, all you have to do is just recognise and repeat those concepts/patterns on the board. If you don't believe, then nothing could be done, I should have added couple of example games taken from WC collections explaining in detail each and every move/pattern, but that would have made the volume over 1000 pages.

I will consider doing this in the future though.

It makes me at least 1600(50 elo drop per year), in case I have not been playing a single game.

It will make me at least 2600(50 elo boost per year), if I have been practicing regularly during that period, even though not competing.

As it is much more the second case, especially emphasised during the last 5 years, I am inclined to believe I have become stronger. What do you think?

How can a book be useless as a learning tool, if it contains a large amount of new terms/knowledge, unknown to mainstream chess science/authors? Is not the purpose of learning to learn something new? Things that are already familar are not a subject of learning. The subject of learning are precisely new things.

He said the book is academic. If it is that much advanced, then the target audience should be grandmasters, eh?

I just lowered the paperback price to 15 dollars, so anyone who would be interested by the paperback edition, might check again on Amazon in 12 hours or so(supposedly the time for Amazon to update), maybe even earlier.

Customer service before all.

Perhaps this is the reason for the lack of sales - you've made your target audience too small

Well they damn well should have - they could have saved every school-child in the Western world many hours of misery spent reading that tedious garbage.

Looks like I've already forgotten - what plumber was that then?

"To read or not to read - that is the question!"

  Adapting a famous Shakespeare quote for the less erudite among us.

Evidently he's referring to Leonard Susskind, the physicist.  When he was young, he worked for his father's plumbing business.  But he was a physicist, not a plumber, when he challenged Stephen Hawking.

"He said the book is academic. If it is that much advanced, then the target audience should be grandmasters, eh?"

Academic does not mean advanced, and I wasn't using it as a compliment (or as an insult). I have no interest in judging how advanced the concepts are. I was just saying it's very theoretical, and not practical. I don't think anyone will want to buy it for learning or teaching chess. Chess engine coders may be able to use it, I don't know.

"If you are willing to believe the concepts are true and valid and just memorise them, all you have to do is just recognise and repeat those concepts/patterns on the board."

Why would anyone do that? Where is the proof that your concepts work?

So would you prefer writing tactics books and puzzles involving mate in 1 or 2, of which there are thousands?

$15 is a good price.

Of course, academic means advanced, I guess you simply don't check what you are writing.

People should buy it only because it offers something new. Why should I do more of the same thing instead of learning something new?

You sure no one will want to buy it, why so? Its only downside seems to be it is using values in centipawns to measure chess knowledge terms, but, once you get accustomed to those, you will simply not want to look at any other way of learning, ever. Because it is much easier to learn and much more precise. Why should be afraid of numbers? People are using point count for pieces, 1, 3, 3, 5, 9 or so, so why not use the very same point count for other positional factors like open files, passed pawns, etc.? Why not?

In which way my assessment for pieces in terms of centipawns is worse then the old way of doing it?

When you know that the bishop is worth more like 330cps instead of 300cps, while the knight more like 310 or so, you already know the bishop, even without the pair of bishops, is much stronger than a knight, so you should not change it as a general rule. So this immediately gives you a more refined assessment and makes you a better player. In what way is this bad? Is this so difficult to learn?

Once you get accustomed, it gets so easy and is such fun. Why would I prefer to know that the bishop and knight are equal instead, 3 points each? That makes me a weaker player.

I will not answer again where is the proof that my concepts work, because I have already did that many times, here too, in different threads, you might want to do a bit of homework before making an attacking sally. You might also want to just read the introduction to 'The Secret of Chess', that is freely available.

In spite of your promise to not attack the author, you are doing precisely that:

- why buy

- no proof

- academic, but not advanced, etc.

People are not interested in general statements. Tell us what you specifically don't like about the book? Which concepts are wrong and why?

I hope so.