Simple Chess, plus Incurable Optimism

The December version of Mike Splane’s chess party turned out to be a small affair. Usually we get 12 to 15 people at the parties, but this is a month when people have lots of other things to do. So only five people were there this time: Gjon Feinstein, Jim Bennett, Juande Perea, myself, and of course Mike.

Even with a small group, I thought it was a good, substantive study session. First we went over a very recent game of Jim that was interesting both in the opening and the endgame. In the opening, Jim played an accidental brilliancy — he gave up a piece unintentionally but it turned out his opponent couldn’t keep it, and could at best remain a pawn ahead with an absolutely dreadful position. Jim should have won easily but didn’t really press home his advantage very well, and they got to a fascinating same-color bishop endgame that we spent a long time analyzing. (Jim won, but it probably should have been a draw.)

After that we looked at the game I wrote about in my recent post “Anatomy of a Meltdown.” Mike especially wanted to make a list of questions that you should ask in order to help you come up with a plan, because I had written in my blog post about the difficulty I had formulating a plan in that position. This kind of thinking could be called “Schematic Thinking” to contrast it with analysis. Some of the schematic questions we (mostly Mike and Gjon) came up with were:

• Where are the pawn breaks?
• What are the best and worst-placed pieces for me and my opponent?
• What are the targets?
• What are the possible trades, and which ones are good for me?
• Where are the best squares for my pieces?
• Who would be winning the endgame?
• Who has the safer king?
• What side of the board should I play on?

This is a great list of questions, although it is not entirely clear to me how they would have helped in the specific position I talked about in my blog post. One reason I say that is that I had already answered most of these questions in my mind. The only real pawn break was g3-g4, and I fixated on that move to an unhealthy extent. I didn’t want a queen trade, or any trade really, because I was an exchange down and the endgames tended to be difficult or lost. It was clear that my play had to be on the kingside. Etc.

The one I missed, though, was “Where are the targets?” There were two big targets in Black’s position, the d6 and f5 pawns, and I completely focused on the second without paying as much attention to the first. This led me to miss a very easy plan. Basically I felt as if my only plan was to play the pawn break g3-g4. That break was difficult to carry out, though, and I squandered ten minutes of analysis time trying to make it work.

But that wasn’t the only plan! Pressure on the d-file, doubling the queen and rook, was a very easy and natural plan. As pointed out in my earlier post, it also assists the g3-g4 plan, because as soon as Black’s rook gets tied down to defending d6, it can’t defend f5. In my post I discussed the rather baroque idea of “retreating to attack,” putting the queen behind the rook with Qc3-c2-d1, as discovered by Rybka. But even the utterly straightforward doubling with the queen in front of the rook, by Qc3-d3, is hard for Black to meet.

So to me there were two lessons here. One is not to prematurely decide there is only one plan in the position. Going through the checklist of questions above may be a good way (although, I suspect, rather time-consuming) to arrive at a choice of plans. The second is Occam’s razor. If there are several plans, look at the simplest one first. The g3-g4 break was difficult and unclear. Doubling on the d-file is simple. I tend to gravitate too much toward complicated and creative solutions, thinking that this is “advanced” chess. But in reality, strong players play simple chess a large percentage of the time. It’s one of the most common phrases in Jesse Kraai’s ChessLectures. “Simple chess.”

Finally, there’s one other question on the checklist that I haven’t mentioned yet. It’s a very characteristic one for Mike. He often asks himself, “How am I going to win this game?”

“Mike,” I asked him, “Do you still ask that question if you are in a bad position, or if you are outright losing?”

“Yes,” he said. He did acknowledge that sometimes he might change the question to “How am I going to draw this game?” Nevertheless, I thought this almost incidental conversation highlighted a big difference in our chess games. When I am in a bad or losing position, I often go into a funk, squander a lot of time, and end up making my position worse. Meanwhile, Mike is still sitting there, the incurable optimist, asking, “How am I going to win this game?”

That, my friends, is how you win games that you shouldn’t win — games that leave other players shaking their heads and asking, “How did he pull that out?” And in the last game we looked at, a Kolty Chess Club game that Mike played just last week, he gave us a beautiful example. Against Jan de Jong, he kind of botched the early middle game and, just to survive, he had to give up two bishops for two knights.

Now, I happen to think that two knights against two bishops is a very interesting imbalance, and there are many times when it’s worth going for. In particular, if you have a choice of defending with N+B vs. 2B or defending with 2N vs. 2B, you should strongly consider the two knights, even though it seems “illogical.” The reason is that the two bishops often just end up dominating the N+B. But two knights are just so different from two bishops that you can do things with them that the bishops can’t defend. In essence, it gives you a chance to win.

In this particular game, though, the bishops were clearly better than the knights, and Mike’s position was hanging by a thread for an incredibly long time, like 30 moves or so. But he didn’t panic or go into a funk. He kept asking how he was going to win the game, and that meant centralizing his knights and activating his rook, the one other piece he had to assist them. And bit by bit, he turned the tide. Finally he won a pawn, and then he won another pawn, and then the game.

Maybe I’ll show some positions from this game in a later post, but even without going over any of the details, I think that it was a great lesson. Incurable optimism can be a powerful weapon. So you blundered? Forget it. Just ask yourself how you are going to win from here.

Also, there’s one more thing I want to say about this question, “How am I going to win this game?” I don’t think the point is that you should completely deny reality. It’s about goal-oriented thinking. Mike’s question takes you beyond the immediate, pressing issues of what to do on the next move or in the next 5 moves, and encourages you to see the big picture. Once you can move past the problem of immediate survival, you can start setting up those ingredients for victory. It may even look silly at first, but lots of times “annoying little threats” can snowball into big problems for your opponent.