A short rant about puzzles

“What are those pictures for?”

One of the kids in my Aptos Library chess club was looking at the page I had opened to in Chess Tactics for Kids. Probably he had never looked at the inside of a chess book before. It’s the sort of question that kids sometimes ask — a question whose answer on the surface seems completely obvious, but then it makes you stop and think.

Okay, obviously, the pictures are there so that I can set up the positions on the demonstration board. But I think that Shane’s question was a little deeper than that. Why do we want to look at just those positions? Why don’t we look at the whole game? This question is related to the issues that Carina brought up in her very thoughtful comment on my most recent post. She talks about how she has been frustrated by puzzles, and by the implicit assumption that if you can’t solve this puzzle then you’re just no good, you have no talent, etc., etc.

I explained to Shane that we can’t look at the whole game because we don’t have enough time. The positions on this page have a specific theme, the theme of deflections. If we looked at the whole game, we would be distracted by a lot of things that are irrelevant to deflections. It’s as if we are putting a specific moment in the game under a microscope. (Okay, I didn’t explain it quite so cleverly.)

But there is something fundamentally unrealistic about all these puzzles, even if they come from real games. Especially if they come from real games. I think of a chess game as a living organism. Every move is connected to the next move, both chessically and psychologically. When you separate the cell from the organism, you inevitably distort it. In a real chess game, you never start looking at a position with a completely blank slate, as you do when you pluck it out of a textbook. You always have holdovers in your mind from previous moves — plans that are active, previous plans that you’ve abandoned, emotions from your past good moves or your past blunders, impressions about what your opponent is likely to play.

In the puzzle you don’t see any of this. You don’t see the moves that the master made preparing the sacrifice. Or you don’t see that the sac was a lucky opportunity that dropped into his lap. Or that the sac may have worked perfectly well the previous move, or may have worked even better with more preparation. Perhaps the most egregious distortion of reality is the problem-like brilliancy that didn’t actually occur in the game. Sometimes such a move had no chance of happening, because neither player ever suspected that anything like it was possible!

If a move has essentially zero chance of actually being played, how important is it for us or our students to learn about it? This is a question that was very relevant for my lesson on deflections. Right now, my students are struggling just to learn that they should protect their pieces. Perhaps I shouldn’t confuse them by pointing out that looks may be deceiving. (Their defender may not really be doing its job because it can be deflected away.) At their level of skill, perhaps I should just praise them for getting the idea of protection right. The move that might be a mistake for a class-A player may actually be a good move, and a sign of progress, for the beginner or class-E player.

Let’s talk a little bit also about the assumption that if you can’t find the “right” answer to the puzzle, you must be a bad player. I’d like to compare a chess game to a quilt. My wife is a professional quilter, but that doesn’t mean that every stitch she makes is perfect. Nor does it have to be. To make a very good quilt, it’s enough to make very good stitches most of the time. It’s also very important to have an overall vision for the quilt, and that’s something that you can never learn if you focus on one stitch at a time.

So what can we learn from chess puzzles, and what are their limitations?

1. There are certain mechanical techniques in chess that you can learn by solving puzzles, or having the solution shown to you.
2. However, a puzzle is always an artificial construct, even if it comes from a real game. In real life, you will never approach a position with a “blank slate,” as you do when you solve a puzzle from a book.
3. Thus your performance on chess puzzles is only an imperfect indicator of how you will do during a game. Maybe the master who found the brilliant combination in the book only reached that position because he saw the combination coming. You, on the other hand, would have played differently five moves earlier, and maybe your idea would have worked just as well. So don’t get discouraged. Also, on the other side of the coin, don’t get too complacent if you solved the problem correctly. All right, but would you have solved it if you didn’t have an annotator tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “White to play and win”?
4. A chess game is an organism. You can learn something about an organism by studying its cells, just as you can appreciate something about a quilt by looking at the individual stitches, but you will never understand the whole organism that way.
5. Therefore you should not study only puzzles. You should study complete games as well (and your own games are the best ones to study).
6. In spite of all this, puzzles are useful. Just make sure you study them with realistic expectations. If you can’t solve the puzzle, don’t beat yourself up over it. Or if you’re teaching and your students can’t solve it, don’t beat them up! It may not really matter all that much.