How many times do you hear that sort of contrast being drawn? “I’m a positional player.” “I’m a tactical player.” We put ourselves in boxes that we then have trouble climbing out of. “I didn’t want to play that line because it was too tactical.” “That line is too quiet.”

While these words can be truthfully applied to some positions, not all positions can be so easily pigeonholed, and certainly no player can be so pigeonholed. Don’t believe me? Think of former champion Tigran Petrosian. A quiet, maneuvering player - obviously a positional player.

But what typified his games, what was his “signature?” Sacrificing the exchange, a tactical sequence. And who can forget the time he played Tal, when tactics lit up the board with enough fire to satisfy Alexei Shirov. And it was Petrosian doing it, not Tal.

Don’t trap yourself into a style of thinking that’s false. Stop thinking about them as two completely separate and distinct forms of chess. Tactical play exposes positional weaknesses. The foundation stones of good positional play are tactics.

Emanuel Lasker wrote: “With combinations they [chess masters] attempt to refute false values, and by positional play to demonstrate true values. ”

Neither positional play nor tactical play can exist in a vacuum. They enable each other. Instead of “two sides of the same coin” (the metaphor often used) think of them as poles of a magnet. You don’t get one without the other (yes, I know about unipolar magnets, but when you look at them you’ll see they aren’t truly unipolar, they’re just hiding the other pole).

And like magnetic poles, they are attracted to their opposites. Tactical flourishes exist because of poor positional play. Positional weaknesses attract tactics just as surely as the north pole of a magnet attracts the south pole of another.

Next time you’re tempted to think about yourself in terms of tactical or positional, think again. You don’t want to label yourself as half a chessplayer. Where’s the attraction in that?

“…Many players think they could play a good game ‘if they only knew the openings.’ This idea is really crazy. You can improve your opening play at any stage of your career. Make the most of your early years by using them to improve your intrinsic chess skill, rather than memorizing moves, which has very little to do with chess skill…” ~ C. J. S. Purdy (Who else?)

The tactics portion of my coaching notebook is coming along.

I’ve been working with a lot of younger kids this year, and they’ve been highlighting the need for some sort of methodical instruction in those areas, and all of my usual teaching aids are too advanced for them. The first thing I need to work with them on is simply seeing the pieces they can capture. I’m starting to drill into them that the first question they should ask themselves is, “What can I capture?”

When you’ve advanced, you sometimes forget how hard the early steps were to make. When you start going over the thinking process of a chess player, you don’t always realize what you’ve been doing for so long that it’s almost unconscious. And it’s that part of the instruction that I’m finding most valuable to my own play. The kids are forcing me to examine my own thinking in detail, looking for those simple things I do without being conscious of it, so that I can find a way to communicate it to them.

And of course, as I do so, I find habits, conscious and unconscious, thay I’ve developed over the years, which are inefficient or just plain wrong. And another hole gets plugged.

I might make 1900 yet.

In case you’re interested, I hacked the Chessbase output. As a result, after automatic processing, is almost valid. Only three errors. I’d have to rewrite their javascript to get the count any lower. I may yet do that, but I’m not that desperate.

Started working with HTML files generated by Chessbase. I have *never* in my professional career seen such absolute shoddy workmanship. Period. The HTML and javascript it generates should be taken out and shot, just to put it out of our misery. Just because I’m sick and twisted, I popped it into the W3C’s HTML validator. 30 errors. And the structural markup is even worse than that reflects.

Why is it that no one really cares enough to do things right? If Chessbase would have just been able to write good HTML (we’ll leave aside the errors in their javascript and CSS) then other people (like me) could take that output and weave it into websites in ways they mightn’t dream of. But no. They’d rather write crap than create something useful. So I have to waste time hacking their output in order to get something fit to post.
Equal Time proviso: Chess Assistant creates only marginally better code. I really don’t understand why.

Ironic trend in the spam comments…I’m starting to see lots of comments with phrases like “Too much spam” and “Delete all this spam.”

The irony is the comment itself is spam. Sorry guys, you’re still not getting through.

I don’t intend for this blog to become a personal journal, but I can’t resist the urge to note here that this week I won my very first “normal” time control event. First place clear by a full point, no less. Hooo-hah. Ain’t it fun when work pays off?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled content.

No, I don’t mean all books, or even all chess books. Just the majority of them. You know the ones I mean. Khalifman’s leventy-seven volume set on the opening for turquiose according to Rex Reed. The umpty-leven page tome on the latest variation on move 23 of the Ruy.

Seems like everyone writes chess books for people other than the club players who actually might want to improve (of course, as Norwood observes, there are a goodly number of them who don’t).

Chess, as machines play it, is a game of calculations. Chess as humans play it, is a game of logical thought aided by calculation. The difference is simple: machines have the musclepower to calculate faster than humans, while humans are better at using fuzzy concepts to guide their calculations. (While machines can work with fuzzy concepts, no machine uses them as well as a good human does.)

Since that is the defining factor for human chess, why is it so many books ignore that and simply contain one concrete variation after another? The concrete lines are good for the player who has mastered the use of the fuzzy concepts, but those players also have access to the latest in databases, so they really don’t need the concrete lines. The majority of players need help with the acquisition and proper use of the fuzzy concepts of center control, relative piece value, development, etc.

Which brings me to my method for selecting chess books to study (as opposed to chess books to collect, a completely different bug that will suck you dry if you get exposed to it, so be careful out there): Open the book to four random pages. If the words-to-moves ratio on at least three of those pages isn’t at least two-to-1 (and preferably more like 4 or 5 to 1) and it isn’t a tactical “puzzle book,” it goes back on the shelf. Moves and variations I can get easily; I’m after knowledge and understanding, and I don’t get that from chains of moves.

“I’m always staggered when I see a 300 page book containing an in-depth analysis of some sub-variation of the Sicilian Defence - who actually reads all that?”

“You also have to be honest with yourself. Be ready to accept that much of what you are doing is wrong; that is the only way to get it right. The best thing that ever happened to my chess was when I went to the Soviet Union in 1986. I was crushed game after game. It was terrible for my ego but it did illustrate all the weaknesses in my play.”