The Q & A Way
Bruce Pandolfini
www.ChessCafe.com
Question:
There are chess masters who are extremely talented and they work really hard. I have heard it said that Capablanca never worked, but I don’t believe it. He must have worked in order to get ahead. I do not think he would have become a master otherwise. But this is not the question I wanted to ask. The question I wanted to ask concerns what one does when reading through a gamescore. I have heard it said that you have to play over every single note and analyze every single variation in order to derive any value from reading through a game. Otherwise it is just wasting time. What do you think? I am a firm believer in the great principle that without any pain there is no gain. I’d rather work my brains to the bone if that is the way to get ahead. Thank you for your consideration on this question. Any suggestions (besides stopping to smell the roses)? Hopefully, you won’t be too mean. I don’t want to become a pawn in the game. Andrew Murphy (USA)
Answer:
Mean? Let’s start by not being mean to Capablanca. It’s trivial, but he wasn’t just a master. He was a grandmaster and, better yet, an incredible world champion. As I say, however, this is a small point and not what your question’s ostensibly about. Of course you don’t have to play over every single note to derive benefit from a game. Many people enjoy playing through games without looking at any notes whatsoever. They let the game tell its own story, blemishes and all. Place too much emphasis on trying to fathom each nuance in the position, devouring every note to the extent that the process becomes laborious, and you might not grasp the overall art, or, for that matter, very much useful information.
In some cases the art is more likely to come through by merely experiencing the game as a journey, which in the end explains and justifies itself. It’s called the final position. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep your focus. Nor does it imply that you shouldn’t try to understand what’s going on. Indeed, you should. But to think that you can only gain from pain is a false principle that tells us more why we often hate our jobs than how a few of us happen to succeed. Even without endless toil, successful-type people might succeed anyway, undoubtedly enjoying the consequences exceedingly more. If you don’t want to be a pawn in the game, you can still appreciate a bit more the pawns on the board. There, that’s not too mean.
Here is the full article.
Capablanca is a genius.
The: “here is the article in full”
does not give the article.
O.K., while I disagree with both opinions
– no pain no gain, and
– just playing through the game without annotations will teach you something,
I think the addressed problem [How to improve in chess] is a very interesting one.
In my opinion, every great achievement in any field (sports, science…) is preceeded by a lot of effort that was put into it by sb in order to get as good at it.
The question now is: why do some people NOT get really this much better EVEN IF they try very hard?
The answer IMO lies somewhere in the fact HOW YOU absorb your training; that means in chess, how much you really can gain by – for example – reading one single chess book.
I bet there are a lot of people (very often including myself) who are reading a chess-book, and after they have finished it, they didn’t really absorb the input and haven’t gained any new/additional knowledge or ability.
On the other hand i’m sure that people who achieve great things are very good at absorbing new information and being able to utilize it immediately for their benefit; maybe one can compare it to a fuel-efficient car, that uses the input (=gas) much better than other cars.
So, over time these people will of course gain much much better knowledge and abilities than ‘normal’ guys like you and me.
However, I’m convinced that everybody can work on the improvement of his/her own ‘knowledge-absorbation’ and next time gain more out of a chess book than they did before.
In order to achieve this one will of course have to pay great attention to which chess-book one selects to study. For example, the highly-acclaimed Dvoretsky books may not be the books for everybody, and studying an opening book may only give you benefit once you have already some advanced knowledge about pawn structures etc.
So, to sum it up, the specific TRAINING PLAN and STUDY MATERIAL plays a very great role in getting better, and maybe the best is to have a good trainer that puts together an INDIVIDUAL TRAINING PROGRAMME for somebody.
That’s also how I understand the principle of the Botvinnik-school that -among others- Kasparov attended.
In addition to my last post I also wanted to point out that absorbing input/information is also closely related to the time it takes you to -for example- read/study a chess-book.
I bet that people that gain a lot out of a chess book are also the ones who finish a chess book much quicker than others.
So, if it takes you 12 weeks to work through an opening book, I rather bet that you also didn’t learn/absorb too much out of it.
An interesting example here may be Magnus Carlsen, who is able to change his opening repertoire nearly monthly; he definitely needs to have a high rate of absorbing information and he is definitely must be quick in reading/studying openings etc.