Chess — The "What the **** do I move now?" Thing

Al GJ

A couple of years ago, in an effort to improve my chess, I began reading Jeremy Silman’s book The Amateur’s Mind: Turning Chess Misconceptions into Chess Mastery. Silman was a respected US chess coach, author and International Master (he died in 2023). Silman states in the first paragraph of his book

The heart of my system of training is based on an understanding of the dynamic and static differences (known as imbalances) that exist in every position. By recognising the different imbalances in a given situation, a player of virtually any strength can understand what his responsiblities are towards that position with relative ease.

By ‘responsibilities’, Silman means that the chess student must only consider moves that are revealed by the careful examination of the ‘imbalances’ in the position. Examples are:

Minor Pieces — the interplay between Bishops and Knights.
Pawn Structure — including doubled pawns, isolated pawns, backward pawns, passed pawns etc.
Space
Material
Files and Squares — their access, domination and control as well as the creation of weak squares in enemy territory.
Development — a temporary imbalance.
Initiative — again a temporary imbalance.

Silman’s idea in the book is to present a position to a number of his pupils, each of whom has a different rating. Silman gives the players a chance to evaluate and comment on the position and then he plays it out against them. He kicks things off by discussion of the bishop versus knight and then presents three of his pupils with the following position:

He warns his students

Before you get carried away, let me remind you: DON’T look at individual moves! In fact, never calculate until you understand the basic components (imbalances) of the position.

Silman’s pupils should note these imbalances and use them to guide their play. According to Silman, the main theme of this position should be ‘the bishop-knight imbalance’. The position is from one of Silman’s own games, Silman–Gross in the 1992 American Open and of it Silman remarks

Of course, I didn’t expect my students to play as I did in the Silman-Gross game. White’s play was rather subtle and is not something a class player would ordinarily come up with.’

(A class player is defined by the United States Chess Federation as one that has a rating below 2000).

It comes as no suprise then that two of his pupils failed to detect the imbalance and all of them failed to do anything with it. In fact the 1200 and 1600 rated players swapped the bishop for a knight thus obviating the supposed bishop-knight imbalance. As for the 1000 rated player, the whole business was completely over his head. I grappled with Silman’s book and got nowhere with it. The whole concept of assessing a position in terms of the ‘imbalances’ within it was just too abstract for me. I do not have the level of skill that would enable me to make use of such a concept. Fast forward to a couple of months ago and I came across a book provocatively entitled Move First, Think Later: Sense and Nonsense in Improving Your Chess by Dutch IM and chess coach Willy Hendricks, a book that won the 2012 ECF Book of the Year award. In the Preface we are immediately presented with the following position and the statements below it

Yes, I consider myself to be a rational person.
Yes, I played 20...Kb8 in this position.
No, plenty of time left on the clock.
Spent more than ten minutes on this move.

That looks like the kind of chess I play. This example vividly illustrates the mysterious oversights that can affect the chess player, and in his book Hendricks, inspired by ‘some of the old questions and new insights of the cognitive sciences ...’ . attempts to investigate how the chess player perceives and processes the information contained within the arrangement of pieces upon the squares of the chess board. In other words, he attempts to answer the question “How do chess players think about a position?” Hendricks has definite, and some may say, controversial views, on a common method of teaching players how to think about a position, a method which he believes is totally at odds with the way chess players really think.

I would like to expose a basic assumption which seems completely self-evident to many chess trainers, and which serves as the foundation of many chess manuals. I admit I have stuck to it my self for a long time as well. This assumption is that a player can, by applying a set of general rules and principles, elucidate the chracteristics of the position, and having done so may easily perceive the correct move to make.

He gives an example of a typical exchange between pupil and trainer:

Trainer: You’ve had the chance to have a look at the position. What’s it about, what are the most important characteristics of this position? Paul, do you have an idea? Paul: Uh, yes, I would play Rc6 and if he takes it I will have Nd5. Trainer: Yes, you come up with moves right away. But let’s go back to the characteristics of the position. Can you say some thing about them? Paul: Well, uh, Rc6 threatens to take on d6, I don’t see what Black can do about it, if he takes, I take back and Nd5 is coming, what can he do then?

Hendricks maintains that many chess manuals are guilty of using the same pedantic tone that the trainer above is using. The central idea of such books is that you should not try out moves at random but instead take note of the ‘characteristics’ of the position. These will then guide you in the formulation of a general plan of action, and only then can you begin the search for a valid move. Hmm, this rings a bell. Hendricks calls this approach the ‘look and you will see’ doctrine and he dismisses it bluntly as nonsense.

No chess player thinks like this, no one has learned to play chess by thinking like this and even trainers and authors of chess books don’t think like this.

He cites as an example of the ‘look and you will see’ approach a book — yes, you guessed it — Silman's The Amateur’s Mind, and Hendricks reproduces the position from Silman’s book that I showed earlier. For Hendricks, Silman’s approach illustrates “in a nutshell the misconception of the ‘look and you will see’ doctrine.” Authors and trainers who use such an approach, says Hendricks, are forgetting that they themselves do it the other way round:

In the position they have selected to illustrate something, they already know the strongest move. Then they pretend that this move is a logical consequence of their description of the characteristics of the position, whereas they are only adapting those to the move they already know is strong. For the trainer it’s easy to get convinced that this is the way it works. It’s appealing to think that the moves you see follow logically from the characteristics of the position you look at. And that someone else who looks at the position in the same way you do can end up with the same moves, using the same logic, intellectual effort, and guidelined thinking.

If this were true, then Silman’s three students mentioned above would have come up with moves that made full use of the bishop-knight imbalance the way Silman himself had done. Hendricks’ point of view is that

for a chess player it is almost impossible to look at a position without looking at individual moves. In any case I would not advise you to do so, because you would be depriving yourself of a very effective way to get at the essence of the position. For the trainer, this means that the primacy is with the positions he discusses. Positions are not examples illustrating more general principles – they constitute the actual learning material.

Hendricks maintains that there is another, more effective method of approaching a position, a method which is highly despised by traditional didactics. That method is trial and error, and of it Hendricks states

trial and error is not necessarily random. You start trying moves that (for some reason) you feel to be most promising. An essential condition for most combinations is having pieces that (can) do something. Starting to work with these pieces can quickly bring you to the real targets. I believe that this is how chess players think. I know that this is how I think. I look for likely moves and feel my way to the move that I feel is best — trial and error.

Later in the book Hendricks takes an amusing dig at another teaching technique that he considers to be of dubious value. He terms this ‘the delusion of the verbal protocol’.

Some trainers and chess book writers think that they can formulate all kinds of advice in words, and that this advice can then be applied in concrete positions and can help a player find the right move (the right plan). In other words, language in chess can be not only descriptive but also prescriptive. In chess manuals of this type, you often find first a verbal piece of ‘advice’ of a general character, followed by a grandmaster game serving as an ‘example’. The suggestion is that what the grandmaster does is not much different than following up on the advice just given.

Hendricks gives as an example Carsten Hansen’s book Improve your Positional Chess, which he thinks is largely based on this delusion. Of the book he says,

Obviously, a lot of work has been put into this book, but this meaningless advice, delivered in a pedantic tone, makes the work hard to digest. Under the heading ‘How to create a weakness’ Hansen advises "In positions where the opponent has no weaknesses you will have to look at the imbalances that exist on the board and see how you can use them to create a weakness in your opponent’s position, either through provocation or through goal-oriented play where you see a way to establish a weakness."

Woolly or what? To illustrate how this ‘advice’ could be put to good use, Hansen then presents a fragment of a game between Alexey Shirov and Garry Kasparov where Kasparov creates a weakness of the light squares in White’s posotion using this ‘goal-oriented play’. Hendricks’ dismisses this as nonsense with a comment that made me chuckle:

It is as if you write a manual on the art of painting, where you claim that with a number of well-aimed but sensitive brush strokes and a good idea of the eventual composition, you can create the finest paintings, and then below this you print a painting by Monet as an example.

And a piece of advice from Hendricks for players who peruse chess books looking for the words of advice that would miraculously enable them to improve their game

For the reader of chess books who wants to raise his level, this means that he will have to start working on the material, and shouldn’t expect too much from the text part. Not a very pleasant message for the many readers who skip the games, fragments and exercises in their search for that one magic word that is to be the key to a higher level.

Is he talking to me? So we have two opposing views on the best way to answer the question, "what the *** do I move now?". In the blue corner we have Silman and others who promote the use of a generalised, rigid and formal system by which one can identify the characteristics of the position and thus arrive at a sensible choice of move. In the red corner waits Hendricks, tapping his gloves together impatiently and maintaining that an intermediary system that stands between the player and the position on the board is unnecessary and that the players should proceed by investigating the moves that catch the attention and which seem to make sense to them. For my part, I think Hendricks wins the fight. He advocates a way of looking at a position that makes sense to me. It is more natural, more realistic and closer to the way I think than the systematic formality of the ‘look and you will see’ approach. I have found though, that whatever way I think about a position, I still play crap chess.

Move First, Think Later: Sense and Nonsense in Improving Your Chess, published in 2014 by New In Chess.
The book covers much more than the topics I’ve mentioned in this article. It is five hundred pages full of interesting and entertaining material, anecdotes, thought provoking ideas, and even includes a chapter giving advice on how to play the lottery. And it has exercises to boot. It’s a very good read.