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Questionnaire Tag

By Steve | July 25, 2007

“Questionnaire Tag” has been floating around the chess blogosphere lately. Thanks to Joshua (Chess Praxis) for tagging me.

1. How long have you been playing chess? Have you played it consistently since you started, or were there lulls in your play? How did these lulls affect your performance?

I started playing chess seriously when I was a sophomore or junior in high school, sometime around 1979. Physics teacher Fred Hayes ran a chess club out of the physics lab store room. I believe he had some magazines and other materials (maybe Chess Life?) with local tournament announcements. I played in several scholastic tournaments and a couple of adult events as well. I bought and devoured several chess books, which I still have. These were all in descriptive notation, so I’m comfortably “bilingual.”

I also played in several USCF postal chess events back then. I believe these were called the “Golden Knights,” or something like that. I had a couple of cardboard books containing game position pages, with little sleeves to put the cardboard pieces in. I also had a stamp for inking the board squares onto a postcard. Seems pretty quaint now!

Back then I could play a sort-of-decent game of blindfold chess, and once or twice I amused myself by beating my high school friends without looking at the board. Although I’m a much better player now overall, I don’t think I could play a blindfold game anymore.

Late in high school I got heavily involved in both instrumental and choral music programs. Between those activities and the transition to college life, I lost interest in chess.

Somewhere around 1987, newly married and fresh into graduate school, I played in one downtown Atlanta tournament. I won a small prize, which I used to buy a wooden chess set from a tournament vendor. But most Ph.D. students don’t really have the time or the money for hobbies, and that included me.

Then around five years ago, I taught my my oldest son, then ten years old, to play. I got him, and later his younger brother, interested in playing in scholastic tournaments. That rekindled my interest in playing the game seriously, and I started looking around to see what the opportunities were for over-the-board play. I had not yet discovered how thoroughly computers and the Internet had revolutionized chess and chess culture, so I assumed that I would need to find a club or some OTB tournaments to play in. I wasn’t sure, though, if it would really be practical to play in tournaments, because my kids were still young and I didn’t know if I could really get away for a whole weekend.

As luck would have it, though, the largest chess club in New England is located just minutes away from my office. It meets on Tuesday nights with a format of one OTB tournament round per week. That was just about perfect for me, and I reentered the world of tournament play in February 2003 with a rating of around 1200.

Since then, I’ve been at it pretty consistently. At times there have been lulls of a few months where, because of my family schedule, I haven’t been at the club regularly. These lulls did not seriously affect my play, other than leaving me feeling a bit rusty upon my return.

2. Aside from playing games, what is your primary mode of training?

My primary mode of training is buying chess books! Surely, the next one I buy will be THE one! Although I was proud of myself for not buying a single chess book at this year’s World Open, I promptly bought several (!) within a week of getting back home.

OK, seriously. This is a hard question. I do put quite a few hours into studying, but between work and family it’s always a struggle finding the time. So I don’t really have a primary mode. Instead, I bounce around between several modes. Sometimes it’s tactics, tactics, tactics. Other times it’s going over endgames. Or reading annotated game books. (I’m currently stuck in the middle of Marshall.)

Regarding tactics, I actually prefer books to computer programs, although I have and use both CT-ART and PCT.

Philosophically, I’m quite in agreement with Jonathan Rowson’s view, expressed in Chess for Zebras, of the distinction between knowledge and skill. “Players seeking to improve therefore need to place emphasis on developing their skill, not increasing their knowledge; to improve their ‘know-how’, and worry less about ‘knowing that…’. They also need to focus less on the ‘what’ of chess, and more on the ‘how’ it is done. [...] if you want to get better at chess you need to place more emphasis on ‘training’, whereby you try to solve problems, play practice games, or perhaps try to beat a strong computer program from an advantageous position. [...] Most players seek to increase their knowledge by learning new positions, and tend to study by “reading and nodding” as Nigel Davies put it. What they should be doing more often is honing their skills, however meagre, by forcing themselves to think through training and practice.”

Although I’m just as susceptible to “reading and nodding” as many other chess-playing adults, I do try to find effective ways to drill and practice. Here’s something I just started trying recently. Take a thoroughly annotated game, preferably one that’s available in a database or PGN file so you can easily strip out the annotations. Play through the game. Starting at move 10, stop every five moves and take 10-15 minutes to thoroughly assess the position. Write down a variety of candidate moves, find your “opponent’s” best responses and your most likely follow up. Identify the principle variation. After going through the game in this fashion, go over it again with the annotator’s notes and see how well your assessment and move choices match the annotator’s.

I’ve done this a couple of times and plan to continue.

OK, that’s enough for tonight. I’ll go ahead and post what I have. I might be able to complete the rest of the questionnaire tomorrow night.

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