Simon Williams’ GingerGM Blog

A thumbs-up and shout-out to the chess blog of “GingerGM” Simon Williams. The video analyses of his games are particularly fun and instructive, and I muchly sympathise with his coffee addiction … I myself may sometimes be seen pacing up and down like a tiger in a cage trying to locate a coffee dispenser prior to a game, and I guess I wouldn’t take kindly either to an opponent taking umbrage at my coffee habits.

Opposite-Colour Bishop Ending and Some Notes on Memorisation

The following gif exemplifies a basic drawing idea in opposite-colour bishop endings: Black wants to

• control the square of the pawn advance
• attack pawns so that the enemy king is tied down to their defence.

1. … Bb3 is a mistake because it frees White’s king from the defence of the f5 pawn; after 2. Bg5+ Kd7 or Kf7, White’s king is going to invade via f4 or d4, respectively. This idea isn’t going to work after 1. … Bd7! when the king’s stuck to defend the f5 pawn.

While we’re at it, here’s a previous chunk on opposite colour bishops that illustrates more or less the same idea; White’s in control of the pawn-advance square and keeps the Black king occupied with the defence of the pawn on c4. The resulting position is once again a draw:

On another note: for those of you interested in memorisation, here’s a compelling article on the “spacing effect” and Polish memory specialist Peter Wozniak by Gary Wolf. One of the insights proffered by Wozniak, backed up by what appears to be sorely neglected research into memorisation, is the following:

Once we drop the excuse that memorization is pointless, we’re left with an interesting mystery. Much of the information does remain in our memory, though we cannot recall it. “To this day,” Bjork says, “most people think about forgetting as decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that gradually fade away. But that has been disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone because you can’t recall it, but we can prove that it’s still there. For instance, you can still recognize a ‘forgotten’ item in a group. Yes, without continued use, things become inaccessible. But they are not gone.” [...]

Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength. [...] Perhaps you’ve recently been told the names of the children of a new acquaintance. At this moment they may be easily accessible, but they are likely to be utterly forgotten in a few days, and a single repetition a month from now won’t do much to strengthen them at all.

[...] One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we’re learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. “The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do the wrong things,” Robert Bjork says. “It’s almost sinister.”

The most popular learning systems sold today — for instance, foreign language software like Rosetta Stone — cheerfully defy every one of the psychologists’ warnings. With its constant feedback and easily accessible clues, Rosetta Stone brilliantly creates a sensation of progress. “Go to Amazon and look at the reviews,” says Greg Keim, Rosetta Stone’s CTO, when I ask him what evidence he has that people are really remembering what they learn. “That is as objective as you can get in terms of a user’s sense of achievement.” The sole problem here, from the psychologists’ perspective, is that the user’s sense of achievement is exactly what we should most distrust.

The spacing effect was one of the proudest lab-derived discoveries, and it was interesting precisely because it was not obvious, even to professional teachers. The same year that Neisser revolted, Robert Bjork, working with Thomas Landauer of Bell Labs, published the results of two experiments involving nearly 700 undergraduate students. Landauer and Bjork were looking for the optimal moment to rehearse something so that it would later be remembered. Their results were impressive: The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it. And yet — as Neisser might have predicted — that insight was useless in the real world. Determining the precise moment of forgetting is essentially impossible in day-to-day life.

 

Passed Pawn Chunks

A shoutout to the Dutch steps method, an excellent self-study course developed by Rob Brunia and Cor van Wijgerden. I’m currently working on the chapter “passed pawns” and thought — to learn as well as advertise — I’d share two chunks from the chapter so far:

Two passed pawns: interrupt one of two defenders.

Setting up a discovered promotion:

Respect for Material

Despite the tumbleweeds skittering across this blog, I’m still playing chess, and I believe I’m improving, too, even though it’s not necessarily reflected in my rating. In any case, lack of time, but also lack of chunks has kept me from updating regularly, but today I’ve come across a nifty little chart I’d like to share that I found in Lev Alburt’s Openings for Black, Explained. The chart grades well-known chessmasters on a scale ranging from “healthy disrespect for material” to “healthy respect for material”.

Quite nifty, I thought. And a sensible way of looking at the play styles, too. I believe I currently belong more to the “healthy disrespect for material” camp, but often find myself opening with every intention of sacrificing for the initiative, and then ending up retreating to defend loose pawns at the first sign of danger, or unable to cash in my activity for a concrete advantage.

So I think it’s time for a change. For the past couple of months, I’ve chosen open games and aggressive openings to hone my tactics and improve my grasp of initiative and counter-play. And I think I made enough progres to now try a more conservative opening choice, especially for Black. Alburt’s tome recommends the Accelerated Dragon against e4 and the Nimzo-Indian against d4, so I’ll have a shot at that and see how it goes. If anyone wants to share their own experiences with these openings, you’re cordially invited to share! By the way: I used to believe firmly in the credo that beginners and intermediate players shouldn’t spend too much time on the opening. However, I’ve recently heard GM Jan Gustafsson challenge this, and I’ve also heard from a fellow club player who crossed the 2000 mark within 4 years (and is still improving) that he almost exclusively studied openings. This is not to say that I’ll abandon other areas of study completely, but I might reconsider my priorities. (Not that I’ve got much time to study chess these days, anyway.)

Back from Hiatus, the Second

Apologies once again for not putting my word(press blog) where my mouth is! Chess has swallowed up all my time, although not the improvement kind; rather, I’ve been busy revamping our chess club’s website (of which I am the webmaster). Meanwhile, my performance over the board has taken a dive and I’ve been on a bit of a losing streak.

Improvement-wise, I feel as though I’m currenly at a decent 1800-idea-chess-level and at a measly 1500-tactics-chess-level. So my plan is to keep myself busy on ChessTempo until I reach a solid 1800 rating there before I go back to mainly studying ideas. A chessclub friend of mine has started using the Dutch steps method and has kindly offered me the material on part 6 as an Easter gift as I can’t really afford spending any more money on chess apart from tournament and club membership fees.

Sadly, I haven’t come across any gif-able chunks lately. Maybe just this little piece of advice from my last loss: If you’ve got a clear structural pawn weakness on the board (such as a backward pawn), make sure you evaluate all minor piece exchanges in light of that weakness. In this particular case, Black clearly wants to keep the dark-square bishop on the board to defend the pawn (or, even better, exchange dark-square bishops).

Realising that you’ve got a structural target on d6 will also help you evaluating potential pawn moves. The d6-pawn can be attacked, say, from f5 witha  knight, so Black’s g-pawn is an important defensive asset as it can take away the f5 square and thus prevent intrusion.

Back from Hiatus

Apologies for my sudden disappearance; it’s the old story — work and exams have gobbled up all my time, making chess improvement all but impossible. However, I’m still playing chess, and I’m now looking at a period of replenishment and, hopefully, serious study and improvement.

Some exciting developments are taking place in the chess improvement blogosphere. The Brooklyn64 blog has launched a revival of the Knights Errant. This is great, because like Lousy at Chess, I’m in dire need of tactics training and honing my calculation skills, and seeing others struggle and practise in that respect is very motivating; and 2) if I’m not mistaken, Brooklyn64 has ties to the Green Point Chess Club, which I used to visit and enjoy muchly. I wonder if Jeff is pulling some of the strings behind the blog?

Of course I’m a lazy bastard and won’t put myself through the hell that is the circles method, but I shall most definitely step up my game concerning tactics & calculation. By the way, my current rating is 1740ish and I’m confident that I can reach 1800 or even 1850 if I keep at it. With regards to my animated gifs, I think I’ll spend more time looking at the gifs I’ve made so far rather than creating new ones, but we’ll see.

Oh, and I would like to draw attention to the magnificent Chess Carnival idea, initiated by Blue Devil Knight. The March carnival will be hosted by Blunderprone. (see my blogroll)

Act in Concert

In case I haven’t mentioned it yet: Jeremy Silman’s The Amateur’s Mind is a gem. Two easy chunks inspired by one of his practice games with an amateur:

1) Decide where your “area of influence” is (usually the area on the board where you’ve got more space) and develop your pieces so that they strengthen your hold on that area. Don’t scatter the power of your pieces all over the board. Instead, focus on your area of influence and have your pieces act in concert. This will make it easier for you to develop a consistent, logical plan. In the position below, White’s area of influence is the queenside. Therefore, says Silman, developing the white-square bishop to e2 is more logical and more consistent than fianchettoing the bishop.

2) Fianchettoed bishops (like bishops in general) prefer an open centre. Fianchettoing the bishop to g2 is not only questionable because of White’s queenside space, but also because Black’s pawn on d5 disrupts the bishop’s diagonal and is safely guarded by his peer on e6. Of course, if Black’s centre pawn was weaker, then pressuring it with the fianchettoed bishop would be a more viable plan.

Attacking the Castled King: Open File versus Pawn Lever

If you’re attacking the king in the position below, what’s the better asset: an open g-file or the g-pawn lever? According to Vukovic’s The Art of Attack, the g-pawn lever is more powerful than the open file, perhaps because White no longer has a dark-square bishop to attack h6. Hence Vukovic advises the second move order: 1. h3 …, preparing 2. g4.

Intrusion on the 7th Rank

A common continuation once you have taken control of a file is to invade on the 7th or 2nd rank, respectively. Vukovic’s The Art of Attack uses that very same strategy to launch an assault against the castled king. The procedure is as follows: dominate the file > weaken the pawns in front of the king with pawn levers or by exploiting backrank weaknesses > occupy the 7th rank for mate. As an example, he cites the game Rubinstein – Maroczy, Goteborg 1920.

Notice the interplay between your piece control and your opponent’s pawn structure. The more I play chess, the more my thought process and my assessment of a position revolves around these two factors; the potential of my pieces on the one hand and the potential pawn weakness of my opponent on the other.

Rook Interference and the Positional Fork

Two gifs today, both about rooks and minor pieces. First one: Disrupt and even trap invading doubled rooks by interfering with a minor piece.

Second one: Be wary of allowing your bishop and rook to be forked by a knight when the bishop is positionally superior to the knight.