Just as an aside, 

I understood the number of positions that a GM knows by heart to be closer to 1000.  It's probably even more than that.   I know hundreds of tactical, strategic, opening and endgame positions and I'm not even a master.

There was even a book written by an IM that claimed to have the 1001 most important positions to know to become a GM.  The last position was the starting position!

Hello,

This is a little bit off topic but I wondered what people thought of the ideas behind Rashid Ziatdinov's 
GM ROM. The main idea is that GM's know "intuitively" about 300 key positions. The book gives most of these positions which you have to work out yourself, plus about 30 classic games you are supposed to learn my heart. I was initially very sceptical of the idea but not so sure now. 
                 If interested can find more information about this at 

http://www.jeremysilman.com/chess_instruction/Ziatdinov_Pt_2.html
and related links. The training with difficult positons was approach recommended too in Kotov's Think like a Grandmaster. (Just pointing out that this book was not just tree's of analyis).

Bye John S

I agree that "intuition" can be developed.  I teach students elements of chess that they later appear to know "intuitively".  However I also believe that there are limitations, probably biological limitations, to how much intuition can be developed and taught.   

I joke that what makes me a good coach is that I know how to pick the right student.  As with many jokes, there's truth in the statement.  My students have already self-selected chess as an area of mastery.  They have all shown themselves to be better than most of their friends and more importantly really want to get better.   

It's no coincidence that just about every one of my students have gone on to achieve extraordinary goals in areas outside of chess and most continue to play competitive chess at least as a hobby.   

This means that chess intuition can be taught to anyone, but only learned by those who are willing and able.  I have known people who spent their entire waking days studying chess and taking lessons from IMs and GMs.  They work very hard, yet seem to be pathetic compared to some others who play chess by the seat of their pants.

The fact that we can't just create an army of Garry Kasparovs or Vladimir Kramniks suggests that there's something more than just education and development going on.  Even the case of the Polgar sisters stands out as an exception that confirms the rule, especially when we consider their biological and social background.   

I never thought my own rating (around 2100 USCF at the time) was special until a brilliant, award-winning college professor told me that he envied my ability to think and play chess.  He said, rightly, that he could never reach my level of expertise.  At first I thought he was joking, but he meant what he said and others who spend their lives with intellectuals have also stated that I am exceptional.   

If I, with my poverty-stricken rating am exceptional, just think how much more special someone such as GM Kosten is.  The average college professor wouldn't be able to distinguish between our abilities, but just about everyone here could.

Maybe we should celebrate our unique talents and finally recognise that Emmanuel Lasker was wrong when he said that anyone with average intellect and enough desire could become a master.  I think there's more to intuition than even Dvoretsky gives credit for.  I've read quite a bit about how certain people can literally grow parts of their brains to fit certain functions (the classic case is the London taxi cabbers, who know "the book" of the entire city).  I've also read how memory is stored and used, but there still appears to be biological limitations on each individual.   

I know it's not popular to talk about limitations, and it's rarely useful in an educational setting.  But here, I think we can acknowledge the very special nature of our gift in chess.

TopNotch wrote on 09/15/06 at 07:26:40:

That brings up the point on how good players calculate and if it is possible to put into words so that others could copy that way of calculating.

PS I'll check your position out.

Quote:


Faith is the word. Faith in General Principles. Obviously our faith should grow when we understand these GP in depth (I'm far from understand them and don't talk about using them). Rationalism is good but we need more faith to apply the GP in most of the times.

I remember watching some important game live on ICC (so important that I've forgotten which game it was).  The leading commentator was Emil Sutovsky, and I asked a question about Black defending an attack with very few pieces on the board and the King on g8 with ...f6.  Sutovsky said that was a bad move because it was "ugly"  There was no computer refutation of the line (in fact the computer was almost completely useless for analysing the particular position anyway), but Sutovsky and the Super-GM playing black were in agreement, and ...f6 was never played.

I was both baffled and impressed that the Grandmaster quickly and succinctly dealt my idea a death blow with one word.  He used a level of intuition I haven't grasped.  So even though as a student of the learning process (and a teacher who practices various methods of developing skills), I believe that most of what we call intuition can be learned from experience but there are certain elements that can only be understood by a true native of the chess language.   

No amount of experience can make up for this ability.  The legendary stories of Capablanca confounding the masters of his day with his endgame intuition should be enough to remind us that there really is something called genius.  This genius in chess shows up when a player makes an intuitive sacrifice (or even a quiet move) that confounds human and computer analysts, yet appears to be right.

Very interesting topic. First, I want to talk about what intuition is. There's a very interesting book called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking that deals with this very topic. Essentially, intuition is our brain's unconscious way of dealing with thousands of bits of information. Just walk down the street and pay attention some time to the myriad of sights, sounds, smells, even the feel of the ground under your feet. Lots  of info, right? Most of the time we don't pay attention to the vast chunk of this information. We don't need to. If we had to consciously focus on all those pieces of information, we probably couldn't stand to leave our new padded rooms.  However, our unconscious also keeps a close eye out for danger. A man with a gun in front of us instantly skips from the unconscious to the conscious and we're already kicked into our fight or flight, sympathetic response. Same thing in chess, only with somewhat less info that's important. Intuition is really nothing more than our unconscious taking over most of the evaluation of the chessboard, kicking up to our conscious anything dangerous, interesting, etc. 

So, how does this mysterious animal develop?  I happen to subscribe to the belief that pattern creation and assimilation is the critical step to learning. Whatever our new experience may be, we work hard to fit new info into some previously developed paradigm or pattern. This is the genius of learning tactics first. These are by far the easiest patterns to memorize and recognize. Once we have thoroughly incorporated these patterns, our subconscious alerts us to times when similar patterns occur on the board, often by a candidate move suddenly standing out to us. Now, the exact same thing applies to positional considerations. Once we develop our understanding of pawn structures, memorizing typical structures and key pawn breaks or plans, candidate moves based on these considerations start to "pop" too. Same for endgame positions, opening ideas, really every aspect of chess. Tactics just happen to be very easy patterns to memorize and very critical for not losing, thus amateurs are advised to learn these first. Appropriately so

Now, to incorporate intuition into good chess performance is a whole different beast. That deals with "thought processes", calculation, etc. Different topic, but thought process seems to be most useful whenever our group of patterns, i.e. our intuition, fails. Then we have to take a hard look at aspects that might give us a clue as to where a useful plan might lie. Again, different topic.

StuntLinguist

Buzz wrote on 09/12/06 at 02:30:02:


Here you touch upon chess education, which is perhaps offtopic.  But I will rise to defend the dictum "tactics, tactics, and more tactics" when it comes to educating young and improving players, certainly those rated below 1000 (which includes most grade school players).  At this level, essentially ALL games are decided by tactics, frequently by such simple things as hung pieces and overlooked one-move mates.  There is simply no substitute, in chess, for keen attention to tactics.  I do not agree at all that any amount of tactical study, even exclusive emphasis on tactics during the time devoted to study, "digs a hole" for the novice player.

I would be happy to teach "thought process" to my more advanced students, if I had any idea what thought process produced a good chess move.  In spite of being a player of borderline-respectable strength myself, I have no clear idea what process is at work when I seek most of my chess moves (the exception being those moves that result from explicit calculation).  I do know that there are some kinds of positions that I understand very well, and in these I can find good moves more easily and also see relatively quickly that a given move is no good at all.  There are also positions that I do not understand very well, and in these, I can search for an hour and still not have a good idea of what to play.  Also the kinds of positions that I play well in are those that have come up a good deal in my play.

One thing that I have discovered is that it is often the precise moves that seem most closely to correspond to the almost-unconsciously known "demands of the position" that turn out to be the best moves when they are calculated out explicitly.  I also believe that when calculation is difficult or impossible, it is often best to trust to the move that "seems" like good chess.  That's definitely true with the clock ticking.  (Elsewhere, I've called this "chess by smell" -- not my term, but that of a chessfriend and a strong player.)  Unfortunately, almost-unconscious awareness of the demands of the position, or a sense of chess smell if you like, does not arise in positions of a kind where one has little experience.

This leads me to conclude, in common with most other players who've thought about it, it would seem, that >>experience is the best teacher in chess<<.  Precisely what it teaches I do not know, but it does engender in one the ability to find good moves in the kinds of positions that one has frequently encountered.

Beyond that I am deeply suspicious of people who presume to tell us precisely what we should be thinking about when we evaluate positions and seek good moves.  I know there are a lot of people, even some GMs, who adulate Dvoretsky, but I am suspicious of him and I haven't ever even cracked one of his books.  The "squares" idea, which was unfortunately picked up by the parent of one of my chess kids, smells even worse to me.  And I am simply amazed that there are people recommending Kotov's Think Like a Grandmaster, since he absurdly (and, I avow, hypocritically) proposes that human chess computation should mimic the branch-and-bound tree search algorithms of computational machines.

It's unfair to mention Kmoch in this connection, since he wasn't proposing a system of chess thinking but was merely trying to teach about pawn structure, albeit with a novel and frequently annoying terminology.