I have been continuing my perambulations in the chess world, and it really is enjoyable. One thing that caught my eye today was a story about an entrepreneur seeking venture capital by challenging a top business pro (a founder of Paypal) to a game of chess. The link is
http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/entre ... chess-game.
But what I noticed most was the following quote from an interview the entrepreneur gave to a business magazine. Maybe unfairly, it struck me as nonsense and a perfect, if unintended, explanation of why the entrepreneur was in the position of having to seek help from a top pro.
Quote:
The strategy element is so important in business with forecasting and predicting outcomes in a structured way. You have to see the variation trees. (...) You might be in a bad chess position for hours in a tournament, and you have to train yourself to fight through the mental pain. Conversely, if you are winning in a game, you might have the tendency to become overconfident, and blow it. The game isn't over until its over is the bottom line. This mental precision that comes from chess preparation is extremely applicable for business deals. Until the deal is signed, the game isn't over.
My fairly extensive experience of top businessman (I met many while working as an economics correspondent) is that they are like top go pros. They have learnt their skills from childhood, selling marbles to other kiddies in the school playground. By the time they are old enough to go into real business, they can see opportunities and trends just by "recognising" them. People who yearn to go into business only in later life may devise a business plan with forecasts and predictions simply because they lack the skill set that "born" dealmakers have (or because their bank requires it before they'll make a loan), and they may even work to ths plan and make a decent living. But for the most part they are very unlikely to become big names in the business world.
The parallel with go is obvious to me, and that brings me to daal's list:
Quote:
Can recognition be as effective in go as in chess?
What do professional go players actually do? (I'd like to see a few hooked up to a brain scanner).
Is there a way of comparing the two training strategies?
Are the same training methods as efficient for amateurs as for pros?
I think the answer to the first one is easy, if you apply it to pros. Recognition (based on many hours of work) is the only way to become a top pro. I don't think there is a single counterexample, and even if there were it would be outweighed heavily by all the other instances. The answer to the second question I think has already been given in the famous chess paper by psychologist Adriaan de Groot. This favours the "recognition" model (indeed, I think it started this line of thought) and I don't think it's ever been gainsaid. The answer to the third question seems subsumed in the fourth one, which I think is the really interesting one here.
What I think happens with some chess trainers, and no doubt it happens in go and even in more important professions, is that they work really hard to become strong and some, being a certain type of person, do this in a methodical or systematic way. This helps them become strong and so the effect becomes self-reinforcing. Eventually they reach a certain point where they are satisfied and look back on their years of toil. They become convinced that it was their discovery of a system that made them strong. I'm of the school (like Hendriks, I gather) that believes this is delusional. What made these people strong was the huge amount of work they put in. They way they formulated their thoughts was personal to them and was just superficially significant. The same thing seems to happen with writers who write about systems designed to help you succeed in business. They claim to spot the fundamentals or the trends based on examination of previously successful companies. They too are probably deluded (or why aren't they running their own companies?).
I think this is what happened to Nimzowitsch, though he was exceptional in that he was able to ignore his System as necessary, and so he became a top player rather than a trainer. In fact, Garry Kasparov ranked him as 5th best in the world of his time - but did not put him in "My Great Predecessors", even though he included non-world champions such as Sammy Reshevsky. Here is an interesting link to "My System":
http://www.grossclub.com/books/my-syste ... eview.html in that connection.
But at the end of this learning process a System exists on paper (at least I think it does in Nimzo's case: I've never actually seen a synoptic description of Nimzo's System - just a jumble of "proverbs"), or in the case of the chess trainers Hendriks describes, they have a large collection of sorted and graded examples. It's understandable to want to make some use of it. Already deluded into thinking their systems made them strong, the trainers start to believe their collections can make other people strong. Is that a delusion too?
I'm not sure. I lean heavily towards saying yes it is a delusion, or at best a case of wish fulfilment, since a trainer who has spent so many years becoming strong but not strong enough to be a playing pro probably wants to justify all that time spent and to stay in the chess business. On the other hand, it is easy to make a case that insights learned can help other players short circuit the process of becoming a strong player. I think it would be very hard to gainsay that at one level, simply because I believe most of us can recall how a proverb or other piece of advice magically opened up new vistas. But I say "at one level" because I think this only applies at amateur level. Systems or proverbs have virtually no relevance to those who are destined to try to become pro. They just have to work devilishly hard and the only sort of advice that works for them is at the macro level ("study the games of Shuei" - but only if given at the
right time).
Even at amateur level, though, I think it's fair to query the use of systems. Looking at our London Chess Centre bookshop, I see thousands of books and videos on groaning shelves. A very high proportion of them are on openings and so are, almost by definition, highly systematic. But such huge numbers of books on the same topics convince me even more that what happens in the real world is that people buy a book looking for a quick fix, and when that doesn't work they try another book, or a video and - like the famous "fleas that bite 'em" - so on ad infinitum. As a go writer I shouldn't really be saying this, but the remedy is probably not another book but a cilice, or whatever you need to force you to work. It would be interesting tp known how many amateurs with a Fujisawa Hideyuki "Shissui no kokorozashi" fan also bought (and used) a thigh-pricking awl to go with it. Not many, I'll be bound.
On the other hand, those amateurs who do exclusively use the hard work/recognition model can become very strong - GoGoD's own T Mark Hall is the exemplar perhaps?
So are chess/go trainers/writers, whether consciously or under a delusion, taking unfair advantage of likewise deluded amateurs? I find this hard to answer. It could well be the wrong question. In my own case, at any rate, I would claim that I have nearly always focused on entertainment and the only contribution I might then claim towards a player's improvement in strength is possibly thus helping with the motivation to work hard. I am a metaphorical awl! But I think that even those who write about technical aspects such as opening preparation can reasonably claim the same. They may not use history or anecdotes or whatever, but a flash of technical insight - a proverb even - can be just as entertaining and motivating. Still, I can't shake the conviction that trying to do that in a systematic way is ultimately a blind alley, even if it helps presentationally with selling books. Following a system can get in the way of doing the necessary hard work, and unless you can afford a personal trainer, a generalised system may not be suitable for your particular needs, and so could even be harmful.
On the other hand, if such books and approaches help amateur chess/go-players do the equivalent of helping business "amateurs" earn a decent living doing something they enjoy, or to "live the dream", should they not be supported and encouraged? After all, at least 95% of the populations of the chess and go worlds are amateurs of the amo, amas, amat variety.
@ Konijntje: special thanks for the reference to Jon Tisdall. I worked daily with him for a long time on the MSO site but lost touch after that and hadn't realised he was putting out books. All the more reason for me to continue ny chess peregrinations!