I have a question. Those best placed to answer it will probably be go players who are also chess players. The reason for the question is that a good answer will help authors like me and go teachers.
First the background. Three things have conspired. One is that, as a result of a grandson learning chess, I have started to take some interest again in that game, which I last played over 40 years ago. What 'interest' means here is not playing or studying the game again, but rather reading chess news and interviews. It has been fascinating to chart the parallels with go. Chess seems to have the same debates as go (sponsorship problems, Mickey Mouse time limits, etiquette problems, citizenship debates, etc.), and since they always seem a little ahead of go, what is happening there may happen soon in go. (A couple of possible items: Fischer-type time increments, which seem to be the norm now in chess; a reversion to interest in classical chess, i.e. not blitz, even to the extent of resuming adjournments regardless of the presence of computers). But my reading about chess has also included quite a bit about improving and teaching. There, there seem to be radical developments - more below.
Another factor for me was my interest in the art of commentary, which I have elaborated on in the Life, Games and Commentaries of Honinbo Shuei trilogy. However, as that is a little esoteric I won't say more about it here.
The third (and trigger) factor was that I was reading an oldish book by Go Seigen (How to think about joseki), which seemed to pre-date much of the new thinking about improving in chess. This book is unusual in many ways. One is that there is none of the usual "high level" pro talk about matching the joseki to the fuseki (except in the nugatory case that some josekis involve a ladder). Instead Go talks about the "back alleys" of josekis. As you'd expect, he is scornful of those who just memorise josekis, e.g. as in quoting three senryu (5-7-5 = 17-syllable ancient vox pop poems): (1) For each joseki/Memorised, you will become/Two full stones weaker. (2) The guy who says/'The joseki goes like this...'/He's the one who lost. (3) New joseki learnt,/But agony! His rival/Skips the club that night. (Yes, the first one is the source of the go proverb - so 2 stones is poetic licence, not a pro assessment).
But Go is also scathing of fellow professionals. He doesn't mention them by name, though by tracking his examples with the GoGoD database, or referring to books, you can guess some. In fact there are many. For, in short, he says there are 'many bad josekis'. One is shown below.
This appears in joseki books (e.g. Ishida) as a basic joseki. It also attracts comments to do with a supposed disadvantage for Black in having to deal with the ladder stone. Nonsense, says Go (and in the book he illustrates quite a lot of similar examples for josekis we think of as basic or clever). This is a 'bad joseki'.
Just as a taster, he points out that in tewari terms Black should omit 7 and just play 9. If White then plays 8, Black clasps the ladder stone again, but in that position would he ever then exchange 7 for 10? However, that is by the by. Go's real point is that this is not really how to evaluate a joseki. Nor is understanding fundamental principles, and this is where he foreshadows the new chess thinking. The point about this joseki (and all the others he shows) is that it is possible to play 'in the back streets'. In this case, far from the need to capture the ladder stone being a weakness, it is a strength, because then Black can live in (yes, actually inside) the corner. I leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I say again that Go shows this sort of "back streets = aji" thing repeatedly for josekis that appear in books and which are (wrongly) evaluated in terms of fundamentals such as territory versus thickness. In other words, the primacy goes to tactics - always. This is where, for me, the chess angle comes in.
A chess book that caught my eye enough to buy it was "Move First, Think Later" by Willy Hendriks. I haven't yet read all of it, and part of the reason for my question here is to see whether it will be worth making the effort to finish it, but the beginning is certainly though-provoking (and very well written). Essentially, the book seems to have resulted from Hendriks's own experience in which he was a trainer. He would (like every other trainer) present pupils with lessons replete with fundamental principles and he would painstakingly try to instil a thought process in which the pupils examined the position for strengths and weaknesses and then carefully formulated a plan of attack or defence. However, he found he was being disconcerted too often. He would present a lovingly crafted move that (say) involved a retreating manoeuvre ("the sort of moves trainers love" as he put it). Then someone would say, but why not just go for the king at once and play Rxg7? Sure enough that was a killer move. But when Hendriks tried to work out how people came up with these killer moves, he could not elicit any sort of thought process. People just saw the moves. Realising that this was happening even with ordinary good moves and not just sacrifices, he (again as he put it) began to "eat humble pie" and he began to research the topic. What he discovered was that a couple of recent writers had got part of the way there before him. John Watson in Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy was one. The other was Alex Yermolinnsky in The Road to Chess Improvement. Watson apparently stressed the "primacy of the concrete" (i.e. tactics, I gather) and Yermolinsky apparently summed up his advice as "get to work" - the way to reach a higher level was "not to take generalities from books but to struggle with concrete positions". I have not seen either of these books, but from elsewhere I gather that this change in thinking has evolved from chess computers. Many openings evaluated in the past through the standard filter of general principles have been revitalised by tactics found by computers, and top players have (I gather) begun to think in the same, "new" way. I say "new" because this seems to me to be no different from the way go books have been written for donkeys years (i.e. reams of concrete examples or problems rather than pages of general principles).
According to Hendriks, what is required to make good moves at the board is not understanding or planning but simply recognising. The more positions you have seen, and the more times you have seen them before, the better you will be at recognising an opportunity in the game before you. This alters the burden on trainers. It may be that principles still have a role to play, but afterwards. In other words they are no longer fundamental, but are just post-facto tools to help you as you "get to work", but even then the idea seems not really to help you understand per se but to use them to imprint the position in your mind. But again we've heard this before in go: recall the hoary old adage that the way to 1-dan is to play over the moves of 1,000 games.
So now we come to my question. Can anyone offer views beyond my own so far very limited knowledge on how thinking on this topic is developing in the chess world? Are Hendriks, Watson and Yermolinsky going to end up in the "back streets" or are they genuine pioneers? Is Hendriks's book worth finishing? Are the others worth reading?
Forestalling the answers a little, I have to say that my recent fresh look at the chess world (from the standpoint of a writer) is that books on openings appear still to be a fetish for the average player, but there is a strong current (new to me) of game commentaries which focus on explaining the alleged thinking, even to the level of explaining every move. When I did play chess I would have lusted after these. I was strongly put off by commentaries that were full of: 9. Ng3. "In Bad Joseki, 1919, von Spifflewurf played 9.Bb4 followed by [add 500 moves]", and I know I was not alone. But I am now beginning to wonder whether writers who write like that are in some ways closer to the truth: they are "recognising" a position and its close relatives, and not even bothering to try to understand it.
Before fingers rush to the Reply button, may I be allowed to stress that what I would like to see discussed is chiefly LESSONS FOR GO FROM NEW CHESS THINKING ABOUT TRAINING. I am not at all interested in seeing yet another rehash of the topics discussed here before.
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