What is good phaedrus, and what is not good.
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
ROBEJU PIRSIG, Zen and The Art of M otorcy·
cle Maintenance
So we know that stronger players are inclined to see board positions by means of 'chunking' and we think these chunks are seen because they are familiar patterns. Most beginners will try to visualize the whole board and will often need to orientate themselves one piece at a time. This much is now well established, but
probing more specifically it is very curious what chess-players see because it seems to me that they see what they think to be of value to them. Professor Susan Greenfield (Brain Story) supports this point: "We are far from being pas
sive cerebral sponges. It turns out that we hu
mans see not with our eyes but with our brains ... your attentional system provides for where your eyes move. So ... if something hap
pens in my visual field that is interesting, I'll move my eyes there. But why would you move your eyes there? Only if your attentional sys
tem indicated the need to move there ... what we see must depend on the unique contents of our personalized brains." These 'unique con
tents' may include that elusive x-factor, 'tal
ent', but I suspect it's largely a question of personal history. What is interesting to us, what is valuable to us, is related to who we are, and who we are is mainly a question of genes and experience.
Our chess 'vision' has almost nothing to do with our eyes, and lots to do with our sense of value. A few examples may help to make sense of this idea. Please pay special attention to the words I have placed in italic.
w
Minders (1061) -Gonzalez (1466) U.S. Amateur West 1993
I have taken this example from the chapter 'The Curse of the Mindless King Hunter' in Jeremy Silman's hugely instructive book The Amateur's Mind. Silman's comment is very re
vealing here (italics are mine): "White was blind to the fact that his fortunes were tied to his extra queenside space and central possibilities.
Instead, he decided that a kingside attack was in order. Why? My guess is that he likes to go af
ter kings and thought that this was as good a time to do it as any. Needless to say, this is not the way to play good chess!" This strikes me as
a fairly normal occurrence and it isn't always a bad thing to play the moves you want to play.
13 �2?
"White thinks that a knight on g3 will help him create a kingside attack simply because he has an extra piece on that side of the board.
However, you should lead your pieces to squares where they have a future. Once the poor horse reaches g3 it will be badly posted since it can't go to e4, f5 or h5 !"
Another of Silman's students adopted a sim
ilarly 'desire-based' approach from the given position: 1 3 'i!fc2 lL:!h5 14 J..xe7 'ifxe7 (D).
w
Now the thoughts of the white-player, rated around 1600: "I want to mate Black on the kingside. How do I get there? His h5-knight is awkward so I don 't want to chase it back into play. I have a knight on c3 that's doing nothing
so I should re-position it and make it more ac
tive. My e3-pawn keeps his knight on h5 out. / want to break in the centre, though, and occupy d6. To do this I must get counterplay in the cen
tre. By playing e3-e4, I get play in the middle but give his knight access to f4."
Silman's despair amused me: "My heart sank when he said he wanted to mate Black on the kingside! What justification does he have for this, other than desire?" Silman also despairs at the "fear of ghosts" shown in the worry about allowing ... lL:!f4, taking two moves to trade knight for bishop.
In both cases what stands out for me is the emotional content of the thought and the way in which the thinking proceeds along evaluative lines. The players didn't just 'compute' their way to a decision, they were led to their choice by an evaluation, but not an 'objective' evalua
tion, rather an evaluation based on desire, fear and aspiration; their sense of value was pro
cessed in very human terms. White wanted to attack the black king in both cases. It wasn't that they thought that the best way to play was a kingside attack at all. Their evaluation of the position was flooded with emotional content.
When the 1600 noticed the possibility of the knight coming to f4, he didn't stop to think whether it was a dangerous idea; he just had a feeling that such a turn of events was not to his liking. The reader's first impression may be that this just shows why these players are rated some 1000 points below the world's best but let me show you the thoughts of a player with those (roughly) extra 1000 rating points and see what you make of the difference.
Speelman - Miles British Ch, Morecambe 1975
1 c4 b6 2 lL:!c3 J..b7 3 e4 e6 4 d4 J..b4 5 'it'c2 J..xc3+ 6 bxc3 l0e7 (D)
In his preface to his notes to this game Jon Speelman says the following: "One of the big
gest psychological problems in playing chess is to strike the proper balance between the moves one wants to play, and those which one believes one ought to play. Certainly, one should aim to be as objective as possible at all times. But in the heat of the battle this is, of course, extremely difficult. This is one area in which the differ
ence between strong players and weaker ones is particularly marked I have a rather clear memory of the feelings - though of course not the exact calculation - which led me to lash out at move seven. My decision was the result of a heady cocktail of respect for my opponent com
bined with an under-estimation of my position.
When I started to think at move seven, I felt that it should be rather good for me; but then I be
gan to have doubts. If Black can get in ... f5 suc
cessfully, then he may have a good game. At some point the extreme idea of h4 occurred to me. And presumably the more I looked at it, the
more I wanted to play it. Eventually, I decided to give in to my cruder instincts."
w
"This is where thefitn starts. I liked my cen
tre but got nervous about .. .f5 . So:"
7 b4!?
I love the way Spess says "so'', as if 7 h4 followed deductively from his feelings about the position. Compare this to something like:
"When one side has the two bishops he must strive to demonstrate the superiority of the bishop without a counterpart. Speelman aims to weaken Black's dark squares by pushing the h
pawn to h6, thus improving the scope of his dark-squared bishop. The move has a further benefit in that there may a possibility of devel
oping the king's rook to h3. Moreover, if Black is to stop the h-pawn from going to h6, he will have to move his own h-pawn, thus providing future targets for White's dark-squared bishop and weakening the g6-square in the event of Black playing ... f5. Perhaps Speelman had also foreseen variations with tactical problems based on the a8-h 1 diagonal and felt it prudent to remove his rook from the diagonal of the b7-bishop. The move has a further crucial benefit in that Black's most natural continuation, 7 .. .f5 8 exf5 ttJxf5, can be met with the developing move 9 .i.g5." This is my own interpretation, as provided by my left cortex.
Which gives a truer account of Speelman's decision: the fun, the liking and the nerves or the invented verbal explanation?
7 ... 0-0 8 l:lh3!?
"Once loosed from the fetters of playing 'properly' , I carried on playing the moves I wanted to !"
Why did he 'want' to play these moves? Pre
sumably this rook-lift is quite consistent with the previous move, but did he 'think' his way to these two moves? Not in any conventional sense; I think it would be accurate to say that he 'felt' his way there, but even that would be misleading, because, as we saw in the Preface, thought and feeling are not as separate as we tend to assume.
8 ... d6 9 .i.d3 e5 10 f4!?
"Although this is consequent, it is also ex
tremely provocative. Presumably 7 h4 and 8 .:h3 had caused a serious rush of adrenaline."
Crazy juice is drenching the board. I wonder if Speelman had seen this position when he chose 7 h4. I doubt it; in fact I have a suspicion that he probably played all of his moves from 7 to 1 0 rather slowly and each of them took up a great deal of nervous energy. Indeed, he admits that he had already used an hour and ten minutes by this stage.
There is much to be said here. My thoughts on objectivity will be elaborated on in Chapter 5 but for now I should say that during a game I don't think it is possible for a chess-player to be absolutely objective. This is why Speelman's
"objective as far as possible" is noteworthy, as is his claim that even this is "extremely diffi
cult". I think objectivity in thought in general may be possible, for example in analysing a pawn ending which was not your own, but even there it doesn't come naturally because you will usually have certain preconceived opinions about what the evaluation should be and will tend to direct your thoughts towards the lines which fit your evaluation. More to the point, your evaluation will be related to desire; you will want to see certain things and you will look in accordance with your emotional reaction to the position. In other words your thoughts al
ways have emotional content.
More specifically, the role of desire in deci
sion-making has been somewhat neglected.
Perhaps this can be best understood with some sort of theory of chess aesthetics but our attrac
tion to certain moves may also work in a similar way to sexual attraction. I'll only make the most tentative dip into this, the deepest of wa
ters, but there may be some mileage here be
cause in both cases the attraction can be rather inexplicable, inducing emotions we cannot fully
rationalize and perhaps in both cases we are also motivated by some sense of 'survival' Leaving the sex to one side, the idea of evalua
tions being formed on the basis of previous ex
perience may be in some sense Darwinian.
A grandmaster reaches his present form over the course of hundreds of thousands of games (years) in the chess jungle. During this time they have slowly but imperceptibly improved (adapted, become 'fitter' ) and in deciding on a move over the board they are unconsciously calling on the experience of their past defeats and victories (ancestry, memes) to reach a deci
sion which will maximize their chances of avoiding defeat (survival) and achieving vic
lOry (procreation). Please don't quote me on all this though, even though I'm writing it in my own book.
My real aim is to try to explain and explore lhe idt?a that all chess thinking is evaluative. I have come to the opinion that evaluation is not a separate thought-process which we suddenly switch into when deemed important, but an in
tegral one which is the pilot of our thoughts, and not just the pilot, but the co-pilot, steward
ess, meal, and view out the window. It's the whole watermelon, it's ever-present, it's the red thread of our thinking, without which we wouldn't think at all.
When we calculate, plan, think abstractly, worry, make judgements, check for blunders, compare pieces and pawn-structures we are always thinking about the relative value of things. This move is 'better' than that one (more value). I don't 'trust' this line (suspicious about its value) I need to exchange rooks (my position would have more value if the rooks came off).
This may seem counterintuitive at first because we generally think of evaluation as something you stop to do, perhaps after calculating or after
a change in pawn-structure. But if you look at your thoughts closely you'll realize that you are making some sort of value judgement all the time. In most players this might be a largely un
conscious process but there is definitely some sort of 'pre-intellectual awareness' in your chess thou
gh
ts. You gauge the likely value of different positions and ideas before you stop to make sense of them; your conscious and unconscious evaluations may change but the funda
mental process underlying your thoughts is
always there. You may or may not realize it, but you are evaluating these words as you read them.
Here is the rub: all thought in chess is eval
uative. What is being sought is value. The 'vi
sion' of the strongest players is abstract because value has no visible form. You cannot 'see' stop after each of them and evaluate; but rather your sense of value will determine what you look at and how long you look at it. When I played a six-game match with Michael Adams I was amazed at how little he saw. Yes, that's right, shock horror gasp! - he's only world top ten. But seriously, I actually think I saw more in general but what I saw was of relatively little value whereas Mickey followed the river; he knew where his thoughts should go. Mickey beat me very convincing} y: 5 (quality) -1 ( quan
tity). Indeed, after the match, when we were discussing chess, Mickey fully admitted not seeing very much in general; "that would have been an eye-opener for you", he said, with his eyes wide open.
At the time I could only blink, but I think I now have a clearer idea of what he means. At the risk of overdoing the metaphors, the evalua
tion doesn ' t happen when the train inspector checks the tickets, the evaluation is the train driver without which you wouldn't move at all or know how to get to where you want to go.
And just like the train, you almost never see the driver. Most of what your brain processes is un
seen in that you are evaluating unconsciously and using this unconscious to reach your as
sessments.
This reminds me of a game I played against Julian Hodgson in which I found a very creative idea that almost had a huge hole but still worked well because of a fairly stunning re
source. I'm sorry I can't trace the actual posi
tion but I remember Julian congratulating me on the idea and saying he especially liked the fact that he couldn 't do X because of Y. Then
when I told him that although I was vaguely aware of X I dido' t think I'd seen Y he assured me that I had seen it, but just didn't realize it be
cause "most calculation is unconscious". I'm not saying that unconscious calculation is the same as evaluation but certainly the two seem to operate together somehow.
The reason I mention the idea of all thought being evaluative in the context of emotion is that evaluation is, at least partly, some sort of emotional process. When you say "it doesn't feel right", you are expressing what might best be called an 'emotional thought' . And this of course links back to the Preface, where I sug
gested that all thought had some sort of emo
tional content. Chess thinking is evaluative because evaluation is what happens when thought and emotion get together. And thought and emotion are always together.
I was delighted to discover that I shared this idea with the late but legendary Jan-Hein Don
ner, who writes as follows in The King (page 336): "A chess-player's thinking - in so far as it is a mental activity - is indeed mainly preoccu
pied with calculation. When he is pondering his next move, there is little else going on his mind than a constant 'if I do this then he'll do that' and so on. This is primarily experimental by na
ture, since he is not allowed to touch the pieces and is forced for this reason to move them in his head. But this silent musing is based on a kind of sniffing - tactile, or tactile-mental activity of a totally different, largely unconscious nature;
a background heavily laden with emotions, a form of perception rather than of thinking, since it is essentially purely evaluating by na
ture. For all this calculation must start from certain evaluations, otherwise it would not even know when to stop."
One reason that players may resist this idea is because it's easy to be bound by a popular du
ality, namely that there are two ways of playing chess - the positional and the tactical. Many as
sume that the former is based on pattern
recognition and 'feel' while the latter is just random computation, flashy tactics and a ques
tion of who can calculate better. It is considered by many to be a significant divide. But this is nonsense, and that's being polite. A good move is a good move before it is any particular type of move� and a good position is a good
position before it is any particular type of position. Our appraisal of quality always pre
cedes our identification of types. Both these types are pattern-based in any case. Moreover, it is extremely rare to find a good positional idea that doesn't include an important tactic, and rare that tactics appear contrary to the spirit of the position.