So far as the laws of mathematics refer to real
ity, they are not certain. And so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Everything is vague to a degree you do not real
ize until you have tried to make it precise.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The game we have just examined made a deep impression on me because I was so sure I was worse, fairly confident that my opponent didn't do anything much wrong, and found myself at frrst equal (move 25) and then better (move 38).
We may be tempted to explain this with refer
ence to the latent dynamism in Black's posi
tion. As a result of this we should reassess the position after move 1 9 as ... what? Equal? But look at it! Doesn't everything you've learned about chess tell you that White is better?
Only very rarely can you enjoy a good posi
tion without allowing it to change. Like Chuang Tzu, we call this the transformation of things.
We tend to accept this, but think that unless someone makes a mistake the change will be a matter of valueless transformation; as if so much could be quantitatively different and yet remain qualitatively the same. Don't we place a higher value on a man than a butterfly? What if a good position has to change, and can only change for the worse? Do we say that it's not a good position after all?
Perhaps, but there's a conflict here because it's difficult to measure (evaluate) a moment at the same time as momentum. For a long time we've focused on the former to the neglect of the latter and this is only beginning to be at
tended to. In assessing a position purely as = or
;!;; or whatever, we do chess a great disservice.
Our fallacy is to apply fixed values to dynamic events. It's a bit like trying to measure snow as it falls from the sky. With some care you can capture a snowflake, acknowledge its unique
ness and then compare it to other snowflakes you've caught before. Yet however fine your appreciation of this particular snowflake, it won't tell you which way the wind is blowing the snow or how much more snow there is to come. For that you need to look at the sky, but then you take your eye off the snowflake.
A chess position is almost always an event in progress. Not without good reason do we refer to the demonstration of beautiful games as 'po
etry in motion'. The position and our relation to it is always changing and is always essentially unpredictable. Indeed, as I've said, the defining
feature of a chess position is its propensity to change. Thus the adhesion of static labels is in·
variably doomed to come unstuck. There is a transforming force that permeates the soul of the game, and there's no good reason to think that this force is ambivalent, consis
tent or predictable. The position constantly changes, and this can't be helped, but I think the evaluation is constantly changing as well.
How could it fail to? I may be missing some
thing, but it seems to me that at some stage we have made certain assumptions like "a 'slightly better' assessment shouldn't lead to victory un
less the opponent makes a mistake" or "you were clearly better and now you're slightly worse so you must have made a mistake,. with·
out any real justification.
Tal may have been on to the slippery prob
lems these assumptions have caused for he claimed that "There are only equal positions and winning positions, nothing in between." From an absolute point of view this is quite obvious, because the game can only end in a draw (equal) or a decisive (winning) result. However, Tal's quote can also be read as telling us not to speculate on these positions which are not clearly winning or drawn. If we can't trace them to a single result by analytical means then the assessments are really just educated guesses.
This is essential for practical purposes, but it might be a mistake to build further theoretical assumptions on already speculative premises.
If you seem to be clearly better and then find yourself clearly worse, we can normally point to at least one mistake you have made, but we have no justification for thinking that we can always do so. None at all, as far as I can tell, and if nothing else, this, for me, only serves to reinforce delight at the mystery and wonder of chess.
But what good is this? I hear you ask. Will it stop me Blinking, or help me build a snowman?
I'm actually not sure how useful these rumina
tions are for your chess, but I ' m sure they are not useless if you consider them carefully. It's probably not possible to stop Blinking entirely, but I am suggesting that the way we look at chess positions is blinkered, or more sugges
tively, blind in one eye. That's clear enough, but it would be much too shallow just to leave it at that because we have to see why this comes
about if we are to have any chance of overcom
ing our propensity to blink.
The main point is that it seems very mis
leading to consider any position in abstract and to attach a label to it as if it made sense
in its own right. Of course, whenever an anno
tator says 'slightly better for White' there is a tacit acknowledgement of the plans and ideas of both sides and often an explicit recommen
dation for how the game will develop. But I wonder if this is like looking at a wheel when stationary and talking about how well it moves.
You compliment the rubber, the spokes and shape, but then when it starts to move round and round you can no longer see these aspects of the wheel; all you see is the movement.
I was pleased to see something similar to these ideas expounded in Yermolinsky's The Road to Chess Improvement. I have had a close look at his chapter on 'Trends, Turning-Points and Emotional Shifts' and still don't fully un
derstand it. However, he seems to be saying that the direction of the game matters every bit as much, if not more, than the assessment at a given point in time: "In a game between two equally skilled players, mistakes cannot be counted on, thus we must assume that trends are not easily reversed. Instead, things tend to snowball: problems on the board are aggra
vated by a negative emotional state, while time-trouble and fatigue contribute heavily;
and at the end mistakes become more likely .. . "
Yennolinsky also raises the curious question of how you behave "when trends are established"
and "after a critical moment when you feel a change in the major trend." This question of be
haviour or reaction is a psychological matter of considerable interest, but of limited relevance here because my primary motivation is how we can come to recognize these critical moments in the first place, and I think we can only do that if we stop seeing chess move by move. More to the point is what kind of significance we give to trends compared to assessments. Yermo seems to be saying that the ' objective' evalua
tion of the position on the board matters less than the subjective feeling of who is in control, of who is driving the game and dictating its di
rection.
GM Keith Arkell suggested to me that one way to make sense of this is to see chess as
some sort of conceptual battle. We have our concepts (strategic operations, tactical justifi
cations) and our opponents have theirs. We feel good when we see our concepts triumph and bad when they fail. Moreover, perhaps we don' t just feel bad in these cases, but somehow vulnerable, because our conceptual abilities have been called into question. The way the po
sition develops will then have as much to do with concepts spanning several moves as with the assessment of the single position at a given time. On this reading, there may be scope to
add to our current symbols to include signs that signify the direction of the game as re
vealed in the trends. So there could be a sys
tem of evaluation which reads some thing like
.. ;;!;; <" "Slightly better for White but favourable trend for Black" There is much to be said for this idea, and perhaps more so because the im
portance of direction may not just be psycho
logical.
Another hefty tome, Watson's Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy has some very thought
ful writing on this area: Chapters 10, 1 1 and 1 2
are especially relevant. In s o far as there i s a sin
gle theme to Watson's book, it is the develop
ment of chess from a rule-based enterprise with static features determining assessments to a fairly anarchic pursuit with an emphasis on dy
namism and initiative. Chess has evolved from a game that emphasized fixed, non-changeable factors, to a game in which assessments cannot be derived from principles, and strategies can
not be derived from rules. It was thought by some that chess was predictable enough for you to able to look at a single position in a game and deduce what should happen next and what the result was therefore likely to be. Now if you look at a position, especially between players of similar strengths, you may well be at a loss to give any assessment other than 'unclear' and the likely line of play may well include a good number of ' ifs ' and 'buts' because it is much more difficult to assess the competing claims of different concepts.
This has a lot to do with the way that opening systems have changed of course. There is much less chance of playing a game with, as Suba puts it, "one doing, the other applauding" when the game really begins in a complex theoretical position with chances for both sides. However,
modern chess. Now that we play chess in a way which tends to include respect for the op
ponent and their competing ideas, the idea of chess as a conceptual battle is becoming ever more acute.
The point here is that concepts cannot be seen by looking at individual positions but rather at the way they unfold over a (usually) short series of moves. Whereas you can assess a single position with a symbol like ;!; you cannot do justice to the conceptual battle with such a crude tool. To do this you need to add the trend aspect and the direction of the game, which is like a barometer of the conceptual battle. For example, in my game with John Shaw on move 1 9 he may have had the concept to exchange a pair of knights to get a clear good knight vs bad bishop position but my conception was to avoid this and accept that I'm lumbered with a bad bishop while leaving him lumbered with a superfluous knight. Thus at this point I am slightly worse when you look at the position seen on move 19 but when you look at the con
ceptual battle after 1 9 .. . t"Lld7 ! I have achieved some sort of favourable direction, or at least halted the negative trend caused by losing the conceptual battle in the opening, when I didn't want to exchange light-squared bishops but was forced to.
So although a full discussion of these theo
retical matters is not sufficiently relevant to be considered here, it seems that we should be wary of assessing a position with only one 'eye' We need to see it both under the aspect of the position as it stands and as it is developing (conceptual battle). The curious thing is that we cannot really do both at once. We can assess the position by weighing strategic factors in a given
propriate in any given instance and, where pos
sible, to keep both in mind. Whatever you make of the above, it seems undeniable that the im·
portance of switching from dynamic to static considerations is not adequately reflected in our current chess symbols.
There are some striking parallels with quan
tum theory in the way of viewing chess outlined above, particularly Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (the more accurately one measures, for example, the position of a particle, the less accurately one can measure its momentum) and Bohr's Principle of Complementarity (wave and particle theories not mutually exclusive).
There may well be some value in exploring these parallels, but that's way beyond the scope of this book, and, I must confess, the scruples of this author.
Conclusions
Blinking occurs when we miss key moments or critical positions which lead to a change in the direction of the game. There are various signs and signals we can try to recognize, but the most important skill to develop is your sensitiv
ity to the changing trends in a game. With im·
proved 'trend sensitivity' and 'position sensitivity' you are much more likely to spot 'gateway positions', which are the turning
points between one trend and the next. There is reason to think that these trends are as im
portant for assessing a position as the strategic factors that we tend to weigh to make our con
ventional assessments. If this is so, the sin of Blinking is related closely to the way we habitu
ally assess positions. We may need a whole new set of symbols to do justice to the dynamic na
ture of modern chess.
The best fighter is not ferocious.
DENG MING DAO
de Firmian - Hillarp Persson Politiken Cup, Copenhagen 1 996
We join the game just as the time-control has been reached. Black is outrated by about 200 points and although tense and uneven, the game has been going the favourite's way. White may have missed a win shortly before the time
control but now has to reconcile himself to a draw after 43 clrh3 Ahl + 44 �g2 Agl +, etc.
GM Jonathan Tisdall gives excellent annota
tions to this game in New in Chess magazine, concluding with the ironic but highly sugges
tive note: "Now, Nick used some deductive reasoning. He should win this game, and so perpetual check must be avoided ... "
43 <iii>h2?? �f3+ 44 �h3 Ahl+ 45 �g2 l:th2+ 0-1
Black mates on f2 next move. It's peculiar that a 2600 GM should lose a game in this way, especially after the time-control. I have no doubt that if the same player were shown the same position in a different context, he would see in little more than one second that the move 43 clrh2 allows checkmate. It's certainly not a difficult combination to see, unless you are
somehow blinded by other considerations. So we could look at this as a freak accident and laugh it away, but I prefer to see it as an extreme but instructive example of one of the main causes of error in chess: the spectre of the re
sult and how it affects our play.
Chess differs from most competitive endea
vours in this crucial respect. You can lose a set in tennis or a goal in soccer and recover, be
cause you still compete on equal terms after the event. But a significant mistake can be fatal in chess because it leads you to lose control of the game. Sometimes you can even perform per
fectly after the error, and yet there is no way back. This puts enormous pressure on the chess-player. One slip and you could be head
ing inexorably to defeat or one careful move, and victory is assured. Donner puts it like this:
"It is mainly the irreparability of a mistake that distinguishes chess from other sports. A whole game long, there is only one point to score. Just one mistake and the battle is lost, although the fight may go on for hours. Surely mistakes also occur in tennis or in soccer but there the scoring continues and the players may start again with a clean slate. A chess-player however, remains bound for hours by a small lapse from a distant past. That's why mistakes hit so hard in chess."
Moreover, we often think and talk about chess with reference to the result: "That's los
ing" "I just need to be careful; I'm sure it's a draw" "If I've calculated this correctly then I'm winning" Indeed, there seems to be a sense, at least unconsciously, in which we are face to face with the ultimate outcome at every single moment of the chess game. It is only nat
ural then that our judgements, calculations and plans should be infused with and coloured by our thoughts about the likely and desired out
come of the game.
A striking example of this 'sin' in top-level chess was the Kasparov-Short PCA World Championship Match in 1 993. Short often played the opening and early middlegame very
powerfully with White but from several win
ning positions he only earned one victory. After the game in which he did win, he looked back on his missed opportunities with these words:
"I had forgotten what it was like to beat Kas
parov. However, I had an advantage in this game because I didn' t know I was going to win until the game was almost over." Indeed, at the risk of sticking my neck out, I think Short' s sec
ond biggest problem in this match was his sus
ceptibility to Wanting (the biggest problem was the strength of his opponent !).
His thoughts during the games were polluted by his desire to win. Whereas Kasparov could just play and implicitly play for victory, feeling nothing unusual in beating his challenger, Short was not used to having winning positions against Kasparov and so had problems adapting from 'playing' to 'winning' since the two do not go hand in hand unless victory seems normal.
My concern here is to look closely at the ways in which thoughts and feelings about the result can lead to errors in perception . I also want to suggest some remedies that will enable you to play chess with an optimal relationship to this perennial feature of the game. But first I present an example to highlight the importance of recognizing and treating this sin. Although White is somewhat stronger than his opponent, both are GMs, and Black's loss can, I believe, be largely attributed to Wanting.
Miles - Arkell Isle of Man 1995
1 d4 tiJf6 2 .ig5 d5 3 .ixf6 exf6 4 e3 .id6 5 .id3 g6 6 l2Jf3 0-0 7 l2Jbd2 f5 8 0-0 tiJd7 9 c4 l2Jf6 10 cxd5 t2Jxd5 1 1 tlJc4 .ie7 12 llcl c6 13 a3 a5 14 1kd2 .ie6 15 lUd1 lle8 16 .ifl tiJf6 17 'ii'c2 .idS 18 tiJcd2 .id6 19 g3 1ke7 20 .ic4 .ixc4 21 tlJxc4 .ic7 22 tiJce5 tiJd5 23 l:el .id6 24 1kc4 �g7 25 1kn h6 26 \i'g2 ti'e6 27 tiJd3 tiJf6 28 tiJd2 tiJe4 29 l2Jxe4 fxe4 30 tlJc5 1ke7 31 t2Ja4 \i'e6 (D)
Nothing much has happened until now, and to my understanding the position is about equal.
Nothing much has happened until now, and to my understanding the position is about equal.