Hayward Daily Review, Sunday, January 26, 1969

Chess

by richard shorman

   C. H. O'D. Alexander and T. J. Beach effectively employ some novel approaches to the task of instructing in their book, Learn Chess (Pergamon Press, New York, 1964). Especially intriguing is the chapter on planning (vol. 2, pp. 151-55ff), presented her in digest form.

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   WHEN A PLAYER who has passed the beginner stage and got a fair understanding of tactics is asked what he finds hardest in chess, he usually replies, "Making a plan."
   To begin with nearly all your plans will arise by accident and even when you are a strong player you will find this happens surprisingly often.
   The game is going along and suddenly one player finds that he cannot do something he had meant to do because of an unexpected reply that he had overlooked. He therefore finds that he has to make a weakening move, say, with the pawns in front of his King. This unexpected creation of a weakness gives the opponent the chance to form a plan to exploit it.

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   IF YOU WANT TO be able to seize chances of this kind, the first essential is thoroughly to master the different types of favorable positions and know how to proceed in them. Then you will be able to recognize possibilities at an early stage and also know how to exploit them.
   Plans by design arise from your opening strategy. The various openings all have various underlying ideas and particular type of position to which they give rise. When you have played any one opening a lot you will find that certain themes come up again and again.

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   A WAY TO LEARN how to develop plans from the opening is to study individual openings and to play a number of games with Black and White on a particular opening. But do not stick to one opening all the time or you will get too narrow in your range.
   Even in these plans arising from the opening, the element of accident or chance enters quite largely. First, there are always a large number of defenses to any opening and these give rise to different kinds of game. It is the sort of play your opponent adopts that will, which your choice of play, determine what kind of plans emerge. Secondly, mistakes will be made by both players and these may radically alter the nature of the position.

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   ONE OF THE MOST valuable lessons a player can learn is the importance of flexibility in approach and of recognizing when a plan should be changed. Over and over again one sees players lose because they fail to realize that a change is necessary.
   A very common situation is as follows. A player has a good attacking position and launches an assault on the enemy King, let us say by a pawn advance. However, he makes a wrong move, after which his attack no longer has any chance of succeeding against correct defense. He could still nevertheless maintain an equal game if, realizing his error, he withdrew from the attack and consolidated. But because this attack was his initial plan he feels obliged to continue it, rushes on with his pawns thus weakening his defensive position, is heavily repulsed and loses.

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   YOU MUST ALWAYS judge the position as it is, not as it was or as it ought to have been if you had played better.
Published master games and text books can be very misleading in the picture they give of planning in chess. Because the published game is selected to please the reader and the text book is usually aiming to explain one particular technical point, they give an impression of everything proceeding steadily to a happy ending for the winner. But the great bulk of actual games, even master games, are much messier affairs in which the advantage changes hands and a player often wins after having had much the worst of it.

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   IF YOU WANT TO seize your chances in such games, you must always be ready to change your mind and your plans. This does not mean that you flit from one thing to another (that is completely fatal), but that you remain open-minded about the position.

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RAPID TRANSIT TOURNAMENT

   The Hayward Chess Club, 2058 D St., will host a rapid transit tourney (ten seconds a move) tomorrow (Monday), at 8 p.m. Monthly winner receives a certificate, annual winner a trophy. Entry fee is 35 cents.