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BGonline.org Forums
Advice for donkeys vs advice for experts
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Paul Money, on playing on (higonefive)
Date: Thursday, 15 March 2012, at 3:17 p.m.
I agree.
There's a chess book by John Cox in Everyman Chess's "Starting Out" series (Starting Out: 1 d4!) whose introduction eloquently states the case that everyone, even weaker players, should strive to make good moves rather than to adopt "shortcuts" that might make things easier for you in the short run but will ultimately harm your game.
Cox is specifically speaking about the temptation for lower-rated players to avoid the main lines in the openings in favor of "opening systems" that objectively speaking aren't the strongest but that require less work to acquire. Cox argues quite persuasively IMO that the reason the main lines are the main lines are because the moves in those lines are the best moves. If you want to play chess well, you should always be looking for the best moves. It never gets easier to learn the main lines if you keep putting off their study.
It's true of course that not everyone strives to reach stratospheric heights. But even if you're at the level of following a blog regularly and trying to pick up occasional ideas to improve your play, I don't think it's a good idea to get in the habit of systematically making plays that you know are not the best.
I of course agree with Paul that what the bot reports as the equity is not always the right play in practice, and that one should take into account how hard a position is to play and so forth. But generalizing to a rule that you should cash when in doubt, because you should just accept that you're a donkey and always will be, seems very wrong to me. It just encourages laziness of thought.
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