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BGonline.org Forums
World Chess Champion Anand on practicing with a real board
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: World Chess Champion Anand on practicing with a real board (Bob Koca)
Date: Sunday, 5 August 2012, at 1:30 a.m.
There's a major difference between backgammon and chess that does strain the analogy a bit.
In backgammon, it's common to train oneself by playing matches against the computer. In top-flight chess, it doesn't make sense to train this way. Instead, a large part of one's study time consists of analyzing openings. You have to learn your way through the maze of possibilities.
For example, say you know that your upcoming opponent likes to play a certain opening variation. You know that with high probability, if you're willing to cooperate, you can get to a certain position by, say, move 12. At this point, perhaps you have some feeling that certain possibilities haven't been explored enough. Maybe there's a move that is played rarely because people think it's not the best and the computers seem to agree, but based on your own chess knowledge you think that it's underrated. So you set it up on your computer, and you start exploring various replies that your opponent might play. Basically, you start manually searching the game tree at that point, and the computer will give you a "constant flow of information" about what numerical scores it assigns each of the various options. If you're lucky and it turns out that in fact you have hit on a position that the computers and the chess world at large has underrated, it should start to become clear as you probe the game tree a bit and the computer starts to shift its numerical scores.
Now your task is to try to remember all that you've learned during this process. You may have discovered that certain tempting lines don't work, or that at a certain juncture a very counterintuitive move must be made, or that in variation A you have to play move X first and then move Y but in a slightly different variation B you have to play move Y first and then move X. The chess programs are designed well to display a lot of information at once on the screen, and to adjust the information at the push of a button. This is what is meant by a "constant flow of information."
Similar considerations apply to mastering certain technical endgames. For sufficiently simple endgames, there are exhaustive tablebases, and mastering (for example) K+R+P versus K+R requires learning a vast maze of variations and different cases. You can explore any corner of this maze easily, but to learn the whole maze you have to walk around it and learn all the information that the computer spits back at you as you shuffle the pieces around.
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