Old school players

Andersenn, Morphy, Capablanca, Lasker, Steinitz, bla bla bla

They didn't have the following learing resources, as far as I can see ;

* Chessbase
* Enormous amount of reachable opening theory
* Chess tactics servers
* Chessmaster 10th tutorials
* CC internet sites
* Blitz internet sites
* Vibrant and active chess forums to clearify they doubts and share their experiences
* Visualisation software
* Irnev Chernev's Logical chess, Silman's freaking imbalances 😛, Seirawan's Winning chess series
* Puzzle books, at least not that much examples as today

etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.,


So what are we missing ? It seems to me that quality of the learning decreased while we are bombarded with more and more informations every day and a bunch of new books and software all of them claiming in their preface "this is the right way because bla bla".


What's the catch ? We should improve much faster. I am 1700, learning 3 years from various sources and I still play half moronic half flip coin chess. Same with xxxxx of other players. Where is the secret, huh ?

I would say the catch is these players that u mention are the best of there time. But I would tend to think that chess players are better now as a whole but we are not all morphys or fishers.

Originally posted by Kevin Mcfarland
I would say the catch is these players that u mention are the best of there time. But I would tend to think that chess players are better now as a whole but we are not all morphys or fishers.

Rating is not a reasonable way to compare your knowledge with that of old school players. Because it is so much easier to learn chess nowadays, with so much information available, you have to play much better now than you'd have to in the past, in order to achieve the same rating.

If Morphy played today the way he did in his time, he'd be on his high 2200s, at best. At his time, the knowledge he had was enough to make him the best player in the world.

Databases, softwares and books improve the level of chess players as a whole, but their effect on rating isn't very significant, simply because, once you reach a certain level, everyone will be using them and taking points from each other.

Originally posted by Heroic Metool
If Morphy played today the way he did in his time, he'd be on his high 2200s, at best.

Some players just have it.

Just like you have music and art prodigies, I think that some are born with a natural talent for chess (or strategy games in general). Lasker, Capablanca, etc. just had the gift and an innate understanding of the 64 squares that most of us can never learn no matter how we study.

I believe if they had the tools we have today they'd still have been the strongest players in the world, because they had "it." Fischer was another one... he had a natural talent for the game, and sure he studied obsessively, but in his mid-teens something 'clicked' and after that he saw things over the board that no other player could see.

I remember talking with Robert Byrne about Fischer, and what it was like to analyze a game with him. He said, "Bobby would go into some line with wild complications, and I'd say, 'Bobby, why didn't you play that?' And Bobby would shrug and point at the final position, 'unclear.' These were beautiful lines; most of us could never have survived the complications, and Bobby wouldn't play it because the final position was unclear. I would have played it, if I had seen it."

Morphy, Capablanca, Lasker - the old time greats - they were like that too, I bet.

Originally posted by ivan2908
What's the catch ? We should improve much faster. I am 1700, learning 3 years from various sources and I still play half moronic half flip coin chess. Same with xxxxx of other players. Where is the secret, huh ?

Originally posted by ivan2908
Andersenn, Morphy, Capablanca, Lasker, Steinitz, bla bla bla

They didn't have the following learing resources, as far as I can see ;

* Chessbase
* Enormous amount of reachable opening theory
* Chess tactics servers
* Chessmaster 10th tutorials
* CC internet sites
* Blitz internet sites
* Vibrant and active chess forums to clearify they doubts an ...[text shortened]... oronic half flip coin chess. Same with xxxxx of other players. Where is the secret, huh ?

Great topic! At our level the answer may be to not worry which generation was better, but to take the basics from the older and the modern improvements from the more recent. Some ideas of old and new from the WWW:

From Kevin Spraggett's "Becoming a Master"
http://www.kevinspraggett.com/reflecti.htm

AVOID THE INFORMATION TRAP

You become a chess master by gradually improving your playing level. You go from level to level...each level may be perceived as requiring a little more information, and even a slightly different type of information.

Many players 'choke' at a certain level and have difficulties getting to the next because they have too much information in their heads! They get confused...remember that in chess what is important is the APPLICATION of information, not the ABSORPTION of information.

Lasker once wrote that he had been playing chess all of his life, and that for the last 25 years of it he had actually tried to FORGET most of the information he had acquired ! He found it hurt him more than it helped him! (As I will point out soon, what is important is acquiring techniques and methods)

With this in mind, limit the number of books you have until you become a master! You don't need very many, as Tom has already pointed out (though I think about 20 would be a reasonable level). Magazines are fine.

With respect to computer chess, maybe I will mention playing -programs later, but no one needs 2 million games! I remember once having dinner with Lombardy and several amateurs down in New York one evening. One of the amateurs mentioned that he had 1.3 million games at home on his computer, and Lombardy looked at him and asked him how many of that 1.3 million games had he worked through so far...(!?)...the amateur got the point!

Limit the number of opening systems you play. You only need one good defense against e4, one against d4, and one against the rest of the family. With white you stick to just one opening...if you have time to learn more (and you don't mind putting in the extra hours) then do so, but remember that chess is a game of 'application' , not 'absorption'. You can only make one move at a time...so keep things SIMPLE.
(end)

Robert Byrne (NYT 1988):

THERE is plenty of inspiration to be gleaned from the opening strategies of the 19th century, but there are dangers too.

Our forefathers could formulate attractive, original ideas and plans without having to worry about whether they contained microscopic flaws. But this was in the days before exact analysis became ubiquitous. Now one has to run a gamut of keenly constructed objections before following the strategies of such giants as Wilhelm Steinitz, Johannes Zuckertort or Mikhail Chigorin.
(end)

John Watson reviewing "The Game of Chess" by Siegbert Tarrasch:

But it shows how determined that thinkers like Steinitz and Tarrasch were to put chess on a rigorous scientific basis, even to the extent of establishing rules for a particular type of pawn advance.

To this day, our elementary texts are full of bogus guidelines about more important topics than rook pawn advances, so we should not feel too smug about such quaint arguments. It would be very interesting to compare the results of using Tarrasch's The Game of Chess as an elementary textbook with those of using our five best selling introductory books. I doubt that 70 years or so of added chess experience would prove to have benefited the latter.
(end)

part 2 to follow.....

And John Watson's book (Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy) reviewed by Macon Shibut: http://www.vachess.org/content/book_review_MODERNCH.htm

Book Description
It is now seventy years since Nimzowitsch wrote his monumental work My System. While it remains a fundamental work on chess strategy, the way chess positions are handled has changed greatly since Nimzowitsch's time - both refinements to existing ideas, and completely new concepts. John Watson's book fulfils the need for a thorough, profound work on the modern handling of chess positions, and how Nimzowitsch's theories - still controversial and revolutionary at the time My System was written - have been refined and used alongside classical concepts.
The first section of the book discusses how the understanding of classical themes, such as pawn majorities, the centre, and structural weaknesses, have been refined. Watson then moves on to discuss new concepts, including the willingness of modern players to accept backward pawns in return for dynamic play, the idea of a good 'bad' bishop, knights finding useful roles at the edge of the board and the exchange sacrifice idea that became prevalent with the post-war Soviet champions. This profound yet thoroughly practical work is rounded off with sections on prophylactic thinking, dynamism, modern concepts as they apply to the critical contemporary opening systems, and some thoughts on the future of chess.


Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy aims to identify and elaborate what is distinctly modern about modern chess. Since chess games, like works of art and literature, are not impersonal phenomena but rather products of human intellect and personality, what begins as a technical inquiry inevitably wades into muddier psychological waters. Questions arise about how today's grandmasters think and how they differ from leading players of the past.

Characteristically, Watson has no interest in just rehashing the usual tiresome debate over whether Morphy could give pawn and move to a modern master, or if Janowski today would be just a class B player. Both mindful of technical advances and respectful of the past masters, Watson basically dismisses most speculation about absolute strength as pointless and banal. Then he proceeds to more fertile investigations of style and method. In a thousand different ways, both explicit and implicit, Watson presents a case that the evolution of modern chess is not merely a question of progressing technique; nor accumulation of concrete knowledge about certain openings and endgames; nor even new 'principles' and insights into formations (pawn structures, classes of position) which were formerly misunderstood. On the contrary, regarding such "'principles' of positional play, which are often descriptions of advantages or disadvantages of various elements of play, eg, bad bishops backward pawns, knight outposts, centralized pieces, doubled pawn complexes, pawn chains," Watson asserts: "This type of 'rule-oriented' and principle-oriented theory was worked out or at least substantially understood by the time of Nimzowitsch's death in 1935."

So what, then, is the modern difference? According to Watson it's something more philosophical than technical: a new understanding of the scope, the utility - let's say the meaning of 'principles' altogether. From page 97: "Many changes have taken place in modern chess, for example, with respect to new ideas about weaknesses, the relative strengths of minor pieces, the value of the exchange, and considerations of time and dynamism. But the forerunner and in some sense precursor to these changes has been a philosophic notion, now so entrenched that we barely notice it. I call this notion 'rule-independence', for lack of a more comprehensive way to express it. It is simply the gradual divestment on the part of chess players of the multitudinous generalities, rules, and abstract principles which guided classical chess, and which still dominate our teaching texts."

I would say that we barely notice this notion because it is timeless, and not novel or modern at all. The intellectual basis for believing in a "gradual divestment from abstract principles" finds a pattern in what indeed happened over the course of the past century in physics. The Theory of Relativity altered scientists' attitude towards laws governing the natural universe. But chessplayers have always appreciated the relative nature of their strategic 'rules'. Even when they adopted the jargon of pre-relativity physicists and waxed philosophical about 'immutable laws governing the chessboard,' their actual games proved that old time masters understood their laws to be mere generalizations subject to myriad exception. In what follows I hope to show that today's spirit of rule-independence, whatever it means, is little different from the understanding which informed the play of Botvinnik, Lasker, Morphy, Philidor...

As Watson notes, abstract generalities and rules "still dominate our teaching texts" today. But today we have Bruce Pandolfini to turn out beginners' books. The world's best players - the ones by whom future generations will gauge the state of our theory - concentrate (if they write at all) on 'serious' game collections (or, alas, opening books). But Capablanca's Last Lectures, Lasker's Common Sense in Chess, Tarrasch's The Game of Chess - these are really great players writing for rank amateurs in a way we haven't seen in a while. A goodly portion of The Game of Chess consists of rules all right - not rules as in 'principles,' but rules, as in "the Bishop moves diagonally..." This is the point: a degree of simplification which might violate the understanding of experienced players is both appropriate and necessary in a beginner's text. We should not take such remarks to be the master's complete and final word on difficult problems of strategy.

Moreover, there is way, way more master chess activity today than before. It all gets preserved in electronic form too, so the databases are heavily inclined towards modern examples, with the explosion of material kicking in at about 1980. To wit: the entire tournament careers of players like Capablanca, Lasker or Steinitz consisted of fewer games than Viswanathan Anand played in just the 1990s. Frank Marshall was considered an active professional in his day and a man with a legendary appetite for chess, but his preserved record is just a fraction what Anatoly Karpov has added to the databases since losing the world championship in 1985. So can we really assert anything about the mindset of old masters by observing that some theme or technique or move 'never showed up' prior 1970 but saw 'repeated adoption' later?

Chess changes over time. Perhaps we can characterize the state of theory as the sum total of an era's prejudices regarding positions, in whatever form or understanding these prejudices take. We can imagine a time from the distant past when matters of pawn structure, or central control, or tempi were unknown. Indeed, most of us experienced that primordial state during our own first months in the fraternity of chessplayers. Maybe all that we then knew, or thought we knew, is that the queen was "stronger" than the rook, to say nothing of the bishop or knight. Maybe we read somewhere that she was worth "9 points". So armed, we had an indisputable advantage over an opponent who did not as yet possess even that basic theory. But we also had something else: a potential for surprise, even confusion, when a better player reveals the limit of our little theory with QxR!!, precisely the one move we considered unplayable.

Whatever the prejudices happen to be at a given time and place, a capacity for spotting - or even better, for manufacturing - the occasional exception has always been the hallmark of mastery - today, in 1935, in 1835.

Originally posted by Heroic Metool
Rating is not a reasonable way to compare your knowledge with that of old school players. Because it is so much easier to learn chess nowadays, with so much information available, you have to play much better now than you'd have to in the past, in order to achieve the same rating.

If Morphy played today the way he did in his time, he'd be on ...[text shortened]... nce you reach a certain level, everyone will be using them and taking points from each other.

pawn,lady,you guys think Morphy would be rated higher than 2200 if he played like he did in his time?That's what metool said "if he played like he did in his time".I agree with metool.
Had Morphy been born in,say,1980 I think he just might wipe the floor with the likes of Kramnik and Anand.But that's not what metool said.

On the original post.Yes,the old greats didn't have all these modern tools but neither did the other guys of their time.Why is Anand better than me?Why is Leko better than me?Why are all those people above me better than me?After all we do have access to the same material.

Originally posted by Katastroof
pawn,lady,you guys think Morphy would be rated higher than 2200 if he played like he did in his time?That's what metool said "if he played like he did in his time".I agree with metool.
Had Morphy been born in,say,1980 I think he just might wipe the floor with the likes of Kramnik and Anand.But that's not what metool said.

On the original post.Yes,the ...[text shortened]... all those people above me better than me?After all we do have access to the same material.

Originally posted by Katastroof
Yes,the old greats didn't have all these modern tools but neither did the other guys of their time.Why is Anand better than me?Why is Leko better than me?Why are all those people above me better than me?After all we do have access to the same material.

Originally posted by greenpawn34
Morphy the 2200 player....at best....brilliant...