Tactics Calculation vs Imagination

Originally posted by Restless Soul
It's not so much seeing the moves, it's correctly evaluating the resulting position that separates weak players from strong ones. It's easy to see that a move could double someones pawns, or fork 2 pieces, or make your position more deadly; however, seeing it at the end and judging the position is more essential then just the simple idea of winning ma ...[text shortened]... t combinations are mainly intuition, thats where practice helps. Practice makes perfect :o

that's kinda what i meant by 'work with it' ... find a wierd move and analyze the dung out of it until you find a way to make it work... if it turns out to be impossible, start over ... that's kinda what i meant to say. You are right though.

Originally posted by chrspayn
It seems to me that you could break tactics up into calculation and imagination. Imagination being spotting the idea in a position, and calculation being the exploration of one line or another. My personal experiance is that I am pretty good at calculation, but my imagination needs work. Is there a set of tools anyone recomends to work on this problem? Should I try to solve easy problems quickly?

Let me preface this by saying I do not consider myself a good chess player yet. I am getting better and try to consistently challenge higher rated opponents. One book that has helped me greatly is "Fischer's Greatest Games" The easiest way to improve your calculation and imagination is to take the annotated games and play them out on the board. You of course will not understand all the themes and tactics but ever so slowly you will learn new positional ideas and themes which should eventually lead to stronger play all around, not just tactics,calculation or imagination! Have fun with it!

Originally posted by chrspayn
It seems to me that you could break tactics up into calculation and imagination. Imagination being spotting the idea in a position, and calculation being the exploration of one line or another. My personal experiance is that I am pretty good at calculation, but my imagination needs work. Is there a set of tools anyone recomends to work on this problem? Should I try to solve easy problems quickly?

Here's the FEN of a position at the beginning of Amatzia Avni's book "Creative Chess":

2r1rbk1/p1p2pp1/1p2p2p/n3Nq2/b1PPQB1P/2PB2P1/P4P2/1R2R1K1 w - - 0 1

What's the best move for White? You throw a computer at this problem, and it sees the solution right away. But I'll be damned if I spot it in a million years, especially if I had run across this position in a real game.

Now, spotting this kind of solution takes real creativity, not just a mechanical consideration of every possible sacrifice. I wonder how many such positions hiding such rich possibilities I've obliviously marched past in my games, and how I could learn to find them over the board?

I couldn't find the solution after five minutes, though I was thinking on the right lines. Did this come from a game?

Originally posted by Fat Lady
[fen]2r1rbk1/p1p2pp1/1p2p2p/n3Nq2/b1PPQB1P/2PB2P1/P4P2/1R2R1K1 w - - 0 1[/fen]

I couldn't find the solution after five minutes, though I was thinking on the right lines. Did this come from a game?

Qh1!

i.e.
Qf6, Bg5!

Originally posted by Fat Lady

I couldn't find the solution after five minutes, though I was thinking on the right lines. Did this come from a game?[/b]

Avni does not indicate whether the position is from a game or not. But a search through my database found the position in Rubens A Filguth vs Arturo De la Garza in Mexico in 1980.

Here's some of what Avni had to say about the position:

"In mid-1987 I gave lectures to several groups of chess players. The groups were heterogenous; they included youths and adults, students and trainers, from relatively weak club-players up to 2300 national masters. For my talks I chose some fascinating, out-of-the-ordinary positions, and assembled them under the headline "creative chess". This was the modest beginning of this book. One of the examples I cited was the following (diagram of above position, followed by the solution).

I've noticed that the strongest participants in the lectures solved this puzzle in seconds; while others stared at the demonstration board for some minutes without success. (guilty as charged!)

I was intrigued; after all, everyone attending had been told that there existed a solution, a forced win. So why did some players fail to reach it?

I could think of three plausible explanations..."

And Avni goes on for another couple of pages, discussing why he thinks some people miss the solutions to these kinds of positions. I'm not going to quote the whole discussion here. You'll just have to buy the book. 🙂 But I do think this is an interesting question.

In retrospect, the solution seems obvious. I think the key to it is analyzing the position accurately, before even starting to think of a possible continuation. An accurate analysis will already get you on the right track to solving it.

I think the reason I failed to solve it was because I saw the position, and did not take the evaluation step seriously, so superficially evaluated the position as fitting in to a particular stereotype, and immediately started looking for rather stereotypical continuations. Had I devoted more time and thought to analysis of the position in the first place, perhaps I might have had a chance at the solution.

Here's the PGN for the game the position came from:

[Event "?"]
[Site "Mexico"]
[Date "1980.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Filguth, Rubens A"]
[Black "De la Garza, Arturo"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "A18"]

1.c4 Nf6 2.Nc3 e6 3.e4 d5 4.e5 d4 5.exf6 dxc3 6.bxc3 Qxf6 7.d4 Nc6 8.Nf3 h6 9.Bd3 Bd7 10.O-O Be7 11.Rb1 b6 12.Qe2 O-O 13.Re1 Rfe8 14.g3 Bf8 15.Bf4 Rac8 16.h4 Na5 17.Ne5 Ba4 18.Qe4 Qf5 19.Qh1 1-0