FT: Boxer Wladimir Klitschko - 'Chess is war with an army'

As I've highlighted on this blog several times in the past, the Financial Times (FT) periodically publishes thoughtful chess-themed articles and interviews, the most recent one being with heavyweight champion boxer Wladimir Klitschko.  The chess itself isn't the really interesting part, although Klitschko knows both Kramnik and Kasparov; rather, it's how Klitschko has incorporated it into his life and his outlook on competition and winning.  Here are a couple of the more interesting points from the article for me; the full interview (linked above) is well worth reading.

According to my opponent, there are some unlikely parallels between top-level boxers and chess players. His friend Kramnik told him that grandmasters “lose an incredible amount of weight during a tournament”. “Some tournaments,” Klitschko says, “are long. It shows how much energy and calories your brain can burn. They lose like, if I’m not wrong, during the two weeks or week and a half, up to 20kg. If they go to sleep, they cannot really turn off their mind. It’s just constantly doing combinations and combinations and combinations.”

In his book, he says that before any fight, he visualised the fighting style of his opponents while also imagining victory. He believes the same approach can work in any negotiation. “Internalise your winning pose,” writes Klitschko. “Save similar motivational pictures on your smartphone and have a look at them if you have doubts.”

The champ appears genuinely elated and takes a photograph of the final board to send to Kramnik. “It’s an exciting game because it’s a war with an army,” he says of chess. “It’s a lot of co-ordination, a lot of focus, a lot of endurance. You have to be really agile in everything you do. It actually fits well into sporting life, into business life, into private life, into anything. It just matches with my genes.” 

Resuming training and posting in May

Although I'll check in from time to time, I expect that I'll be mostly offline here until late May, due to other pressing demands on my time.  I'll look forward to getting back to chess, for sure.

In the meantime, something to consider...

How to come back from the chess vacation?

Eight rules to do everything better (in chess)

While this blog is devoted to chess training, I think it's important to look at major principles that apply to any mastery effort.  The below categories are taken from "8 Rules to Do Everything Better" by Brad Stulberg - worth reading on Medium for the author's original take on the ideas - and listed along with some personal comments on their applicability to improvement in chess performance.

1. Stress + Rest = Growth.  For me, this is a good principle to help calibrate the amount of serious competitive play (stress) that results in advancement in playing strength.  One weekend tournament / month equivalent seems to be best for me; others may have different optimal paces depending on their energy level and needed recuperation time.

2. Focus on the Process, Not Results.  The fear and loathing that results from focusing primarily on your rating I think holds a lot of people back.  This is a recurring theme, I've even recently seen some (non-joking) commentary that to "win" your personal ratings competition (against whomever you've chosen as your rival, I guess) it's best just to quit playing when you're ahead.

3. Stay Humble.  See above.  Also, one of the main points routinely made by chess improvement coaches like IM Silman and NM Heisman is that you will lose a lot if you play a lot, so it's inevitable.  Realizing this will help you extract the best lessons possible from losses and not view them as devastating blows to your ego.

4. Build Your Tribe.  While it's not always possible to have a "buddy system" for training, one of the big accelerating factors for improvement is doing your chosen activity with: a) other motivated people, and b) having at least one master-level person to help show you the way.  Nowadays this can more easily be done online, if you don't have a local club.

5. Take Small, Consistent Steps to Achieve Big Gains.  Like with many complex activities, it's unlikely you'll have linear progression.  Rather, you work hard at tasks that push your boundaries and may plateau for a while, but then your brain "gets it" and you achieve mastery of an additional idea or particular skill.  Chess has a lot of these types of positional, tactical and strategic skills to be mastered over time.

6. Be a Minimalist to be a Maximalist.  Basically if you want to focus on improving your chess performance and put in the necessary time, you will have to forego other activities that compete with it on your personal schedule.  Where you draw the line is up to you, but you can't have five serious hobbies and expect to make significant progress at them all, for example.

7. Make the Hard Thing Easier.  This is about building positive habits, and/or doing small but important things to eliminate distractions.  Keep the tactics book out where you can always see it and thereby have it remind you of the 15 minutes a day you've committed to working problems, or have the tactics exercises site you use be your browser homepage.  Put the TV remote control away every time after you watch something, rather than leaving it conveniently at hand, or make yourself login to Netflix (or whatever) every time rather than it loading automatically.

8. Remember to Experience Joy.  If you don't do this in the long run, why are you even pursuing the path to chess mastery?  If you hit a stretch where it's not fun at all anymore, remember #1 above and reduce the stress.

Book completed: The Stress of Chess ... and its Infinite Finesse

I recently finished GM Walter Browne's The Stress of Chess ... and its Infinite Finesse ("My Life, Career and 101 Best Games"), which is his annotated games collection.  You can see previous posts here related to GM Browne, including Annotated Game #1 (simul played in Las Vegas), Training quote of the day #12, Insights from GM Walter Browne and GM Walter Browne: 1949-2015.

For chess improvement purposes, it's a great collection and perfect for using to go through a game during your lunchtime at work, which is how I worked through the book (and why it took so long to complete).  I think it's useful for both your chess skill and overall brain health to have some quality chess study time, even if no more than 15-20 minutes, to break up the work day and get your mind thinking about something completely different. (Unless of course you're a chess professional, in which case for your brain health I'd recommend focusing on an activity that had nothing to do with it at all).  I did the same thing with GM David Bronstein's Zurich International Chess Tournament, 1953 and will look for similar types of game collections in the future.

I found Browne's annotations to be relatively short and succinct in words, yet always valuable and relevant.  For chess improvers, another major benefit of going through a collection of a player's own annotated games is that you gain unique insight into their thought and decision-making process.  Browne includes a lot of these types of observations and it's highly educational to see a top-level GM (which he was at his peak) provide casually sophisticated evaluations of positions and share the considerations he took into account when making choices on how to proceed at key points.  As usually occurs when reading others' annotated games, sometimes you have to put some work into figuring out why a particular move is played (or not played) when it isn't explicitly explained or a variation given, but that's part of the value of engaging in effortful study - to grow in understanding by figuring things out for yourself.  Also, as with almost any games collection, there are at least occasionally a few typos and such in the notation that force you to puzzle out the real continuation, but the editorial quality is high enough that these are no more than a very infrequent and temporary distraction.

Browne's career was interesting in its ups and occasional downs, and spanned a long period of time in American chess.  His personal observations about tournaments, opponents, particular controversies and so on are probably of more interest to those with some previous acquaintance with them, or just curious about tournament experiences in general.  I don't think anything would be lost from a chess training perspective by skipping his sometimes encyclopedic accounts of his chess career, although there are some particularly entertaining stories from the decade where he competed the most internationally (roughly from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s).  For those into the poker scene, he also towards the end of his book (and career) recounts some of his professional poker tournament experiences and has some interesting insights in that regard as well.

Annotated Game #186: All rook endgames *should* be drawn

This last-round tournament game is another illustration of why persistence and active play can pay off (even if it does not actually, in this case).  Some relative weak opening play in an unfamiliar position leads to a failure to falsify a key move, which lands me significant material down.  Deciding that there was at least some hope for a kingside attack and pressure in compensation, I continue playing and the initiative shifts to me, despite being objectively lost.  Eventually my opponent can't take any more pressure and simplifies to what should be a drawn rook endgame...which isn't, however, in the end.  A good lesson on weak pawns, rook activity and other elements of rook endgames...which apparently all really should be drawn.

[Event "?"] [Site "?"] [Date "????.??.??"] [Round "?"] [White "ChessAdmin"] [Black "Class A"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "A25"] [Annotator "ChessAdmin/Komodo 11.2"] [PlyCount "184"] {[%mdl 8192] A25: English Opening vs King's Indian with ...Nc6 but without early d3} 1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nc6 3. g3 Nf6 4. Bg2 Bb4 {the second most common move in the position, according to the database. The bishop needs to be developed, but this doesn't have as much bite as when the d-pawn has already advanced, since there's no pin on the Nc3.} 5. Nd5 {the standard reaction.} Nxd5 6. cxd5 Ne7 7. a3 (7. Nf3 {is played most here and scores quite well, over 72 percent.}) 7... Bc5 8. b4 Bb6 9. e3 {I'm playing a lot of pawn moves here and neglecting development. The idea is to bring the knight out via e2 rather than f3, to avoid it being harrassed by the e-pawn. It's rather slow, however.} (9. Bb2) 9... d6 10. Ne2 O-O 11. Bb2 Bg4 12. Qb3 $146 {inviting the minor piece trade on e2, which I think would be better for me. The king would be safe and my light-square bishop would then be unopposed.} (12. d4 {is the move that is begging to be played here.} f6 13. h3 Bf5 14. e4 Bg6 15. O-O Rc8 16. Kh2 Re8 17. f4 c6 18. dxe5 fxe5 19. fxe5 cxd5 20. exd6 Qxd6 21. Nf4 Bf7 22. e5 Qd7 23. Qb3 g5 24. e6 Bxe6 25. Nxe6 Qxe6 26. Rae1 Qd6 {Butala,M (2246) -Banic,S Ljubljana 2001 1-0}) (12. h3 $5 {also looks fine.}) 12... Qd7 { obviously aimed at exchanging off the Bg2 and taking advantage of the resulting light-square weakness on the kingside.} 13. h3 Bh5 (13... Bxe2 14. Kxe2 f5 15. f4 $11) 14. f4 $6 {this is not terrible, but not ideal either. It weakens the king position and now the exchange on e2 is better for Black.} (14. g4 Bg6 15. f4 $11 {is an improved version of the idea. My knight would be happy to go to f4 after an exchange.}) 14... Bxe2 15. Kxe2 f6 {blunting future potential threats on the long diagonal.} 16. Raf1 $6 {here I completely miss Black's imminent threats. The g3 square is now unprotected, thanks to the f-pawn advance.} Nf5 {with a simple fork threat that I handle terribly.} 17. Rf3 $4 (17. Kf2 {I'm uncomfortable here and will have to focus on defense, but the engine considers the position equal.} Rae8 18. Re1 $11) 17... e4 $19 { what explains not seeing this response to my last move? Probably over-focusing on the tension between the e5 and f4 pawns and looking at the exchange possibilities there. Also not seriously focusing on my opponent's possibilities in order to falsify my move.} 18. Rf2 Nxg3+ 19. Ke1 Nxh1 20. Bxh1 {although an exchange and a pawn down, I decide to fight on. Black's kingside is looking a little open now and I thought my only chance would be to try to attack.} Rae8 21. Rh2 (21. f5 $19 {is the engine's improvement, preventing Black from occupying the f5 square and seizing more space. The square f4 is also now available for a rook transfer.}) 21... Qb5 22. Qd1 $2 {another bit of territory lost, notes Komodo via the Fritz interface.} (22. a4 {would be an opportunity to regain some material.} Qd3 23. Qxd3 exd3 24. a5 Bxe3 25. dxe3 Rxe3+ 26. Kd2 $17) 22... Qxd5 23. Qg4 Qe6 {by this point I really am lost.} 24. f5 {another desperate move, to prevent a queen exchange.} Qf7 {here my opponent starts losing the thread, playing very conservatively instead of putting the final nail in my coffin.} (24... Qa2 $5 25. Rg2 Qb1+ 26. Kf2 Re7 $19) 25. Bxe4 {A bit of material back and a psychological victory, even if it doesn't change the objective evaluation.} d5 (25... Qb3 {my opponent still does not see the strength of this penetration idea with the queen.} 26. Rg2 Re7 $19) 26. Bd3 c6 27. Rg2 Bc7 28. Bd4 b6 29. h4 {although I'm still losing badly, at least it's nice to have some initiative. Watching the h-pawn grind towards him made my opponent react sub-optimally.} h5 {this stops the forward motion of my h-pawn, but also leaves the h5 pawn without much support.} 30. Qf3 Be5 { the best move, exchanging off one of my good pieces and getting closer to an easily won endgame.} 31. Bxe5 Rxe5 32. Rg6 {blocking the h5 pawn's protection.} Qe7 {a direct approach, doubling on the e-file, but not the best.} (32... c5 $5 $19 {would get Black's pawns rolling and support d5-d4.}) 33. Qxh5 Rf7 { my opponent continues to react conservatively to my threats, giving me a bit of hope.} 34. Qg4 Re4 $2 {my opponent decides to simplify rather than endure further kingside pressure. Komodo now evaluates the position as equal.} (34... c5 {is still a good option.} 35. h5 c4 $19 {and now ...c3 is threatened, undermining support for e3.}) 35. Bxe4 $11 Qxe4 36. Qxe4 dxe4 {we now have a rook endgame that is perfectly fine for me.} 37. Rg4 {conservative play.} (37. h5 $5 {the engine identifies the correct plan, which is to exchange off the weak h-pawn. It doesn't have to be done immediately, but there's no reason to wait. Unfortunately, I did not identify this as a strategic need.} Kh7 38. Kf2 Rd7 39. h6 Rxd2+ 40. Kg3 gxh6 41. Rxf6 h5 42. Re6 $14) 37... Re7 38. Ke2 Re5 39. Rf4 Kh7 40. d4 (40. Rg4 {was probably the best route to a draw, just shuffling the rook.} Kh6 (40... Rxf5 41. Rxe4 $11) 41. Rg6+ Kh7 (41... Kh5 $6 42. Rxg7 $14) 42. Rg4) 40... exd3+ 41. Kxd3 {while the engine still rates it as equal, my job is now more difficult, with more open lines in the center and a backward e-pawn.} Rd5+ 42. Ke2 {I pick the wrong side, concerned about my weak pawns. Now Black can more easily activate his queenside majority.} (42. Kc3) 42... c5 43. e4 (43. b5 Kh6 $11) 43... Rd4 44. Ke3 Rd1 {things are still equal, if uncomfortable for me. Black has the iniative.} 45. bxc5 {not an objectively bad move, but it gives me considerably fewer options to combat Black's queenside threats.} (45. Ke2 $5 {is much more flexible, harrassing Black's rook and allowing my rook space on the third rank.}) 45... bxc5 46. Ke2 $6 (46. Rf3 {is the only move that holds equality and is not obvious to find.}) 46... Rd4 $15 47. h5 {now I start crumbling, not having any better ideas.} (47. Ke3 {this is supposedly better according to the engine, but it still looks difficult.} Ra4 48. Rf2 Rxa3+ 49. Kf4 $15) 47... Rc4 (47... a5 $17) 48. Rf3 $2 (48. Kd3 {and White could well hope to play on, comments Komod.} Rd4+ (48... Ra4 49. Rg4 Rxa3+ 50. Kc4 $11 {Black will not be able to make progress on the queenside with separated pawns and the rook in front, versus my king close at hand.}) 49. Kc2 $11) 48... Rxe4+ $19 {now all of my pawns are weak, vulnerable and isolated. Black has a winning game now.} 49. Kf2 Rh4 50. Kg3 Rxh5 51. Kg4 Rg5+ 52. Kf4 g6 53. fxg6+ Kxg6 54. Rc3 Re5 55. Rc4 Rd5 56. Ke3 f5 57. Ra4 { the best chance, with a temporary defense along the fourth rank, but my opponent correctly takes the time to reset his rook position.} Rd7 58. Ra6+ Kg5 59. Rc6 {I figured I needed activity and threats to have any sort of chance to resist.} (59. Ra4 {is safer but still very much losing.}) 59... f4+ 60. Ke2 Re7+ 61. Kf2 Re5 62. Rc8 {with the idea of pursuing an "annoying rook checks" strategy to harrass my opponent.} a5 63. Rg8+ Kf5 64. Ra8 c4 65. Rc8 Re4 66. Rc5+ Re5 {this was an unnecessary concession by my opponent.} (66... Kg4 67. Rc6 (67. Rxa5 f3 $19) 67... Re3 68. Rxc4 Rxa3 $19) 67. Rxc4 {I began to have a bit of hope again now.} Rb5 $6 {this allows the next move with tempo.} (67... Kg4 $5 68. Rc8 a4 $19) (67... Rd5 $5) 68. a4 $17 Rb2+ $2 {now according to the engine, I can draw.} 69. Kf3 {Exerts pressure on the isolated pawn} (69. Ke1 $5 ) 69... Rb3+ 70. Ke2 Re3+ 71. Kf2 Re4 {Black threatens to win material: Re4xc4} 72. Rc5+ {here I thought I had to avoid the rook trade, not having fully calculated out the resulting K+P endgame.} (72. Rxe4 Kxe4 73. Ke2 {will also draw. For example} Kd4 74. Kf3 Kc3 75. Kxf4 Kb4 76. Ke3 Kxa4 77. Kd2 Kb3 78. Kc1 Kc3 79. Kb1 $11) 72... Re5 {Black threatens to win material: Re5xc5} 73. Rc3 $2 {this unnecessarily limits my rook movement and loses to Black's next.} (73. Rxe5+ {works, similar to the above variation.} Kxe5 74. Kf3 $11) (73. Rc1 $11 {and now my rook can check on g1 if Black's king goes to g4.}) 73... Kg4 74. Rc8 Re4 75. Rg8+ Kf5 76. Rf8+ Kg6 77. Kf3 Rxa4 $19 78. Rc8 Kf5 79. Rf8+ $2 Ke5 80. Re8+ Kd5 81. Rd8+ Kc6 82. Rh8 Rd4 83. Rh5 Kb6 84. Rh6+ Kb5 85. Rh5+ Kb4 86. Rh8 a4 87. Rb8+ Ka3 88. Rb7 Rb4 89. Rd7 Kb2 90. Ke2 a3 91. Rd2+ Kb3 92. Rd3+ Ka4 (92... Ka4 93. Rd1 a2 94. Rd8 Ka3 95. Rd3+ Rb3 96. Rd1 f3+ 97. Kf2 Rb1 98. Rd3+ Kb4 99. Rd4+ Kc3 100. Ra4 a1=Q 101. Rxa1 Rxa1 102. Kxf3 Ra4 103. Ke3 Kc2 104. Kf2 Kd2 105. Kf3 Rd4 106. Kg2 Ke3 107. Kg3 Ke2 108. Kg2 Rd3 109. Kh1 Kf2 110. Kh2 Rb3 111. Kh1 Rh3#) 0-1