|
||||||||||||||
You might offer to buy him a pint and maybe he would tell you ten great ways to get better at chess. On the other hand, for the cost of about a half-hour of time working with him as a chess coach (or the cost of about 9 pints) you could simply buy his latest book, titled (wait for it) 10 Great Ways to Get Better at Chess. My guess is that Davies wrote his book to share his knowledge and experiences as a chess teacher. His own explanation is given in the Introduction:
So, what are some “great ways” to get better at chess? I’ll share a few. Check out Chapter One: Develop Your Vision. Well, okay, the author is probably not talking about prescribing bifocals for the older player… Ah, yes, I remember, Proverbs 29:18 KJV: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Actually, that’s not a bad reference for club players to apply to their chess, but by vision Davies means “the ability to calculate variations quickly and accurately”. He gives a couple examples of vision failure in games of the Grandmasters, then shows some play by his students – both “before” (I found myself screaming “Make it stop! Make it stop!”) and “after” improving their vision. Clearly the tonic was working. Although the GM admits that the upward limit of improving chess vision is probably based on the amount of innate talent that a person was born with, he suggests practicing solving positions and playing blindfold chess as ways to improve. He found it particularly helpful while developing as a player to select complex positions from games of strong players, and to analyze them with a clock running, as if in a game situation.
Davies would have been justified in giving a Chapter Three (“Study the Endgame Some More”) and a Chapter Four (“Keep Studying the Endgame”) just to reinforce the topic. It’s just really that important. From personal experience, as someone who plays the randy Jerome Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+), I have studied a particular Bishops-of-opposite-colors endgame that sometime arises and that I’ve been able to escape into, to repair the damages caused by my horrid opening play… On the other hand, little else annoys me as much as a defender who throws back most of my sacrificed material, exchanges Queens and then dives into the endgame himself, where he proceeds to grind me to dust there. I admit that I dashed ahead to Chapter Seven, Read a Good Book, to see if Davies suggested a particular endgame title or two there, but he did not. I had to go with the advice that he gave in the endgame chapter:
Much of 10 Great Ways to Get Better at Chess is reflected in that remark. It is more descriptive – illustrating the problems, showing how much better things go when they are addressed – than prescriptive (“do this, specifically”), despite what the author has written in the first quote I provided, above. To put it another way, it is beneficial for me to know what I am doing wrong in my chess play and how much better things will be when I get those things right; but I wish Davies had spent more time on showing me what to do to get those things right. (Not quite as bad as if my doctor had said: “Want to quit smoking? Just don’t ever light up another cigarette. Problem solved.”)
For improving endgame play, readers could examine Silman's Complete Endgame Course: From Beginner to Master, with instruction presented on a need-to-know basis, by rating. A pleasant change of pace is Soltis’ Grandmaster Secrets Endings, which is also easy to carry around and dip into in spare moments. For basic endgames that everyone needs to be competent with, there is nothing like setting up the positions and playing against your computer – a club player should be able to beat even Rybka 4 in those K + R vs K endgames, for example. Those are suggestions of a Class B player, retired. I suspect a Grandmaster could dance rings around them – and he probably does, in his individual coaching sessions. Of course, as I mentioned, Chapter Seven does recommend some books for the improving player. Young pawnpushers will likely note that most of the titles are old-ish, probably drawn from the books that impressed the author when he was making great strides upward. (I noted a couple of personal favorites, One Hundred Selected Games by Botvinnik and The Middle Years of Paul Keres, by Keres.) Every recommendation Davies makes, in my opinion, is a winner, but one wonders about the newer works by newer authors…
I won’t go through all ten of Davies’ suggestions, out of respect for his hard work (although his publisher, Everyman, spills the beans here.)
From the Publisher's website:
Other titles by GM Davies reviewed at Chessville:
For more by GM Davies visit Tigerchess.
|
Chessville
The
Advertise to Single insert:
|
|||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
If
you wanted to learn how to get better at chess, you could ask a Grandmaster.
You could, for example, ask England’s GM Nigel Davies. He’s written a
dozen and a half books, and produced a score and a half of DVDs. He’s
a chess coach, has 
For
an alternate “great way” – or as an addition – Chapter Two suggests Study
the Endgame. Again, Davies gives game examples from his students,
but this should not be necessary to persuade readers of the truth of his
suggestion: most club players unconsciously imitate the play of early
chess-playing computers, memorizing opening moves, concentrating on tactics
at the expense of long-term planning, and playing the endings like duffers…
For
example, players who want to practice solving problems (suggested in Chapter
One) might want to look at Sukhin’s
.jpg)
