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Chessville
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The 10 Most Common Chess Mistakes …and how to avoid them Reviewed by Tom Codispoti
But what about the book? The sales blurb on the back cover states that the book is “ a fascinating collection of 218 errors, oversights, and outright blunders [which will] show you the price that great players pay for violating basic principles, and how you can avoid these mistakes in your own game”. “From neglected development, king safety, misjudging threats and premature attack to impulsiveness, snatching pawns and basic inattentiveness, you get a complete course in where you can go wrong and how to fix it.” Wow, pretty heady stuff. Now I am fully aware that publishers put these plugs on the back covers to entice people to buy the book. I also understand that they may be, let’s just say, embellished a bit since they are sales pitches. But with promises like “Sage advice to help you avoid blunders and become a better player”, I have to admit that my expectations were high for this book. What Larry Evans has done is come up with 10 common mistakes made on the chessboard. These are:
These are all fairly obvious on the surface and I doubt that any of these are new to anyone who has read an introductory book on chess. Just to be certain, I checked the book that I used to get started in chess, Modern Chess Strategy by Edward Lasker. Sure enough, there are sections in Lasker’s book with titles such as “Rapid Development”, “Premature Attacking Moves”, and “Provoking Weakening Moves”. But Evans isn’t claiming to have discovered new material, he is making the point that even masters lose games because they still make basic errors and by avoiding these mistakes, your game will improve. Fair enough. The layout of the book provides each mistake its own chapter. The individual chapters start with a quote that relates to the topic, followed by one or two pages that explain the concept of the mistake. After the introduction, approximately twenty examples appear at the rate of one per page. Each example is given a sentence or two for background and a diagram of the position in question. Beneath the diagram, two moves are given for you to choose from. One is a mistake, as was played in the game, and the other is the correct move for the position. Here is an example from section three – Misjudging Threats:
And here is one of the examples from that section:
If I set a difficulty scale of 1-10 with ‘10’ being the most difficult, this example was probably about a ‘4’. There were a few easier but many more that were harder. I did not keep score but I would be surprised if I got much more than a third of them correct on the first try. My base score was probably higher but that is only because you have a 50-50 chance with each problem. I only count the correct ones if I got it right for the right reason. Sometimes you can ‘cheat’ a little bit by knowing the situation. For example, in the section on premature attacks, there is an example where the choices for Black are …0-0 and …g5. Well duh, if the mistake is a premature attack and …g5 is the obvious attacking move, 0-0 must be correct. It’s calculating the refutation to …g5 that is the tough part. One reason some of these were difficult for me (besides my lack of ability) is most likely because these are master level games. The mistakes they make are usually quite a bit more subtle than ones amateurs make. Here is an example of one of the more difficult problems. It is from the section titled Creating Weaknesses:
I don’t think it is such a big deal if you are not able to find the answer to an example like this. What’s going to help you is playing through the answer and understanding why the move…h6 lead to problems. Having voluntarily given up one half of the g5-pawn’s support, Black’s position really crumbles when he is forced to give up the remaining support by playing …f6 to block the d8-h4 diagonal. The unsupported pawn falls and sets up a lethal discovered check. This is the extra work that needs to be done with most chess books in order to get the full ‘bang for your buck’. I went back through many of the examples a second time, but more thoroughly than before. By understanding why each mistake caused the problem, I was able to grasp a little more the consequences of certain actions. While it is not quite second nature to do so, I have found in some of my recent games where I am taking a closer look at snatching a pawn or creating a weakness. There is a nice chapter at the end called “Anatomy of an Error”, where Evans analyses a game that went horribly wrong and shows how to narrow down the moves to find the one that possibly caused the problem. An exercise that I want to try is to use this idea to analyze a game and find the mistake on my own and then check it against a chess engine or a master’s annotations. Did the book live up to my expectations? Not quite. The concepts of development, king safety, etc. were ones that I had seen before so there was nothing new there. What I did get hung up on was the promise that there would be pearls of wisdom contained in the text that would tell me how I could avoid these mistakes in my game. Where were the techniques of how to properly break pins or judge threats? What about rules of thumb for calculating or pawn snatching? I have never been one who could look at a position in my own game and say to myself ‘This reminds me of that Petrosian-Korchnoi game from’63 where grabbing the pawn proved fatal’. I need to be told things in terms like ‘If your bishop captures a pawn on the a- or h-file, make sure that the pawn next to it can’t just advance one square and trap your bishop’. Evans does provide some nice advice but not enough that I am confident I can consistently avoid these mistakes in my own games. While I hoped the hype was true, the book is not the panacea that will add 300 points to your rating just by reading it. We are all still searching for that book! Evans does reinforce some of the basic tenants of chess and shows how even masters sometime forget them. It’s nice to be reminded that even the greatest of GMs are still human and can still make the same mistakes as you and I (remember, it is the frequency of those mistakes that makes the difference). But there is a big leap between showing someone what is a mistake and empowering that person to be able to spot, and avoid, similar mistakes in their own games. Just as with everything else in chess, you will have to put in the work to make that happen. My recommendation? This is a fine book if you are looking for something to study where you do not want to set up a board such as in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, in bed, or even (dare I say?) in the bathroom! The experience level is hard to judge since the difficulty of the examples seems to vary quite a bit. The target audience range for this book would be from beginners up to intermediate level players with the payback curve declining as the experience level rises. For beginners, this book would be an excellent companion to a chess primer. The lessons of bad development, pawn-snatching, etc. could be reinforced with the examples from Evans’ book. The only caveat here is that some of the mistakes reviewed in the book are very subtle and may not be very apparent to the novice. However, even if you don’t attempt to find the answer, just reading Evans’ explanations of why each move is good or bad makes for a worthy learning experience. For more experienced players, the examples are reminders to stay alert and not forget basic ideas in their zest to learn more complex issues such as opening lines or endgame techniques (it is much harder to study calculus if you don't remember your algebra). I doubt that experts and above would get much benefit from the book. Common sense tells you that you won’t play mistake-free just because you read the book. But you can hope that by being exposed to these concepts in different ways you will be more aware of them in your own games and this book is a good tool for that. If you’re looking for a book that will tell you exactly how to prevent miscalculations, or the trick to avoiding deadly pins, this won’t do it. It is a nice means to reinforce the basic principles of chess that will help you improve your game – with lots of work (sigh).
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