Chess to Enjoy / Entertainment
The End of Strategy
What if a learning curve is really a bell curve? By GM ANDY SOLTIS
IT’S BEEN MORE THAN 15 YEARS SINCE mankind was humbled by our new com- puter overlords. We’re still waiting to learn from them. It should have happened by now. When
it became clear that programs were getting strong, we hoped that machines would eventually be able to teach us new strate- gies, new ways to win. But when we see a game played by the
rock stars of today’s computer chess, it often looks baffling:
Silicone bafflement Rybka Houdini TCEC match 2011
After all, there are two fundamental principles that have guided human play- ers since we figured out how to castle:
1) Every move you make should have a
purpose. 2) Your moves should form a plan.
That is, they should be consistent and
fit together into a cohesive whole—even if the whole is misguided. “A bad plan is better than no plan” is a mantra attributed to Emanuel Lasker, Frank Marshall and many others. Inconsistency must be avoided at all
costs, according to this conventional wis- dom. It recalls the putdown by the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He ripped into a colleague’s inconsistent thinking by say- ing, “It’s not only not right, it’s not even wrong.” I was terrified of being inconsistent even
before I played in my first tournament game. I remember going through Fred Reinfeld’s collection of Nimzowitsch games, one of those wonderful, cheap Dover Pub- lications paperbacks, titled Hypermodern Chess. I got to this diagram:
Black played 10. ... Bg4 and then 11. h3
Bf5. Okay, so this must mean Black wanted
to provoke h2-h3, right? Otherwise Black would have played 10. ... Bf5. There followed 12. Rc1 a5 13. Qd2 Qb6,
which makes some sense. But then came 14. Nh4 Bc8!? and 15. a4 Be6!?. And then 16. Nf3 Bf5. Huhh? White went on to win in 66 moves, so
maybe Black’s bishop moves hurt him. But at many points along the way, White’s moves were also strange. Some of them didn’t seem to have anything to do with the one that came before. Or the one that came after. This is puzzling because Rybka and Houdini can give material odds to grand- masters. Why can’t their moves make sense to us?
14 July 2013 | Chess Life
Looking up “vacillate” Carl Schlechter Aron Nimzovich Carlsbad 1907
Now, it seemed to me, White should
exploit the holes that Black created on the kingside with Ne2-g3. For example, 19. Ne2 Ng6 20. Ng3 Nh4 21. Bd1 and Bg4 to trade off the bishop that protects Black’s holes. But no. The game, with Reinfeld’s punc- tuation, based on Schlechter’s own notes in the tournament book, went 19. g3 Ng6 20. Qd1 Bg7 21. Qf3 a5! 22. Ne2 Bb5! 23. a4 Bd7 24. Rh1! Qe8! 25. h4 Qc8! 26. Bd3 Bg4 27. Qg2 gxh4 28. f3 h3! 29. Qf1 f5! 30. fxg4 fxe4 31. Qxh3 exd3 32. Bxh6 Rh8! and White resigned. It seemed to me that White lost because
“He Who Vacillates is Lost” read the headline on the game. That sent me to the dictionary. (You see, in those days there were these big books called “dictio-
he opened up the kingside, where Black was strong, when he should have switched to the queenside. That’s not vacillation. That’s just logic. But maybe vacillation is the way to go.
Computers like the inconsistent 24. c4, for example.
naries” that you opened up when you did- n’t know what a word meant.) Reinfeld said White had three plans:
(a) He could open up the center with
dxe5. Or (b), he could close the center with d4-
d5 and then advance his queenside pawns. Or (c) he could prepare for f2-f4, perhaps
with Kh2 and Ng1-e2. But White played 16. d5 Bd7 17. Kh2 Rein-
feld said “He vacillates!”—because he started with (b) and then headed to (c). I didn’t know what to make of that because if f2-f4 is such a dubious idea, why did Black take extraordinary steps to stop it? He played 17. ... Nh8!? and then 18. Ng1 g5.
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