Silmanites vs. De La Maza "Knights": Don't Be Hatin'!

{from despair.com}

As I dip into the waters of Chess Blogs, I've been dismayed how so many people are divided between two camps: Silman "fanbois" and de la Maza "Knights".

For the uninitiated: Silman is a well-known chess author whose works on chess strategy (most notably How To Reassess Your Chess) have quite a following. Indeed, as I wrote earlier, this is one of two books that got me seriously interested in chess. Michael de la Maza is an amateur that dramatically increased his chess rating through an intense program of chess tactics. His method was first described in a series of articles and then in the book Rapid Chess Improvement. He also made Convekta a lot of money by touting its "CT-Art 3.0" program as being ideal for his system of tactics study. People that have put themselves through a rigorous de la Maza tactics regime refer to themselves as "Knights" or "Knights Errant".

First, a disclaimer. I am not trying to tar all the de la Maza fans with the same brush. I've seen lots of good, reasonable advice out there. However, I've been encountering snobbery and anti-Silman sneering in my travels, and I can't understand the polarization. Here are a few of the themes that I've been seeing, and my reactions:

-"Tactics are more important than positional understanding". Well, der. No one, including Silman, disagree that tactics should be the focus of study. However, I've seen people overstate their case and say that Silman's stuff is "garbage". The most important benefit of Silman's material is it aids you in finding good moves when tactics are not the sole factor. The concept of using the imbalances in a position to direct your strategic thinking is immensely useful. Even though tactical oversights will play a larger role in the outcome of your games, that does not mean that the strategy of accumulating small advantages is worthless. Other things being equal, the player with the worse position will tend to make the more serious errors.

Although, ultimately, chess is a game, and people should spend time doing what they find enjoyable, I'm taken aback by the cheeky conclusion to de la Maza's original articles:

I look forward to avoiding opening, middlegame, and endgame study for years to come.

This is akin to restricting your exercise to one-arm pushups in order to excel at fighting with one hand behind your back.

I don't think players have to read and re-read and re-re-read Silman's books as if they were the bible. Learn the basic concepts, then go on to study tactics and annotated games. That little bit of time taken to read a book or two on chess strategy is well worth it. I would strongly recommend any player interested in improving their game to also look at Kmoch's Pawn Power in Chess. Oddball nomenclature aside, it's all very good stuff. It will help you arrive at middlegame plans by looking at the pawn structure.

-"If you give one of his positions to a computer, and try and play his plan, the computer will eventually play something Silman didn't mention and proceed to win." Computers now routinely beat the best players in the world, so this argument strikes me as silly. As Dan Heisman has said repeatedly, your goal in a game of chess is to find the best move possible given the time constraints. A thought process like Silman's helps guide you to finding good moves.

You want to talk tactics? Mikhail Tal, the great attacking player, was quoted as saying, "There are two kinds of sacrifices: correct ones, and mine.". The point being, maybe his tactics weren't perfectly sound, but it put his opponent on the ropes. Even if a Silmanesque thinking technique doesn't result in perfect strategy, it will help you find strong moves (provided you double check your moves for tactical flaws before you play them).

One final observation: it appears that de la Maza and many Knights have quit, or cut back on, chess after attaining their goal, be it completing the "Seven Circles" program or whatever. I've seen this phenomenon happen to myself and others, in many different areas of life. For example, someone quits their job and plays a MMORPG 140 hours a week in order to get the first top-level character in the game, or starts an intense diet or exercise program, or takes up golf or whatever. They put in an incredible amount of time, then burn out once they've reached their goal or gone as far as they feel they can. The "Seven Circles" method de la Maza proposes is not for the faint of heart. Towards the end, you're expected to do 1000 tactical problems, in one day, in under 9 hours. I'm not surprised after completing that ordeal that some people get a bit sick of chess.

In contrast, books like Silman's, or Best Lessons of a Chess Coach by Sunil Weeramantry and Ed Eusebi, don't just instruct, or make you a stronger player. They open your eyes to the richness of chess, and add to your appreciation of chess. When you play through annotated games, and the annotator says "obviously such-and-such a move would be bad because of such-and-such a positional factor", you'll see the truth in that assessment. I think Silman put it best in his review of de la Maza's book:

I get hundreds of letters from students worldwide that gain hundreds of points in a few months from reading my “strategically oriented” books. Others don’t improve drastically in tournament play, but simply enjoy the game more because they can suddenly understand ideas utilized by the chess greats. This is a VERY important point (I’m not pushing my books, I’m trying to make a point!): they enjoy the game more because, instead of looking for tricks while not having a clue about what’s happening on a broader scale, they are taught that chess has many hidden depths that ARE accessible to them with proper training.

If we set aside the issue of whether or not Silman's books can make you a better player, there's no denying that they can make the games you play more enjoyable. I have enjoyed accruing small advantages to reach a winning position. I have had knights on outposts dominate bad bishops. I have won games because of an outside passed pawn. I have counterattacked in the center after being attacked on the wing, and I have opened up the position for my bishop pair. I have taken advantage of a lead in development to open the position and launch an attack.

I'm sure these games abounded with tactical errors. But I feel I played more strongly for having been exposed to these positional ideas, and by thinking about the imbalances in the position.

Plus, I've been playing chess seriously for 13 years and I'm sure I'll be enjoying it for decades to come.

Silman's Complete Endgame Course: A Review

Jeremy Silman's long-awaited endgame manual, Silman's Complete Endgame Course, is now out in stores. I picked up my copy last week, and have plowed through about half the material in it. Surprisingly, this book is encouraging me not to study the endgame, and that is its author's intent.

"Huh?"

Let me explain. The book is actually divided into sections based on what the author thinks is essential knowledge for a player to know to achieve a certain chess rating. The material is divided according to the USCF ratings system: below Class E (Unrated -1999); Class D (1000-1199); Class C (1200-1399), and so on. After Class A there's also material for Experts (2000-2199), Masters (2200-2400) plus a final section of "Endgames for Pure Pleasure" for everyone. For all the levels up to about Master his suggestion is for students to read the book up to one class level beyond their current rating, and then put the book down and study other areas of chess until they've achieved that next level bracket.

I both agree and disagree with his division of material, and general advice. Mostly I agree. Quoting Dan Heisman from one of his ChessCafe articles:

I have heard from students about instructors
teaching players rated 1200-1300 Philidor and Lucena positions. Yet I
know someone who lost an easily drawable Philidor position because
he did not know the technique and never heard of it. My point? That
player was me: I had been playing tournament chess for 5½ years and
my USCF rating was about 2100! Sure, if I had known the technique I
would not have lost, but the point is that I got to 2100 without ever
even hearing about the Philidor draw because such specific knowledge
is only marginally useful (not useless!) and I was pretty good at {tactics,
piece activity, time management, thought process and general principles}.

Most of the endgames you encounter will be more complex than the basic positions you commonly find in endgame manuals, and in these situations your weaknesses in tactics, general principles, and sloppy thought processes (as well as your opponent's) will be the overriding factor.

Let's see what Silman's book would have a class C player like me study. The Class C chapter covers some very basic pawn endgame principles (opposition, rule of square, rook pawns tend to draw, outside passers are an advantage). There's a brief mention of opposite-colored bishop endgames, and bishop or knight vs. rook pawn is covered briefly (most importantly, the "wrong-coloured bishop" draw). The Lucena and Philidor positions for rook endgames (yes, the same endgame Heisman said he didn't know as a 2100 player) are introduced. Basic queen vs. pawn endgames are covered.

If you haven't studied endgames at all, none of the above sounds familiar. In that case, you should definitely start studying endgames! For me, most of the above was "old hat" and suggests that, for my level, that endgames aren't a big problem (which was my conclusion even before I started on this book). However, I did realize I should play over a few of the Philidor and passive-rook endgame examples as a refresher (a couple of the "white wins" scenarios didn't seem that clear to me). Also, although I knew the basic Q vs. P strategy, and have played it out many times in actual games, I wasn't playing as "crisply" as in the technique Silman shows.

So, let's see what Silman thinks I should study if I want to achieve my desired "B" category. We have: K vs. isolated pawns (e.g. the principle that two pawns separated by one file, and on the same rank, can protect each other without assistance from the king); elementary breakthroughs; triangulation; outflanking; rook and two connected passed pawns vs. rook; rooks on the 7th rank; more opposite bishop endgames; the 2-bishop mate. Although some of this is pretty basic to me (the opposion and opposite-colored bishop endgames in particular), some other material is stuff that I've studied before but obviously not gotten rock-solid (K vs. pawns separated by 2 files, for example).

On the whole, Silman's recommendations seem sound. The material does seem, on the whole, level-appropriate, and the advice to study other areas of your game besides endgames is sound. I disagree with dogmatically following his advice.

First, some principles are quite basic, can be learned easily, but aren't covered until much higher chapters in the book than their ease of learning would suggest. You can argue, for example, that the "principle of two weaknesses" isn't critical at lower levels, but the idea is so simple there's no reason not to learn it. I think if the endgame is present in a basic endgame manual such as Pandolfini's or Alburt's books, there's no reason not to study them. If it happens to make sense and stick in your mind, great. If it doesn't quite make sense, you can come back to it when you reach the next level. I think Silman would consider Soltis' Grandmaster Secrets: Endgames an advanced book, but I think anyone that has studied at least one beginner's endgame book would benefit greatly from reading it. I've also studied pawn endgames a bit (key squares, critical squares, some corresponding squares theory) and I think it's been immensely helpful. Silman doesn't cover the key squares in some basic pawn endgames till Class A. For example:



The colored squares are critical squares for Black's pawn. If white's king lands on any of those 3 squares, he wins. You can argue that you can be a B-player without knowing this, but it's pretty easy knowledge to pick up.

Second, I believe that studying more advanced material can help you in many ways. An example of a book that's definitely intended for stronger players, but that I feel I benefited greatly from, is The Final Countdown by Van Riemsdijk and Hajenius. This starts with relatively simple pawn endgames, but rapidly gets into complicated endgames requiring knowledge of corresponding squares. I wouldn't recommend this book to most people, but it really opened my eyes to how to use the opposition in pawn endgames. I've already mentioned Soltis' book, which is great because a lot of the content is more general principles and less technique. I think that studying more advanced endgame material also helps develop your calculating, visualization and planning skills. For example, if you can play through some basic pawn endgames in your head (e.g.: white K on d1, black K on d8, white pawn on d2) or at least by looking at the board and calculating to the end, then you're improving your ability to visualize several moves into the future. Although it would be a LOT of work, I intend to play through all the "basic" endgames in blue text that are in Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual before I die. The final section of Silman's book, "Endgames for Pure Pleasure", does give a taste for more intricate endgames, but I would strongly recommend supplementing this with Soltis' book.

Silman may be correctly supplying the basic endgame knowledge required to attain a certain level. However, I feel that time spent studying endgames isn't wasted unless you either are trying to memorize, or cannot understand the complexity of the ones you're working on. Nonetheless, Silman's book can help you determine if you have weaknesses in your endgame knowledge, and helps you determine where to best spend time in order to improve as a player. Although some of the material in the book is "common knowledge" to me, his descriptions of certain endgames help to cement that knowledge in. The book is rather thick from all the written descriptions, and Silman's writing style is talky and somewhat goofy (and downright naughty in at least one place: "my opponent's bishop...eyeing my monarch in a lecherous state of rut"), but the style works for me. I strongly recommend this book to class C players and up; lower classes will of course benefit, but will use a smaller portion of the content.