800 Pound Gorilla For Christmas Anyone?

Yes, Houdini 4 has been released at long last.

If you're new to chess you might be wondering what is 'Houdini' and does King Kong play chess?

The first answer is, Houdini is a chess engine. It is one half of what you need to play serious chess on your computer. The engine does all the clever chess processing stuff, and the other part you need to use it is the GUI (Graphical User Interface). That's the bit of the software that shows us the chessboard, how the pieces look and what you can do with your (or anyone else's) chess games. One of the main reasons people use these things is to analyse games.

You can download both, with several different versions each, for free (my favourites linked below).

For a while now I've been using Chess.com's computer to play against. While it's a perfectly good opponent for beginners to intermediate level, it has its drawbacks and doesn't begin to have the features you'll find on downloadable chess software like Houdini. So if you're serious about improving in chess, better look to something a little more sophisticated to help guide you.

While Houdini 4 is only 50 Elo points stronger than its predecessor, the improvements mean H4 DOUBLES your computer's performance. Not only that but H4 comes with Let's Check, the world's largest database with a library of 200 million games (I know, I counted) and this is being added to all the time. This library access means H4 will take seconds to figure out what your computer would take hours to work out by itself (if you let it take that long). With access to playchess.com it also means training classes with Grandmasters Daniel King, Klaus Bischoff, Maurice Ashley, Dr. Karsten Müller and others.




Are your palms sweating yet?

But in all seriousness, for us beginners this is really only going to be something of use to much higher level players. By the time the average beginner (with a rating of Elo 600 or so) gets to Elo 1200 or 1600, something much better will be out by then. The question is, will H4 get us to Elo 1200 or more much faster than anything else to justify you spending your hard earned cash on?

To my mind, no it won't.

Please remember this is a blog for beginners. So for this player, while I'm still working towards my mini goal of getting myself passed the 1000 Elo rating, there really is no need to get this. Why? Because there are slightly weaker versions of Houdini and other chess engines available for free, and I still have a long way to go before I'm anywhere near being able to beat them, let alone challenge them.

In actual fact I was using the free version of Houdini for a while and was quite disappointed with it. Not that I found any weakness in its play, but it was just so SLOW. Also, something rather bizarre is that I found Chess.com's own computer a much stronger opponent...? Weird

Just yesterday I downloaded another chess engine, Komodo 5, and set it to demo play. It played against itself (which is great, no way for me to lose!), watching the speed of the pieces whiz around each other during the endgame reminded me of a swarm of angry bumblebees or something. Very exciting (and no need to change my GUI so the look and features are exactly the same). So I'm happy with that for now. Also the Komodo chess engine is now rated as number one seeing as it beat all other chess engines (including Houdini 4 beta) at the TCEC tournament earlier this year. But more importantly for me even though I have the weaker free version, I just like it's style of play. It uses a different method of analysis to other chess engines.

Komodo 5 chess engine (free version) download yours here http://komodochess.com/

Another top engine is Rybka, but I haven't tried that yet.

And to see anything, you'll need a GUI. A favourite among many users seems to be Arena.

So to sum up, I'm not saying you shouldn't buy H4 if you want it. Owning it means you hold one of the most advanced tools at the pinnacle of the battle between man and machine. It's like watching Ferarri videos on youtube, most of us will never own a Ferrari (or defeat any top chess engine), but it's still fun/inspiring.

H4 saves you a lot of hassle and provides quite a lot of useful stuff all in one place (and quite a bit of stuff you won't find elsewhere). While it is under $100 (US) it's not going to break the bank, all I'm saying is if you really can't spend the money it doesn't mean the end of your chess dreams. There are other free alternatives.

Book Review: Learn Chess A Complete Course

As soon as anyone gets interested in chess and wants to start finding their way into that world, one of the first things they notice is just how high the average standard of play is.

Log onto most sites and you'll find players of around the 1200 Elo rating and upward. While that isn't considered high in the chess world, for someone who's only just learned how all the pieces move (with an average rating of 400 Elo?), 1200 Elo is light years away.

So how does one learn and get oneself up to a decent beginning standard of play as quickly as possible so they don't have to humiliate themselves every time they step out onto the 64-squared minefield?

Easy. Just work through Learn Chess: A Complete Course by Alexander and Beach.

Originally published as two separate books back in the 1960s, these valuable guides are now available together in one small volume. And what a pair they make...

A considerable amount of thought and experience has gone into crafting this book, starting from how each piece moves to ending the second book with how to make a plan (although this comes a lot more easily once you've been through the exercises presented throughout). 

Working my way through from beginning to end, there were only a couple of times I felt the exercises were too tough or a little bit of a stretch. By and large, however, progress was smooth.

I particularly remember this book because of the chapter I started with: how to attack (chapter 6 of the first book). Some beginners might be appalled at the thought of learning to attack comes before learning the openings (way before the openings), but here's the clever bit. In teaching the reader how to attack the authors present... Scholar's Mate. 

Chess Game Strategies.com

Facepalm yet? Well don't. Having been a music teacher myself for many years, I know the most important thing in teaching is motivation. Keeping motivation high in beginners is the holy grail for teachers, no matter what they're teaching. So if you can keep people interested, they'll keep coming back for more. It's better to start with something easy, which you can grasp easily and progress quickly with, than something deep and dense which makes for an uphill climb straight off.

After all, it's only the beginning and this is only the start. You'll have time to move onto bigger and better things, but only if you're motivated to come back for more...

Scholar's Mate is something most beginners are familiar with (as opposed to most openings) so here you'll be able to grasp some basic principles of attacking, some variations of Scholar's Mate (that f7 square for black is a continual weak spot you always have to keep an eye out for), and how one can punish white for bringing out her queen too soon, all the while developing one's own pieces.

What starts out sounding like a lesson with limited potential, turns into the tentative but solid building blocks upon which these master teachers build upon.

Before I found this book I felt like I needed to learn ten billion openings (give or take!) in order to get myself off the ground. But at the same time felt that to be an overwhelming task and as such, never really got around to reading my openings books. I felt pretty demotivated. But after reading chapter 6 I was off. I supplemented this book with some playing and some chess puzzles, but at the start, my focus was mainly on this book. I felt that I was reading a course that had been tailor made for me and if I wasn't working from the book, I wasn't improving as quickly (exercises I found elsewhere were either too hard or too easy). Seriously, it's that well structured.

Whether it is strategy, checkmating or tactics, this book leads you in gently enabling you to grasp the concepts quickly and progress as quickly as you're willing to work. While everyone's different, when I started studying this book I was just under Elo 800. A couple of months later and I'm nearing Elo 950. I'm guessing that by the time I finish I'll be around Elo 1100. While it's impossible to say exactly what your Elo will be by the time you finish (or how long it will take you to finish the book), one thing's for sure, if you work conscientiously and diligently, your Elo will increase by a minimum of at least 200 points.

The contents are: 

Book One: 

1. How each piece moves 
2. Recording (writing the moves down, understanding chess notation) 
3. Check and Checkmate
4. Starting to play: the importance of extra material
5. the opening: development and the centre (contains no openings, just good basic opening principles)
6. learning to attack 
7. finishing the game (introduction to endgame theory: how to mate with a king and queen against a lone king; king and rook against a lone king)
8. pawn endings

Book two (page 95): 

1. winning material by double attack 
2. knight forks and pawn forks 
3. pins and skewers 
4. more ways of winning material 
5. mating the castled king 
6. winning the ending 
7. the openings (1e4 e5) 
8. further openings 
9. making a plan 
10. looking ahead

The only downside to this book which needs to be mentioned is just the sheer amount of typological errors in the games. This isn't just one or two, this is all too frequent throughout the examples in the first book. In a way it is a testament to the teaching that I was able to spot these errors and not become confused or demotivated! I know I'm not the only one to notice this and thankfully this book has been re-published by Everyman. It has also been updated, so better try that one instead and if anyone else has noted these errors in the earlier version, perhaps you could let us know if they've been rectified or not in the Everyman version. 

Overall though, this is one hell of a book. Highly recommended for beginners, chess coaches and parents of chess players.

I'm Back!

Apologies for my absence. Had some health issues and couldn't muster the energy to post. Anything interesting happen in the chess world since the end of October??

Conrgats to Magnus Carlsen, what a tense victory after a somewhat slow start to the match and what an amazing life story; training for that dream since his childhood. I'm sure he feels it's all been worth it now. And what gentlemen both Carlsen and Anand were/are. Really nice to see and chess is very lucky to have such great guys as ambassadors.

Well, I can promise you that throughout my time away chess was never very far from my mind. During the festival of Hannukah, I also had some cousins over to stay which meant one thing: chess guinea pigs! If you're a parent or chess coach, teaching those under 10 can seem like a daunting task. But in my never ending project to search for good ways to keep kids interested, I had a couple of ideas for teaching which I'll also be sharing here soon.

After having resumed chess back in August this year, I've been quite conscious that simply playing games from beginning to end isn't a very good way to improve one's play overall, although working exclusively from books isn't as much fun.

However, over the last month or so I did only play games from beginning to end and playing online against various engines has led to some really bad habits (taking about 5 seconds max before making a move etc.) which I'm determined to get rid of. Anyhow, I really feel desperate to get back to my books and exercises as I've really plateaued and my game isn't going anywhere. I really need to get back to the drawing board...

Anyway, more later!

Much Better! :)

I improved it :P

New Beginner's Video From GM Susan Polgar

So you're new to chess. Maybe you've learned the basics like how each piece moves, and maybe even things like castling and opening principles about controlling the centre of the board. Now you want to move forward but the next step up the ladder of chess skill isn't clear?

This is a common problem. Most beginners think that after learning the rules to chess, they then should start at the beginning; the opening. Wrong.

What you need to do first is to learn to walk. That means learning the basic 'language' of logic in chess upon which everything else is built upon. From openings to much else besides.

Image From The Chess Club

Here is what you should be looking to work on: skewers, forks, discovered checks, smothered mates, forced play, decoys and pins.

These aren't tricks or gimmicks that unscrupulous players use, it's the standard method of operation. Along with this you should also be working on exchange puzzles and mate-in-one problems. Learning, training yourself to see these when, and if, they arise in a game is key to chess success.

There are a few learning resources I've recommended on this blog that will help you get off the ground, but now we can happily add another one, a new vid from one of the greatest female chess grand masters of all time, Susan Polgar!

In the first ten minutes, GM Polgar covers things like the importance of controlling the centre and not bringing the queen out too early, if you already know that stuff, just skip to 10min30 for the tactics.




Looks good and well worth taking the time to watch, but I haven't seen the full 3 hour thing yet. It would be interesting to see how much she covers in the DVD.


http://www.onlinechesslessons.net/shop/volume-6-winning-chess-the-easy-way-in-las-vegas-secrets

The Chess Beginner: No Man's Land...

The Opening? I Wouldn't Start From There If I Were You

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If you want to skip to the recommendation on what to study next after learning basic game principles like controlling the centre and how each piece moves (including the moves like castling, the fiancetto, and en passant) just scroll down to 'The Solution'

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About 15 years ago (late '90s) I was a chess enthusiast. It lasted for a couple of years. During that time I gained a lot of playing experience with my Kasparov talking chess board (before the internet!), but after having decided that I really liked the game I wanted to take things further. 

So with lots of enthusiasm I went out and joined a chess club, bought a ton of books and even had a few lessons from a chess coach. All to no avail. My efforts yielded little and the returns were next to nil. I remained a complete novice and was obliterated in every game I played in my chess club. I went and asked the club organiser what I should do (he was also a chess coach and tried to show me a couple of things), but I didn't really understand his advice. It was clear he was used to teaching a calibre of player way above that of my own level.

Some of the books I bought were by Jeremy Silman, and even though this was clearly an author and teacher with few peers, he seemed to be describing solutions to bad habits that I hadn't even had a chance to develop yet! I really was nowhere. In no man's land... Eventually my enthusiasm fizzled out and I stopped playing.

Since starting to play chess again this time around, I again wanted to get somewhere and figured I needed to start at the start and learn as many openings as possible.


The good chess books tell us that memorising the openings by themselves is wrong and that we should learn the principles behind the openings. However with each move in an opening, there's a different strategy, a different game that will result from even the smallest of variations. (Think of the difference between the Ruy Lopez, Italian and Scotch openings)

Over on Jeff Blackmer's blog, he describes this complexity perfectly:

"...it’s a curious thing to study grandmaster level chess. It is played at such a high level. The lines of play are well known, studied and analyzed twenty moves deep. Positions are scrutinized for any possible advantage. And so, as you study a chess game played on this level, you witness a curious thing. On move 37 white wins a pawn…black resigns. What?"

Chess is a complicated affair and we all know that you have to learn to walk before you can run. The problem is how do you learn to walk? Each opening is a complex composition of moves, a symphony of strategies, ideas and counter-ideas, really too much to take in in the beginning. 

From my experience, even having tried to learn the principles behind the openings, my playing was still poor because there was something else that I needed to learn first.

From Batsford Chess Openings: 350 pages of THIS to memorise?
Good luck with that!

Recently, I found a fascinating article from a British newspaper that really got to the crux of defining chess and why it's so hard/fascinating. Dr. Tobias Galla, senior lecturer in physics at Manchester Uni. said:

‘A ten-year-old can probably figure out how not to lose in noughts and crosses, so there’s a strategy that makes sure you don’t lose. Once you’ve found that strategy, the game is uninteresting, you stop playing it. That’s an equilibrium point. Once you’ve reached that point, you don’t play any more. With these [chess] games with lots of different moves, it’s not so easy to guess these best strategies.

Like the noughts and crosses example illustrates, imagine just learning some moves of a noughts and crosses game, without being told the strategy. Not really hard, and it's pretty easy to see the strategy. So although the chess books tell us that we need to learn the principles behind the openings, it's the principles (strategies) themselves that are also too rich and varied for the beginner to start with. This might be harder for more advanced players (and some coaches?) to appreciate.

The Solution

There is a basic chess vocabulary (if you like), which we need to become fluent in as the next step up the ladder after learning how each piece moves. Just like learning a language after you learn the alphabet, you need to learn to spell words before we get into describing thoughts (found in openings, mid-games), we need to build a vocabulary first. This vocabulary on the chess board is about learning the basic rules of engagement: calculating how two or more pieces can work together to attack or defend, learning what pins, skewers, forks, and discovered checks are; how to manipulate your opponent (forced moves), and so on (GM Susan Polgar has a great new video on these topics). The greater our vocabulary, the stronger our play will be (and like much else in chess and language, you never stop learning). 

In the beginning, it's about learning the best move order in any given exchange, as well as some basic end game mating patterns like two rooks and a king against a king. Or king and queen against a king.

Learning these is really about learning to see this stuff on the board (it also helps you not to be caught out by them from your opponents!). Without these basic building blocks, your play will lack the glue to hold all the other stuff together.

Seeing these basic concepts and understanding them takes time and work, but during that process you're becoming familiar with the rules of engagement. Just like learning a language, in time it will become more fluent. Don't worry if this seems like a lot of work. The fact that these little exercises aren't rocket science to grasp, means you can work through them and pick them up quite quickly. More importantly, you'll be progressing at a much faster rate as opposed to struggling with a huge first step as you try and jump up several rungs on the ladder by starting out with openings.

You can also do puzzles like Mate In Two or Three moves. Or searching for puzzles about pins, skewers, forks etc. (Just recommended a great free tactics site for just such practice the other day.)

When will you be ready to move onto openings? The only answer I can give is when you're ready. You should start learning openings fairly soon, but don't try too much too soon. Watch a good openings instruction video. As time passes by and you learn more, you'll be more comfortable with the information and won't feel bogged down. But (quite maddeningly I'm sure) just learning openings by their names (Giuocco, 4 Knights etc.) isn't the best way to go about it. More on that in a later post.

The best advice I can give is to work from a book or two, if you're in the initial stages of learning or teaching. Here are two great books which have helped me immensely and are very well thought out (they start out gently, and while Polgar's book is diagrams only, the Learn Chess book explains the concepts well and builds in increasing levels of difficulty). (Reviews coming soon.)

Learn Chess by Alexander and Beach

Chess by  László Polgár

Just want to say: my purpose in writing this article isn't to generalise and put chess coaches down. My experience may have just been an unlucky one. I'm sure there are many good chess coaches out there and I just happened to stumble on the wrong ones for me.

Maybe it's similar to music, you don't start learning to play the violin from an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. You start with the millions of other teachers out there and work with them until you reach a level where you're ready to learn from the master.

Interesting Chess Facts

There are 400 different possible positions after one move each. 

There are 72,084 different possible positions after two moves each. 

There are over 9 million different possible positions after three moves each. 

There are over 318 billion different possible positions after four moves each. 

The number of distinct 40-move games in chess is far greater than the number of electrons in the observable universe. The number of electrons is approximately 10^79 , while the number of unique chess games is 10^120.

And even more impressive is the fact that I manage to pick the wrong move each time :P