How (and whether or not) to Learn to Play Chess

Chapter One

"When I lose I feel like committing suicide"
Nigel Short

If you really want to learn to play chess I suggest that you buy a pretty good book called, Chess for Dummies before you waste any more time or, God forbid, money on this stupid little manuscript. But, if you are desperate and there isn’t a copy of CFD on the shelf, and nobody is looking at you – like some disheveled geek who could be the local chessmeister – you can take a quick look at this and put it back on the shelf.

The truth is, I should have called this thing, Chess by a Dummy; in as much as I am a lousy chess player and am of such ordinary intelligence that one of my teachers once told me, "Arthur, if your IQ was one point less you’d be a plant!" Anyway, it is true that I have never been accused of being brilliant (like all other chess teachers) nor am I even a very good chess player. So why do I have the temerity to write an essay about how to learn to play one of the most difficult games in the world? Because I love to teach and, being of only average ability, most things have been difficult for me all my life, therefore, I teach from the lowest common denominator. And besides, I wouldn’t pretend to try to teach you how to play chess; I am only providing a bibliographic guide to chess education. This, I say without conceit, is the only chess book written by a non-competent player; virtually all others are written by Masters or Grandmasters; the problem being that those guys are so good they just can’t understand how hard it is for the rest of us. I have known many world-class athletes and few of them are gifted teachers. How do you teach something that just comes naturally to you?

As they say in Nicaragua, "No es facil" (Life is not easy) and now I am sixty years old. For those of you in your twenties, thirties and forties, sixty is when you have to run to the bathroom every half hour, you can’t open the Ragu spaghetti jar, you get those weird red splotches on your skin and you might not know what day it is. It shouldn’t take much imagination to realize I have had a difficult time trying to learn to play chess! Learning chess is as hard for me as it is for George W. Bush to learn to say nuclear. I learn something new one day and the very next day, when I see the position on the board, it is as though I had never seen it before.

I only own about a hundred chess books but I have looked at several hundreds. Believe me, there are very few excellent books for the beginner. There are lots of books which are okay, from which you will learn some thing of course, "….develop quickly, control the center and protect your king…" but there are not many, considering the copious number published every year, which are really, really good. It is my hope to recommend to you just the handful of really good ones and save you the time and money I spent getting from rank beginner to rank patzer.

Before wasting any more time with this little booklet, look at the following twenty questions. If you know the answers to most of them and they just seem stupid to you, then put this thing back on the shelf and move on to a more thorough study of the "Taimanov Variation of the Sicilian".

1. How do you know if the chessboard is oriented the right way or not?
2. What is "The Spanish Torture," sometimes simply called, The Spanish Game?
3. What are the three things every good chess player strives to do in the first ten or fifteen moves of every single game, without exception?
4. At your chess venue some evening, would you prefer a Steinway piano, Giocco piano or Yamaha
5. What is meant by the expression, "Pawns are the soul of chess?"
6. If Black’s first move is g6 would say this is deconstructivist, post-modern or hypermodern?
7. What is a closed game?
8. What is the difference between a file and a rank?
9. What is meant by en prise?
10. What are the three main stages of every chess game?
11. Is a closed center better for bishops or knights?
12. What is meant by tempo?
13. Let’s say you’ve snagged your opponent’s rook at move seventeen. What is the most conservative, safest, simplest
14. winning strategy from now on?
15. Can you demonstrate a Fool’s Mate and a Scholar’s Mate?
16. What do the names Capablanca, Steinitz and Tal have in common?
17. If you were at Mario’s Ristorante would you order a Fianchetto a la carte or as an entre?
18. What is The Scicilian?
19. What is a backward pawn?
20. What does KB x KBP+ mean?
21. In the "Ruy", what is the purpose of BN5?

So, if you cannot answer all of the above questions, you are indeed, a beginner (whether you think so or not) and this little bibliographic monograph will be good for you. Just a couple more questions: Do you ever touch a piece and then take your hand off and then move something else? Do you ever "hang" pieces (move a piece, like your queen, only to watch in shock and awe as your opponent casually slides his Bishop out of the corner and removes the Lady from the board)? Do you keep on playing even if you are a rook or queen down? Even if you are a queen down and you continue to play have you ever beaten your friend? If you answered yes to any of these questions then you are what is called a "Tyro" and you have unequivocally established the fact that you need to supplement my income by purchasing this booklet.

One final caveat. Chess is an addiction no less than alcohol or heroin so I think that before going any further, before you stick in the needle so to speak, you need to be absolutely honest with yourself and say softly under your breath, as you stand there in the super-geek section, in front of the chess and bridge books, just exactly why it is that you want to learn to play better chess. This is an important question. I am not being facetious and I suggest that you think about it carefully because it is going to come back to haunt you a thousand times over in the next few years. It is important to know who and what to blame when you are standing on the arie side of the guard rail looking morosely down at the deep, dark water two hundred feet below.

Of the myriad reasons why people want to learn to play chess (better) the most obvious is the (Darwinian) urge to WIN… to be the best or at least, beat a friend or acquaintance with whom you play once in a while. And, needless to say, you want (need) to do that because you are insecure and your self-esteem is fragile so you cannot endure losing…(because you forget, it is just a game).

Let’s say a few months ago you started playing chess with your friend. Sometimes you win and sometimes he/she wins. When you win you feel like Candide in one of his "best of all possible worlds" recitations and when you lose you feel like Gregor Samsa in his cockroach mode. So, think about this for a moment. The fact is, you want to learn to play chess better so that you will always win, always feel good, always beat your friend. So, the question is: did you tell your friend that you are going to go to Barnes and Noble to buy some chess books so that you can learn to play better? I’ll bet you didn’t. My guess is that you aren’t telling anybody and that you think you are going to be able to learn some tricks on the sly and beat your friend from now on. If this is a good friend or perhaps even a girlfriend or spouse, how do you think he or she is going to feel after a few months of unrelenting, ego-shattering disappointments? Will you be surprised a few months from now when he says he is too busy to play chess anymore?

Anybody who says he doesn’t mind losing at chess is either lying or is not a good chess player. Period. "Whenever I lose I feel like committing suicide!" (Nigel Short, almost world champion)

For example, I know a middle-aged couple who play chess every night together. They adore each other and love playing chess together. Sometimes one wins, sometimes the other. They both wax enthusiastically about the playing skill of the other. The three of us happened to be working on a job together once and I played a game with each of them at the end of the day. That was just about the time I had begun studying chess myself and since I only played actual games infrequently I figured that people who played every night must be very good. Well, turns out they only knew how the pieces move. Mate was the sole object of their play. Because I developed cautiously, castled and got all my men in good positions before launching an attack they had no idea how badly they were playing. I’m sure they think that good players simply crush bad players in just a few blitzkrieg moves.

So, imagine if I were to see one or the other of these two innocent wood-pushers on a regular basis and we were to play chess. Inexorably, I would go into teaching mode and talk about "developing" one’s pieces as expeditiously as possible in and around the "sweet center" and, with equal celerity, getting the monarch safely behind his Republican Guard. Sometimes I would launch vicious mating attacks to teach him the importance of solid (defensive) play and at other times I would trade aggressively to lead us to an endgame to teach him the long-term importance of material superiority (and learn to treat his pawns with more respect). In a few weeks he would be playing a semblance of actual chess while his poor wife would still be launching queen-sorties at move two. It would not be long before she would tire of his newly developed weapons of mass depression and find a lot of stuff to do around the house rather than play chess anymore.

"Chess is life" Robert Fischer used to say, and indeed it is. Do we want to live comfortably behind an ignorant ingenuousness or do we want to know the (disconcerting, depressing, uncomfortable) truth about anything and everything from art, and politics to sex? Do we want to go through life reading Danielle Steele or do we want to face Proust. Do we want to continue to listen to Michael Jackson or are we willing to try Stravinski. Do we want a Rockwell on our wall or a Beckman? Do we want to be happy and not care if we lose or do we want to be (unhappily) trying to be really good artists, musicians or chess players?

Do you really want to know the truth? Do you really want to make life more difficult for yourself or do you want to "just have fun?" Remember the way we used to play volleyball? It was fun slapping the ball back and forth, laughing as we launched it in high parabolas of innocent joy. Along came images of the 1968 Olympics and that was the end of dog day's evenings of innocence hitting a white ball back and forth in the backyard. Is that what you want? Remember the first time somebody "spiked" a ball and shortly thereafter all the girls disappeared? It wasn’t "fun" anymore and it hurt. Believe me, if you start learning how to play chess you are gonna get hurt.

Remember the movie Missing? The kids are down there in Santiago, Chile having a good time playing "newspaper" and along comes the CIA and some strange stuff going down and the boy gets nosy and that was the last we saw of him. Remember what the U.S. embassy guy said, "You play with fire, you’re gonna get burned." Not exactly Promethean, but are you ready to get "burned." I mean, it is a life-choice….you can go on pushing the pieces around and whacking the ball back and forth, having "fun" or you can start spiking, causing pain, getting burned….but knowing the truth. Fischer said "Chess is life," but perhaps equally true might be, "Chess is truth."

My parents were divorced when I was seven and I grew up penuriously with an abusive stepmother. MacCarthy’s witch-hunts were in high gear and we were all afraid of getting polio and once a week we dove under our desks because the Russians might be coming. In high school I barely passed Algebra thanks only to endless summers of tutoring. My GPA (and ego) never recovered. My friends went to Harvard and I went to State. I have life-long insecurities and (therefore) I hate losing. I think that one of the reasons I study chess is that I desperately need to prove that I am not the stupid schmuck I have been taught that I am. My girlfriend can beat me at chess and so I try to study certain openings unbeknownst to her. Is this sick or what? I am sixty years old for crying out loud and I still have to win so badly that I will cheat on my girlfriend?

It was actually my girlfriend who prompted me to learn to play real chess. The first time we played she won. My insecurity is so profound that I was looking at the chess books at Barnes and Noble the next day. She meanwhile, had no idea of my duplicitous project, not to mention more important things she had to do, and of course, a couple years later my play was so superior to hers that one game we played in Central Park was memorable because after gaining a winning position in which she resigned, I said, not without evident satisfaction, "Well, lets just see if we turn the board around if I can find a way out of this." And I was able to get out of the mating net I had arranged and come back and beat her again. For her own reasons, my girlfriend hates losing as much as I do. People who don’t like losing don’t like losing twice in the same game!

Another example of how sick I am: One of my best friends and I both had studios in upstate New York and we got together about once a week for chess, sometimes at my place, sometimes at his. We have known each other for thirty years and we are both jocks and uncompromisingly competitive. At chess we were about equal. We played horribly. I know that now because neither of us would give up. It never dawned on us that when you lose your rook, much less your queen, you can resign with confidence. We would play to the bitter end, with the most profane, amateurish reversals. We developed tactics for ripping defeat from the jaws of victory to a high art.

At about that time, I went down to New York City to see if I could arrange a show (for my photographs) and was hanging around The Chess Shop on Thompson Street, just off Washington Square (famous for its lugubrious, if colorful chess scene). I did not like losing to my painting buddy Scott and so at the Chess Shop they recommended a fellow who gave lessons. The deal was one hundred bucks for four lessons and an extra lesson thrown in if I put down the Century at the very beginning. Three weeks later all I had gotten from him was his disgusting cold. I never bothered with the other two lessons. His name was Frank. I would have done just as well if I had thrown my money at those "monte" guys shuffling bottle caps on boxes on Forty-second Street.

Frank never mentioned the word "development" much less the concept of the "sweet center" and its importance. The word "opening" did not seem part of his vocabulary much less "tempo." He might have been an excellent player who thought that I would learn simply by us playing a few games once a week while he coughed in my face. It is true that just by playing a few hours of pool or playing a few sets of tennis with a top player one could improve a great deal, but chess is different. Mimicking the way a master looks pensively at the board, utters barely decipherable "Ummmmms" and sighs and drapes his fingers over a piece and slides it misanthropically across the board is not actually going to help you win games from your buddy. So anyway, there I was, feeling guilty for having tried to cheat on my buddy and getting ripped-off in the process!

But I am an incurable addict. I am still trying to cheat on my girlfriend who is beating me again. Just this past fall she and I were teaching at a small college where we played chess with the students as well as each other. I would sneak a book of "openings" down to my office and tell her I was preparing the next day’s lecture while actually I was trying to learn a new opening tactic with which to beat her.

My point is that I think it is important to understand exactly why one wants to learn to play chess better. It is not easy, it is not fun and it is at least a ten-year commitment. You know how to play the piano and now you have decided to learn the entire set of Beethoven sonatas. It is good to know that at eighty, Horowitz said he was still learning things about Beethoven! If you think chess is any different then I suggest you take up Cribbage.

One of the more interesting comments about chess was made in the story by Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game in which the narrator tries to decipher the real nature of chess. It is worth thinking about. He ponders to himself, "…the more incomprehensible seemed a lifelong brain activity that rotated exclusively about the space composed of sixty-four black and white squares. I was well aware from my own experience of the mysterious attraction of the royal game, which among all games contrived by man rises superior to the tyranny of chance and bestows its palm only on mental attainment, or rather on a definite form of mental endowment. But is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science, a technique, an art that sways among these categories as Mahomet’s coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval yet ever new; mechanical in operation yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space though boundless in its combinations; ever-developing yet sterile; thought that leads to nothing; mathematics that produce no result; art without works; architecture without substance, and nevertheless, as proved by evidence, more lasting in its being and presence than all books and all ages; of which none knows the divinity that bestowed it on the world, to slay boredom, to sharpen the senses, to exhilarate the spirit. One searches for its beginning and its end. Children can learn its simple rules, duffers succumb to its temptation, yet within this immutable tight square it creates a particular species of master not to be compared with any other -–persons destined for chess alone, specific geniuses in whom vision, patience, and technique are operative through a distribution no less precisely ordained than in mathematicians, poets, composers, but merely united on a different level."

This incomparably beautiful description of chess was written by a man who, within a year of its publication killed himself. Of course, Zweig, having been one of Vienna’s leading (Jewish) intellectuals before the Second World War, had other reasons besides chess to despair of life. Nonetheless, I suggest getting hold of a copy of The Royal Game and reading it before launching into this life-threatening activity. (It can be found in, among other things, Sinister Gambits. Ed. Richard Peyton. Souvenir Press, London, 1991.)

Actually, if you are of a literary bent and wish to investigate the neurasthenic side of chess you should read The Defense by Vladimir Nabakov. Another chess seppuku. Sir Edmund Hillary felt that an adventure, in order to properly be considered an adventure, had to entail life-threatening contingencies. Chess is indeed, an adventure.

There is no short-cut to learning to be an excellent chess player but, I confess, for the rank beginner there is one book which, in a single weekend will give you the weapons necessary to beat your "tyro" friend from now on (assuming we have established, beyond a doubt, the fact that you are really a malodorous, rank, hang-a-piece, play-to-the-bitter-end "wood-pusher." The weekend friend-beater chess book is Fred Reinfeld’s Chess Tactics for Beginners. This delightful little book has been out of print for decades but there is a company in California which has reissued it: Melvin Powers Wilshire Book Company. 12015 Sherman Road. North Hollywood, California 91605. I just saw a copy at Barnes and Noble.)

This compact street-fighting booklet of Reinfeld’s is just the bare bones of chess tactics. Going through this book is like attending a Saturday workshop in self-defense in which you learn four basic things to disable your opponent: eyes, nose, throat and groin….well five actually, the fifth being the best: running. These are the basics which any good fighter knows and uses in every donnybrook. After your Saturday self-defense workshop the next time you are in the local tavern and the inebriate, always irascible "Paddy" gets carried away and you rap your knuckles on his nose and he goes down in a heap of tears, you mustn’t think that this little surprise tactic makes you ready for the nocturnal back-streets of Panama.

The eyes, nose and throat and groin in Reinfeld’s book are pins, skewers, forks and discovered attacks. Every good chess player is constantly looking for and trying to set up one of these below-the-belt tactics. It is not enough to know that if you hit a guy in the right place he will go down. Hitting him is just a tactic. Before you can hit him you have to get him in a position so that it is convenient for you to hit him and that is what we call strategy. Remember Ali’s great fight with Forman, the "Rumble in the Jungle" and what he did to get Forman to the point where he could take him out. Rope-a-dope was the strategy. So, tactics are the knock-out blows and strategy is the long term method we use to get the opponent into the corner where we administer the coups de grace.

I repeat, with no apologies, ad nauseum, there is no easy way to learn to play chess. You are looking at a bare minimum of an hour a day for the next ten years just to become a reasonably decent player. I have many books purporting to be able to teach you to play good chess in one weekend or twenty-four hours! Such titles are legion. Would you send me a hundred dollar bill if I promised you that in one year I would return your investment a thousand-fold? Well then, why do you think you can become a good chess player in a weekend? A good chess player is like a good pianist. The memory, skill and study are about equal. That guy playing a Mozart sonata in the foyer of the library on Sunday afternoon probably started playing piano when he was ten and at forty he has been playing for thirty years….and nobody outside of this little community has ever heard of him…and he teaches "music appreciation" at the local community college… you know what I’m sayin?

There is one other book which every beginning player should have and that is, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess which is still published by Bantam Books, New York, 1966. This excellent little book is perfect for the subway, bathroom and purse. There is not a single word of text in the entire book; just diagrams. And, like Reinfeld’s book, you don’t need a board to learn from it. In any spare moment, simply open it at random and study the positional puzzles, which are mostly back-rank mates-in-one. Go through it over and over. I still look through it now and then. It is brilliant in its simplicity because one of the things it hammers home is pattern-recognition. Good players don’t usually see several moves ahead as much as they recognize patterns from which they deduce that an advantage can be achieved if they pursue a certain course of moves. By the time you have gone through Fisher’s book a couple times you will be familiar with some of the mischief you can do with rooks and queens.

Another subway or bathroom book is Simple Checkmates by A.J. Gillam first published in Great Britain in 1978 by B.T. Batsford, London. It is simply a compilation of simple one and two move mates. Each page has two diagrammed situations with the answers at the bottom of the page. I found this book quite entertaining while driving across the country a few years ago. Since I was in a hurry I was almost entirely on the Interstate. I would hold the book on the steering wheel and glance back and forth from the book to the road as I solved the problems.

These three books represent the complete simpleton’s chess bibliography. Once you are beyond the self-congratulatory learning plateau of these three shots of chess-crack-cocaine you will have to make a decision: to learn or not to learn.