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Well, I lost to Hikaru. Again.
I’ve played him three times in Titled Tuesday now. Not surprisingly, given that he’s the number one rated blitz player in the world, the result in the other two games was the same. I’ve also spent a fair amount of watching him play blitz on his Twitch stream. The big question is, What makes him so good?
Well, a lot of things, of course. But one that stands out to me is that he’s hardly ever stumped.
Now in my own blitz games I’m stumped quite often. Maybe you can relate. I get to an unfamiliar position and have no idea what to do. I don’t just mean that I don’t know the best move, I literally have no idea: where to put my pieces, which pawn breaks to aim for, what my opponent is trying to do, anything.
Usually in this situation I end up burning a lot of time, but not finding a good move. It’s quite hard to figure out a strategic situation from scratch without any pointers in less than a minute (in a blitz game even 30 seconds is quite a long think). The seconds I use trying to figure it out often end up costing me dearly later in the game. Especially if my opponent is familiar with the position and is playing good moves quickly, that means I’m getting behind on the board and the clock, which is hard to recover from.
I got stumped quite early in this game. Hikaru led with a b3 move order I didn’t have any specific preparation for. After a few random developing moves, I arrived in this position.
Here I just had no idea how to finish developing my queenside pieces or what my typical plans in the middlegame should be. Not wanting to burn too much time, I continued with some more random developing moves. Improbably, these worked out well and I was in decent shape for awhile, but eventually my lack of familiarity with the middlegame, deficit on the clock, and my opponent’s superior skill caught up with me and I got hit with some tactics. You could say the game came down to tactics, and in a sense it did, but my lack of familiarity with the position started me down a dangerous road much earlier.
This never seems to happen to Hikaru. He doesn’t always play the absolute best move, but he seems to always be ready with a healthy move he can play quickly. So how do you get good at finding these good-enough moves?
The Fix
Part of it comes back to studying the opening the right way. You often hear people say that the opening isn’t very important at lower levels. What they mean, I think, is that you rarely see games decided outright in the opening. That’s true enough, but the real impact of the opening is more subtle.
In an opening workshop, GM Sam Shankland said, "The most valuable aspect of opening work is that it guides our understanding of resulting middlegame positions." I found this quite interesting - not only a valuable, but the most valuable! Part of what makes GMs so strong is they have a ton of this opening-specific strategic knowledge.
In another round of the same tournament, the shoe was on the other foot. My opponent, a master, wasn’t familiar with the opening and made several small mistakes. I won the game in 20 moves without having to do much of anything.
I don’t want to make this an article about the subtleties of the Catalan, but just to give one example of this kind of micro-knowledge, my opponent’s move 6…b6 is an inaccuracy. The way to exploit this is by exchanging pawns with cxd5, when Black’s bishop will end up stuck behind his own pawn on d5. I happened to know this so I was able to execute the right reaction quickly.
Did the opening cause Black to lose? Well according to the engine Black’s position wasn’t losing until 14…Nxe5 so a superficial analysis would say that this game was decided by a blunder in the middlegame. But by that time Black was already down on the clock and under a lot of pressure on the board. His attention was no doubt diverted by trying to figure out how to arrange his pieces.
Meanwhile, if you check this game with the engine, you will find many of my moves in the early middlegame weren’t the engine’s absolute top choice, but they were all decent moves that fit together into a coherent plan to apply pressure to my opponent.
So was this game decided by the opening? Well, it’s a matter of perspective, but the opening certainly at least played a large role in the outcome.
Several times lately I’ve seen intermediate players post games they’ve played with comments like, “My opponent never made any mistakes!” When I look at these games I usually see a similar pattern. The opponent never blundered, but the player posting the game didn’t put any pressure on them. They didn’t know the main plans in the position and shuffled their pieces around more or less randomly until something happened.
Making the jump from intermediate to advanced is largely about figuring out how to beat opponents who won’t beat themselves. Past a certain level, your opponents are unlikely to blunder unless you put a lot of pressure on them. Understanding typical opening plans is all about creating this kind of pressure.
Exercises
So how do you learn these plans? Here are three ideas.
Good opening resources should educate you about these plans. Whether you prefer to learn openings by books, videos, or Chessable courses, the biggest value of the course is in how it explains the resulting middlegames. Seek out sources that have explanations that make sense to you. And whatever you do don’t skip the explanations!
Look at master games in your openings. For this purpose, I like to look through lots of games very quickly. In this case I’m going for quantity over quality, because I want to see the patterns that happen again and again in many games. Once I’ve scanned through a bunch of games I put notes about the most common plans in my opening file.
Play against the computer from the opposite side from the one you’re interested in. That is, if you want to know the plan for White, play against the computer as Black. Arrange the screen so that you can’t see the computer lines, play your move, wait a few seconds, and press spacebar to have the computer play its top move. Repeat a few times. Feel free to give yourself as many takebacks as you like. Pretty soon you’ll get a sense of what the computer thinks is important in the position, what moves it wants to go for, and how it punishes mistakes. Again, note the results in your opening file.
Let’s end this one with a little homework assignment. Find a position from one of your games where you were stumped and use one or more of the techniques above to figure out what the right plan would have been. If you’re up for it, post the position and the results of your research in the comments.
What I’m Reading This Week
Are Chess Tactics Too Hard?
Martin Justesen looks at some research suggesting you should aim for an 85% success rate in training exercises.
How To Learn Chess As An Adult
Alex Crompton goes through his unconventional but highly effective study plan, drawing on language learning research.
Detecting Individual Decision-Making Style
The team behind the Maia bots created a machine learning model that is able to identify individual chess players purely by their moves with an astonishing degree of accuracy.
On Jan 29, I hit my high for Lichess puzzles at 2311. At that moment, my Lichess blitz rating was 2043 which is pretty close to my average rating over 6000 games.
On Feb 5th, I read the article linked "Are Chess Tactics Too Hard" and started doing only Lichess tactics at -300
My puzzle rating dropped like a stone. By Feb 20th, it hit a low point of 1840 after several dips and gains.
My blitz rating started making a climb and hit my all-time high at 2230 just now.
Coincidence? Maybe?
I find myself enjoying tactics more and motivated to get steaks of 10+ correct.
At -300, my approach to tactics is different. I'm trying to be perfect, not uncover some idea that is hidden and hard for me to see. I rarely get "stumped" by the tactics but I get one wrong it is because I miss a move order trick or miss a hidden response at the end of a tactic - the ideas are not novel or hard for me to understand but the execution is sometime faulty. That's the part I'm training.
I suspect for me, training to be "perfect" directly impacts my rating but I've been over 2200 before and maybe this is just a blip and I'm assigning some explanation to something that is purely cyclical.
We'll see how long I stay above 2200. In the past its only been for a couple days.