Chess for Tigers

over 2 years ago

“Human affairs are like a Chess game: only those who do not take it seriously can be called good players”
— Hung Tzu Ch’eng

Chess is a beautiful Memory Game. But the history is full of beautiful discoveries that people has ruined. Alas, chess is beautiful only while you play it without any ambition of World Glory. If you made that mistake, you will probably try to learn more from the books… Dull, boring, heavy books, full of secret moves coded in foreign languages, or even coded with the algebraic chess notation, or the cryptic English descriptive notation. Most people quickly give up this torture – and also drops chess! Are there no interesting books that can show you the spirit of the game while you can enjoy reading? Well, there is ‘My System’ by Aaron Nimzowitsch. And there is one more book that could stimulate your interest in the game. I am going to show this book to you now…

Late Simon Webb has authored a book that might interest you as a beginner. It is titled ‘Chess for Tigers’, it was first published in 1978, and at its cover it is said:

„The tiger is a vicious beast. He doesn’t care about the aesthetic side of chess. He doesn’t even care about making the ‘best’ moves. All he cares about is winning.”

So, if you feel tigrish, you can find the book at this link:

Chess for Tigers

The book has 15 chapters, which all sound VERY interesting…

So you want to be a Tiger? 7
Play the man – not the board 9
Looking in the mirror 22
How to improve your opening repertoire 35
How to catch Rabbits 42
How to trap Heffalumps 51
Fortune favours the lucky 66
How to win won positions 83
What to do in drawn positions 93
Clock control 100
How to avoid Silly mistakes 120
Team Play 123
Quick Play 134
Correspondence Chess 140
Are you ready…? 151

…which does not mean they are all useful as the one that says ’Play the man – not the board’, or the ones of hunting rabbits and heffalumps. For this occasion I am going to show you the shortest and the least useful:

* * * Chapter 11 * * *

Are you prone to making silly mistakes? Many chess-players are. I know some who never lose without making a ‘silly mistake’. If only they could cure this weakness they would all be World Champions.

So first we must distinguish between these sorts of ‘silly mistake’ and genuine Blunders. By a Blunder I mean a move which allows your opponent an immediate win of material, or to wreck your position with a reply you hadn’t considered. Other ‘silly mistakes’ include playing a combination which is not quite sound, or allowing your opponent's attack to break through slightly more quickly than it should have done. How often have you heard players saying ‘I was holding him easily, but then I blundered and let him win a pawn’, when what they mean is that they could have held out for a few more moves with a different defence? These latter types of ‘silly mistake’ will disappear from your play as soon as you learn to be objective, and recognize them as part of the normal hazards of chess. There is an element of risk in playing combinations, and bad positions are always liable to become worse. Then you will realize that they are not really 'silly mistakes' at all.

Here I am concerned with cutting down on real Blunders. Look what happened to me in the following position against Jeff Horner, played at Blackpool, 1977.

31… ♛c6??? 32. ♘e7+

Black resigns

This was a traumatic experience, and also cost me £150, for this game was in the last round of the tournament, which Horner and I were leading with 4/4, and the position should be won for Black with careful play.

The solution

Immediately after this nasty accident, I adopted a method which over the next few years virtually eliminated one move Blunders from my play. Write the move down first. Of course you already knew about this, didn’t you? You've seen other players doing it, but probably you think you can decide on your move and check it mentally before playing it. That’s what I thought! But I still left my queen en prise.

After taking up this method I found that I nearly always played the move which I wrote down, changing about one in fifty on average, and not all these changes were because I was about to make a Blunder. For a very small effort I saved myself quite a lot of points over the next few years, and so it was well worth it. Try it, and you won’t regret it!

Now for the details of exactly how and when to put the writing-downfirst method into operation. Don't write down the first move that comes into your head, and then start thinking about it. Think first, and when you have decided which move to play, write it down on your score-sheet. Then spend a few seconds checking that your opponent has no unexpected reply. Assuming that you don't spot anything you should be able to make your move within 10-30 seconds of writing it down. If you take longer than this, you may start running into time-trouble. Tigers generally cover their move up so that their opponent can't see it, and sometimes go so far as to disguise their hand movements when writing the move down, but this is not essential! The extra few seconds your opponent has to think will not make a great difference, but all the same there is no point in giving him something for nothing.

In the opening, when you know which move you are going to play, it may seem a bit pointless writing it down first, and this is up to you. Two more important exceptions, however, are the following:

(1) When you are in time-trouble, you shouldn't use your own time to record your opponent’s moves, let alone your own. A convenient guideline might be to stop writing your own moves in advance when you have less than ten minutes left, and to stop writing your opponent’s moves in your own time when you have less than five minutes left, although of course if you only have one or two moves to make then this doesn't apply.

(2) When you have a lost position, you will probably be less in the mood for being extra careful, and as pointed out in the chapter on Swindling, it can be a good idea to appear to be losing interest, in the hope that your opponent will get careless and play too quickly. So I prefer not to write my moves down first when I have a really bad position.

Remember that if you can reduce your Blunders by as little as 50 per cent you will save yourself quite a few points over the season, unless you're a bit of a Superman already. You won’t eliminate them completely, but I guarantee that writing the move down first will significantly reduce them.

* * * End of Chapter * * *

So, if you like what you see, and are ready to Play the man (and not the board)…

…then you are welcome to our Hive (li)chess tournaments with some serious tradition :)

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