There is a whole generation of players who have been raised on Internet chess and Blitz chess in particular who have never played in a tournament nor have they ever seen a GM in action up close and personal.
Also, it’s somewhat surprising to learn that so few players are familiar with chess history or who have actually studied more than just a few GM games.
This was in the early days of Internet chess and there were a lot of sites which are no longer around and I particularly remember one site where a player who was verified by the site owners as being a real GM was allowed to start at an inflated rating. The brouhaha it created was incredible. A host of players thought he should start at a 1200 rating like everybody else and prove that he really deserved his rating!
Grandmasters are unbelievably strong. Take the area of tactics for example. A point a lot of people miss when they are doing tactical puzzles, even those who get very good at solving them, is that when we see those positions that has a tactical solution, that represents only half the problem. The GM probably had the line worked out in his head many moves before the given position.
To achieve Grandmaster status it requires a great deal of commitment, determination, and a certain affinity for the subject, not to mention enormous amounts of experience. That’s assuming one is not a prodigy, of course.
Most Grandmasters have average cognitive skills and average memories for matters outside of chess. This suggests that expertise in chess has less to do with analytical skills (the ability to project and weigh the relative merits of hundreds of options) and more to do with long-term memory and pattern recognition.
They have experienced and stored thousands of game situations in their memory and have the ability to select the best answer from those stored memories. Of course it will also take uncountable hours and passion for the subject to accumulate enough knowledge to reach GM level.
In the 1920s, a group of Russian scientists set out to quantify the intellectual advantages of eight of the world's best chess players by giving them a battery of basic cognitive and perceptual tests. To their surprise, the researchers found that the GM’s didn't perform significantly better than average on any of their tests.
In the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist named Adriaan de Groot asked what seemed like a simple question: What separates an average player from world class GM’s?
de Groot selected a few positions where there was one correct, but not obvious, move to be made. He then presented those positions to a group of masters and average players and asked them to think aloud while they selected their move.
What de Groot uncovered was that for the most part the experts didn't look more moves ahead, at least not at first. They didn't even consider more possible moves. They tended to see the right moves and they tended to see them almost right away.
When de Groot listened to their verbal reports, he noticed that they described their thoughts in different language than less experienced players.
They talked about configurations of pieces like Pawn structures and immediately noticed things that were not quite right, like exposed pieces. They weren't seeing the board as thirty-two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, systems of tension and lines of force.
Grandmasters literally see a different board. Studies of their eye movements have found that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players. According to the experts, this suggests they are absorbing information from multiple squares at once.
Their eyes also search across greater distances and linger for less time at any one place. They focus on fewer different spots on the board and those spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move.
But, the most striking finding of all from these early studies was their memories. The Grandmasters could memorize the board after only a brief glance and they could reconstruct old games from memory. Later studies confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a player somebody is. GM’s can remember positions from games for weeks, even years, afterward.
Oddly, when Grandmasters were shown random arrangements of pieces their memory for the board was only slightly better than those of average players.
Those experiments revealed something about memory and about expertise in general: we don't remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. A board of randomly pieces has no context. Such positions could be described as “white noise.” Graddnasters use the library of patterns that they've cached away in long-term memory to chunk the board.
Contrary to the belief that chess is based on analysis, many of the Grandmaster’s decisions about which move to make happens almost as soon as he looks at the board.
It’s something like the time I was watching a television program where an expert was hunting rattlesnakes. He had been doing it for years and could spot them instantly. The show’s host never saw them. Another example is the way a major league baseball outfielder knows where to position himself to catch a fly ball almost as soon as it leaves the bat.
Researchers have found that highly rated players use a section of their brain that suggests they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to use a different part of the brain where they are encoding new information. The experts are interpreting the board in terms of their knowledge of past positions. Lower-ranked players are seeing the board as something new.
While they may not be smarter than the rest of us, Grandmasters are way better at chess than we are and, unfortunately, history seems to suggest that if you aren’t a Grandmaster by your early 20’s, you never will be. In fact, if you are not a master by then, you probably never will be. And that seems to be what upsets some people (who for some reason seem to be in the 20-30 age bracket)….they don’t like being told they have no hope of reaching the Grandmaster level. But then again, most of us think we are the exception that will beat the odds.
If you are interested in reading de Groot’s book, you can read it online on Google books HERE.
I had the opportunity to spend time discussing chess with a "mere" IM a few years ago, and it was a real eye opener. He was familiar with the basic plans in almost every opening variations--including ones he had never played. He remembered essentially every game he had ever played as well as hundreds of GM games. And of course his tactical vision seemed incredible to a mere patzer like me. And he was not a professional player! I've hear a 2500+ players described as a "weak GM." Just play one and find out!
ReplyDelete"A board of randomly pieces has no context." This is the flaw of most chess books; they start discussing a position on the board and continue to the game's end but skip the beginning. The reader feels thrown into the middle of a movie with no idea how things got to where they are.
ReplyDeleteThe difference between masters and players like you and I is that when they encounter a position in a chess book, their knowledge of typical structures and patterns provides plenty of context. They quickly recognize a familiar looking structure. They can probably make a good guess as to what the opening was, and they know what the typical plans and tactical ideas are in that structure. All this while you and I are counting the pawns to see if material is equal!
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