The local chess fraternity remains stunned beyond comprehension by the brutal murder of 23 of our citizens in Lusignan and Bartica. These slayings of our innocents have numbed us.
The election of office bearers for the establishment of a new Guyana Chess Federation was postponed. It was scheduled to be held last Monday but was postponed as a mark of respect to those who fell on Sunday evening in Bartica. A new date for establishing the federation will be announced in due course.
On behalf of chess players everywhere in Guyana, the Interim Steering Committee for the Development of Chess wishes to extend heartfelt condolences to the families, relatives and friends of those who died in the carnage at Lusignan and Bartica.
Today, we will try to understand a little about decision-making in chess. At the Wijk aan Zee tournament last month, world champion Vishy Anand was defeated by 20-year-old Teimour Radjabov. I replayed the game with the help of grandmaster analysis, and realized Anand made some bad decisions, such as when he sacrificed the exchange for more enterprising play. His opponent never allowed him to recover.
Chess players generally do not think much about decision-making when preparing for a tournament game or actually playing a tournament game. We make decisions naturally and unconsciously. I never seriously considered this aspect of the game until poor decision-making was identified as the culprit in Anand’s loss. I was stimulated, therefore, to read up a little on the subject.
Every chess player is familiar with the concepts of material, time and quality. The balance among these three factors is the foundation of every move in chess, and also in every decision that we make. Making a correct evaluation and then a correct decision requires understanding the trade-offs and relative values of these core elements.
Material describes our tangible assets. Time is how long it takes to achieve a specific objective. Quality, the most important element and a goal unto itself, is value – and even power. To make the most intelligent decision, we should strive to balance these factors sensibly and correctly.
Garry Kasparov has noted that improving your decision-making is like studying your native language. Even though most of us do not know much about the mechanics of the language we learned as children, that does not prevent us from speaking it fluently. But still, we all make mistakes: incorrect grammar, words which we use improperly, awkward sentences.
We recognize the value of communicating with greater precision – like having an understanding of the difference between ‘that’ and ‘which.’ So we study grammar books. Similarly, we make decisions on the chess board and in life without conscious thought. But we can make decisions meaningfully by studying the ‘grammar books’ of chess and life.
The aim is not to overturn a lifetime of experience which has served us well in chess and other aspects of life. Rather, as Kasparov suggests, we need to start out by becoming aware of the processes that work for us, then move on to improving them step by step.
At the prestigious Soviet School of Chess the former world champion noted that he was trained to ask himself the following questions before making a crucial decision: What bad habits have you picked up in your decision-making? Which steps do you skip and which do you overemphasize? Do your poor decisions tend to stem from bad information, poor evaluation, incorrect calculation, or a combination of these things?
This advice in my mind holds the key for intelligent decision-making on the chess board since it benefits from a conscious and improved process. By becoming more aware of all the elements, all the factors in play, we can train ourselves to think strategically, or as we say in chess, positionally.
Poor decison-making in serious tournament chess not only costs you the game. I have seen it costing Spassky US$1 million during his return match for a US$5 million purse with Fischer in 1992. Think about it!
