Comments on "The Expert Mind"

Recently a friend asked me to comment on this article. Here are some thing I would like to add:

1. Learn from history- improve your game by studying the evolution of chess. Studying today’s Grandmaster strategy is just too difficult for someone starting out in chess. There are too many intricacies that would throw off even a moderately skilled player.

Instead of jumping straight into today’s modern Grandmaster games, most beginners are first advised to study the games of the first modern chess players AND understand the evolution of chess strategy over time.

World Champion	What They Discovered
Paul Morphy	Discovered that developing pieces immediately in the opening would convert to a large advantage. Discovered that you should develop knights first, bishops next, then queen. Showed how to correctly play open positions.
William Steinitz	Discovered strategy for closed positions. Discovered that you didn’t need to develop as quickly in closed positions. Still controlled the center.
Richard Reti	Discovered that you didn’t need to control the center in many cases. Discovered that it was possible to overextend in the center and how to attack an overextended center.
	… and so on. After understanding each era of chess, you’ll eventually come to an understanding of why modern Grandmasters make the moves that they do.

2. Internalizing the ideas is probably the fastest way to improve. There are many principles in chess like “Control the Center” or “Bishops are better than knights”. These are very abstract principles that the beginner may be able to vocalize but won’t really be able to apply in his own games. I think internalizing these principles, or using these principles and seeing how they apply to one’s everyday life, makes the lesson so much more effective. You want to extract these patterns and see how it relates to other things.

For example, at college I learned these abstruse Computer Science algorithms that could make a computer do stuff faster. I was able to learn the lessons faster when I was able to make parallelisms to chess. In effect, it helped not only me in my Computer Science class, but it helped me in my chess games as well.