How We Think, Part XXLV

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Did you know Romans who used numbers like XXLV didn't have a number for zero? Just a bit of trivia.


Recently I've been trying to blend all the different things about how we think into a smooth easy-to-use process for chess.

-- Position weaknesses & threats silently described (to see the parts and sequence for threats left-brain-wise).
-- Forcing variations seen as simply pieces moving on the board in your mind to engage the right-brain.
-- Strategic goals silently stated to provide direction for our imagination to find solutions.
-- Adjustments to move-sequences to find the best. It seems our first try is rarely best.
-- Breathe deeply and slowly to calm the inner beast. This is the one conscious way to influence it.

Your goal could be something abstract like "to get more and more advantage to win". However, one's goal could be something concrete like winning a pawn or controlling a file or leading the opponent to misplace a piece.

Saturday I played in a consultation game and realized that often I wasn't following this at all. Quite often I would quickly jump from position analysis and strategic goals to move selection instead of forcing moves/sequences.  It seems that considering forcing moves isn't always the most natural. However, I would quickly add that when I did adhere to "position weaknesses & threats, forcing moves, strategic goals" order of things it went pretty well. It seemed always to be a question not of what forcing moves are possible, but what sequence could I/we use to achieve an immediate tactical/positional goal. That leads me to believe we need to have a good sense of the goals before considering any candidate solutions.

Position: weaknesses & threats
Goal(s): longer-term strategic things and shorter-term concrete positional things
Forcing-moves solution
Plan solution
Adjustments (to improve the quality of the line you will play)

Where the "connect the dots" intuition comes into play is in the forcing move sequence solution where we're intuiting candidate moves and guessing our opponents responses as we go. There's a bit of the "solitaire chess" where you guess moves for both sides.

A writer once sent a long letter to a friend and then apologized for its length. He said he just didn't have enough time to make it shorter. I think a lot of our initial move-sequences are overly long or convoluted because we need time to make them better (usually shorter too).