You've Got to Have a Plan

We hear that all the time, but is it really true? And what is a plan anyway?

The whole concept of plans is a mystery to many chess players, and that's probably because the word is used too loosely. Sometimes you see a sequence of calculated moves, and the author calls it a plan. Other times, someone says "My plan was to attack on the kingside". No wonder people get confused!

I find it easier to talk about goals and milestones. The goal is what you want to achieve ("my goal was to attack on the kingside"), and milestones are subgoals on the way there. Typical milestones are trading off a defending piece, and preventing counterplay on the other wing. Once your goal is set, the plan is the move sequence to get there, ticking off the milestones along the way. In other words, your goal is your strategical plan, and the moves to get there makes up your tactical plan.

How to find a plan

I common misconception is that you can make any plan you want in a given position. The truth is that it's not for you to decide, the right plan is already there in the position. Your job is to find it.

Talk to your pieces. Ask every piece and pawn about their dreams and ambitions, and how they'd like to work together. Eventually, they will reveal the plan to you. Talk to your opponent's pieces too. They might have enemy secrets to disclose.

Sometimes, there's more than one plan available. Which one to choose is a matter of your chess personality. If you're an attacking player, don't pick the consolidating plan if there's a good attack plan on the table. When you hesitate between two plans, there's often a way to postpone the decision by playing a move that fits both plans. Those moves are multi-purpose moves, but that's the subject of a future blog post.

An Example from the King's Indian

This position is the Classical King's Indian main line after the moves 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 O-O 6.Be2 e5 7.O-O Nc6 8.d5 Ne7.

 The main plans here a carved in stone - Black will attack the kingside, starting with Nh5 followed by f5, and White attacks on the queenside. The most popular choice is 9.b4, immediately declaring intentions.

If you don't like mutual all-out attacks, then the King's Indian isn't your style, and you'd do best to pick some other opening. Black must push forward on the kingside, if you attempt any other plan, you will be crushed (as long as White knows what they're doing). The same is true for White, you must advance quickly on the queenside, otherwise Black breaks through.

There are also secondary plans involving prophylactic moves to slow down your opponent's advance. The current state of the KID is that you can't completely ignore your opponent - at every move you must carefully balance attack and defence.

A third feature is the the pawn on d6 - it will become vulnerable as soon as the c-pawn moves. That's why we often see the manoeuvre Rf7 and Bf8. That Bishop move is actually one of the multi-purpose moves mentioned above, it protects d6 and at the same time vacates g7 for the Rook.

Takeaway

Don't make up plans from what you want to do. Instead, let the position tell you what you should do, and make plans from there!

What's Your Style in Chess?

Style is a combination of your chess personality traits and your self image as a chess player. The personality is more or less determined by your genes, and will not change much over time, although you tone certain aspects, such as hold back aggressiveness in order to play more solid.

Your self image, though, is made up by yourself and your environment, and can change a lot if that's what you want. A common factor is that your self image is affected by role models, books and videos, sometimes a bit too much. If you're a fan of Bobby Fisher, you might want to play in his style. If your natural styles are similar, it's all good, buy if the differ, you'll just end up playing positions you're not comfortable with.

At ChessPersonality, you can do a simple test of your style. Based on just 20 questions, it's not exactly scientific, but it will give you a hint. Below are my results (rather similar to Bobby Fisher's, by the way). What stands out here is the 100% Intuitive and 0% Calculating. That's absolutely true - I just hate calculations, and chess intuition is my biggest strength (and also my biggest weakness).

Another way to find your style is to play through games, both your own and other player's. Look for positions where you feel comfortable, and where the right moves comes naturally to you. Find out which openings produces these positions. These are the openings you should focus on.

Now look for positions you don't like. An uncomfortable position is one where you can't find any natural moves, and you don't feel good about the moves recommended by theory. These are openings you may want to dismiss for now (but you might have to study the later to become a more well-rounded chess player).

To wrap this up, here's a story from my early days. My very first chess book was Chess Openings by the German master Theo Schuster. That book did a fine job helping me to build my first repertoire, but it also caused me a great deal of problems. The biggest problem was that I, as Schuster recommended, played d5 in response to d4. Queen's Gambit is a respectable opening, but not in my style as I at long last found out. In the mean time, I got rather poor results as Black against d4.

The last (and shortest) chapter of the book was Indian Openings. It started with Playing these openings requires a great deal of experience, so I will just summarise them briefly. As I didn't see myself as a very experienced player, I ended my reading there.

Years later, I was just about to play my very first tournament when this weakness struck me. My white openings were okay, as were my defences against e4, but I had nothing to show against d4. When I brought this up with one of the top players at the club, he said "Play the King's Indian. That will fit your style perfectly." That was shocking, as I didn't now what "style" was, and Schuster already told me that Indian openings were for experts only.

But, being desperate, I went to the chess store to pick a couple of books on the KID. With little more than a week to the tournament, I started reading. Much to my surprise, I felt right at home. I could understand the plans, and the moves came very natural to me. As Lex said in Jurassic Park - "I know this!" Why didn't anyone tell me this before?

The tournament went well, two King's Indians scored me one win (against a stronger opponent) and one draw.

The King's Indian is since then a stable corner stone in my repertoire. Other openings have come and gone, but this one is for keeps.

Takeaway

Don't play against your style. It's easy to be impressed by brilliances in books and videos, but they may not be for you. Don't be fooled by book titles like Winning with the French. If the French doesn't suit your style, you might end up with Losing with the French.

 

A Sense of Urgency

Sometimes when you spot a move that seems to get you out of trouble (or initiate a strong attack), you may feel an urge to play that move immediately. That false sense of urgency is probably the most common cause of mistakes in chess, so let's have a closer look.

The sense of urgency is entirely based on fear. Apart from the usual fear of losing the game or making a fool of yourself, there are deeper fears at play here.

In general, when you have a bad position, you don't want to know just how bad it is. You don't want to accept defeat until in stares you in the eye, and therefore you immediately play the first move you see that holds some kind of promise. That's why bad positions often crumbles to pieces much quicker than they need to. Some players are very good at rescuing bad positions - when you think they're completely lost, they launch a counter attack, or when they have two pieces hanging, they hang a third only to complicate things. What they are doing here is exploiting a particular fear in their opponents. When you think you're winning, your worst fear is to screw it up, even a draw would be a terrible defeat.

The normal reaction to a frightening or stressful situation is the fight or flight response. That's an automatic psychological reaction that temporarily disables the logical thinking. It may serve you well when you meet a lion on the savanna, but a chess board is a different environment with zero risk of physical injury. So, what you have to do is to take a deep breath, sit on your hands, and wait for the fight or flight response to fade away. That's not what my opponent did in the position below.

Black is clearly winning here, mate will soon follow after Qa8. I knew that I had a lost position, so defence was not an option. I decided to play gx5, a very unexpected (and also very bad) move, and let my opponent work out the consequences. Black was stunned by the threat to their Rook, and immediately played 1...Rh6 to get out of the line of fire, but 2. Rg1+ won the Queen and the game.

Takeaway

Never give in to the fight or flight response. The worst thing that can happen is that you lose the game. If you have a bad position, see it as a training session. There's always a chance to save the game, and if you don't, you have at least learned something!