I thought I'd write a quick post to point you guys to an interesting article I found on the /r/chess subreddit. The article was written in 2011 by IM Kostya Kavutskiy, and attemps to provide tips as to how to overcome a drought in chess improvement (i.e., when your rating has stopped increasing and has effectively stalled). The article is titled "... on Breaking 2366", and is about how this IM came to reach the rating 2366 after stalling around 2250. (Funnily enough though, 6 years later his FIDE profile shows a standard rating of 2390, with games played as recently as May 2017, so perhaps he's stalled again and would be due for another article...)
He separates the tips into the following categories:
Analyzing your own games
Kavutskiy recommends reviewing the opening of every serious game you play. You shouldn't make the same mistake in two different games that use the same opening. I've recently played in an OTB tournament and have definitely made (costly and annoying) mistakes in my openings. Also, if after a game you realize you had trouble finding a good plan once you reached the middlegame, then Kavutskiy says your understanding of that particular opening is lacking.
Psychological mistakes
A psychological mistake is "usually the main culprit of any chess slump". Kavutskiy gives as example the main mistake he found in his own play, namely relying too much on intuition (or rather, not relying enough on concrete calculations); he writes that he would sometimes refrain from sacrifices because (1) he didn't trust his calculations ("the hard part was convincing myself that my opponent hadn't set some nasty trap. A year ago I would have just assumed that I [had] missed something in my calculations and would have played some 'solid' move instead"), or (2) he was simply not "brave" enough. Unfortunately, I feel like this section doesn't really answer one very difficult question: how do you figure out the psychological mistakes you make during your games?!
Working harder
To get over stallation (if that's a word), Kavutskiy says that you need to work harder than you're used to, at home (by analyzing your games, reading books, etc.), but also during your games. In particular, you need to work harder than your opponent: stay more focused, calculate variations more deeply and accurately, etc. I think this advice makes sense, and for me this was one of the main takeaways from this article. It can be hard to stay focused for the whole duration of a longer game, or after you start feeling like you have a sizable advantage against your opponent.
Chess books ("Chess books are ridiculously helpful")
Finally, Kavutskiy recommends reading more chess books as a road to improvement. He recommends a few specific books, a list which you may or may not find interesting (and which I invite you to consult in his article). He does recommend Perfect Your Chess by Andrei Volokitin, which I own and would also wholeheartedly recommend; the book presents hundreds of puzzles that target more advanced players. I can also recommend Excelling at Positional Chess, which I've reviewed here almost 10 years ago. I think benefits you get from books depend on how much work you put into them (do you get invested, set up boards with the position and run through the variations in the book, or do you read passively?), and I think that was one of the main messages in Kavutskiy's article, for better or worse (I've been reading very passively these days).
Showing posts with label Psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Psychology. Show all posts
Friday, September 29, 2017
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Psychology: Importance of tactical, positional and general chess knowledge
Reference: Holding, D. H. (1985). The psychology of chess skill. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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The book cited above is not a chess book per se; rather, it discusses different psychological aspects of the chess player, such as his cognitive abilities.
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According to one study, the main things a chess player should work on is his tactical abilities, as well as his positional judgement. Pfau (1983, cited in Holding, 1985) administered tests to nearly 60 chess players. There was a 75-item multiple-choice test, which covered the different areas of a chess game, namely the opening, the middlegame and the endgame. For instance, Holding (1985) cite the following question that was used by Pfau (1983): The Staunton Gambit is employed by [white] in the [Dutch Defense]. Seventy-four other questions were thus used.
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The participants were also given a series of diagrams of gamelike situations, and were asked to find the best moves. Some of these diagrams were aimed at testing the tactical level of the player, while the rest of the diagrams were aimed at testing positional judgement.
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Results. There was a very strong positive correlation between tactical skill and rating (.76); between positional judgement and rating (.72); and between results at the knowledge test and rating (.69). There was also a moderate/strong positive correlation between memory for positions and rating (.44), but that's nothing compared to the enormous correlation observed in the first three mentioned cases.
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Note that the correlation between the knowledge test and the participants' Elo ratings was observed both for general chessic questions in the questionnaire, as well as for specific questions (regarding openings, the middlegame and endgames).
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Also note that there was a small insignificant correlation between time spent studying and rating (.10). This suggests that what is learnt is much more important than how much time you spend studying it. In other words, learning techniques used by the players while studying is of major importance. This could also suggest that those who learn fast could be at advantage here.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Psychology: are men better at chess than women?
The question as whether men are innately better at chess than women is controversial. At least, this idea is widespread, to the point where it has become a stereotype : men are better at chess than women.
An interesting article that stresses this point is the one by Anne Maass et al., who conducted a study in Italy. I will discuss this study further, but before entering the subject, here is the reference for those who are interested in reading the full article :
Maass, A., D’Ettole, C., & Cadinu, M. (2008). Checkmate? The role of gender stereotypes in the ultimate intellectual sport. European Journal of Social Psychology, 38, 231-245.
Women chess players represent less than 5% of all tournament players worldwide. Added to that underrepresentation of women is their underperformance: they are only 1% of all grandmasters. It is easy to say that men are more interested in chess for one, and better at it for two. The aforementioned study tends to go in the other direction.
The goal of Maass et al. was to investigate the role of the widespread stereotype (men are better than women at chess) in the women’s underperformance. It seems that it’s the first time researchers investigate another venue than cognitive differences to explain the better performance of men in chess.
First, the authors lead a pilot study in order to verify that the stereotype is indeed widespread. They found that the participants of the pilot study did think that men were innately better at chess than women. They also found that the participants thought other players too had the idea that men are superior to their female colleagues.
In the study, Maass et al. explicitely tested the impact of the activation (mention) of the stereotype before a game. They also checked for the importance of cognitive differences in the results obtained (for instance, it is well established that men score better in mental imagery and mental rotation, so they wanted to check if these cognitive differences could explain more the difference of results than the mention of the stereotype would).
The experiment. The study was conducted via Internet. Fourty-two male participants and 42 female participants were paired according to their Elo rating for the games, i.e. each woman was paired to an equal-strength man. There was a maximum difference of 30 points between the man and woman’s ratings. All in all, this means each player was of the same strength. These pairs of players played 2 games against each other, but without knowing they were playing twice against the same opponent. They just thought it was two games against two different opponents, because the nicknames weren’t the same in both games (they were neutral-gender nicknames, so that guessing the sex of the opponent would be impossible).
There were two conditions in the experiment. In the control condition, participants were just playing two games with their paired opponent of the other sex (still without thinking it was the same opponent twice). They didn’t know whether the opponent was a male or a female, and the experimentators never mentioned anything about men being superior to women. In the experimental condition, the participants were told in the first game that they were playing against a man, whereas in the second game they were told they were playing against a woman (that order was reversed for half of the participants). Before the game, the participants in the experimental condition were told "that recent studies had shown that men earn clearly superior scores than women in chess games. The aim of this study is to provide further tests for these findings". That was the way to activate the stereotype for the participants in the experimental condition (as I said, the participants in the control condition weren’t told anything about that stereotype).
So, what were the results of the games?
First of all, women in the control condition played just like anyone else (they scored approximately 1.0/2.0). Women in the experimental condition also played as expected when they thought they were playing against another woman (1.0/2.0), but their performance dropped drastically when they thought they were playing against a man (they scored around 0.5/2.0) (see figure below, adapted from Maass et al., 2008).
An interesting article that stresses this point is the one by Anne Maass et al., who conducted a study in Italy. I will discuss this study further, but before entering the subject, here is the reference for those who are interested in reading the full article :
Maass, A., D’Ettole, C., & Cadinu, M. (2008). Checkmate? The role of gender stereotypes in the ultimate intellectual sport. European Journal of Social Psychology, 38, 231-245.
Women chess players represent less than 5% of all tournament players worldwide. Added to that underrepresentation of women is their underperformance: they are only 1% of all grandmasters. It is easy to say that men are more interested in chess for one, and better at it for two. The aforementioned study tends to go in the other direction.
The goal of Maass et al. was to investigate the role of the widespread stereotype (men are better than women at chess) in the women’s underperformance. It seems that it’s the first time researchers investigate another venue than cognitive differences to explain the better performance of men in chess.
First, the authors lead a pilot study in order to verify that the stereotype is indeed widespread. They found that the participants of the pilot study did think that men were innately better at chess than women. They also found that the participants thought other players too had the idea that men are superior to their female colleagues.
In the study, Maass et al. explicitely tested the impact of the activation (mention) of the stereotype before a game. They also checked for the importance of cognitive differences in the results obtained (for instance, it is well established that men score better in mental imagery and mental rotation, so they wanted to check if these cognitive differences could explain more the difference of results than the mention of the stereotype would).
The experiment. The study was conducted via Internet. Fourty-two male participants and 42 female participants were paired according to their Elo rating for the games, i.e. each woman was paired to an equal-strength man. There was a maximum difference of 30 points between the man and woman’s ratings. All in all, this means each player was of the same strength. These pairs of players played 2 games against each other, but without knowing they were playing twice against the same opponent. They just thought it was two games against two different opponents, because the nicknames weren’t the same in both games (they were neutral-gender nicknames, so that guessing the sex of the opponent would be impossible).
There were two conditions in the experiment. In the control condition, participants were just playing two games with their paired opponent of the other sex (still without thinking it was the same opponent twice). They didn’t know whether the opponent was a male or a female, and the experimentators never mentioned anything about men being superior to women. In the experimental condition, the participants were told in the first game that they were playing against a man, whereas in the second game they were told they were playing against a woman (that order was reversed for half of the participants). Before the game, the participants in the experimental condition were told "that recent studies had shown that men earn clearly superior scores than women in chess games. The aim of this study is to provide further tests for these findings". That was the way to activate the stereotype for the participants in the experimental condition (as I said, the participants in the control condition weren’t told anything about that stereotype).
So, what were the results of the games?
First of all, women in the control condition played just like anyone else (they scored approximately 1.0/2.0). Women in the experimental condition also played as expected when they thought they were playing against another woman (1.0/2.0), but their performance dropped drastically when they thought they were playing against a man (they scored around 0.5/2.0) (see figure below, adapted from Maass et al., 2008).
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Moreover, the authors checked for the participants' intention of playing aggressively for the win before their game. In the control condition, there was no difference between men and women as to how much they planned on playing for the win (as opposed to playing to avoid making mistakes). There was no sex difference either when the women in the experimental condition were told that they were playing against another woman. But when the women in the experimental condition were told that they were playing against a man, they planned on playing much more defensively, and effectively ended up doing so. The participants’ results in their games was positively correlated with their intent to play aggressively, so this could partly explain the women’s underperformance in chess : due to the activation of the stereotype, they play overly defensively.
Also, results suggest that men are not cognitively at advantage over women, since there was no significant correlation between mental rotation or imagery capacity, and results in the games.
Moreover, despite the women knowing they had the same Elo rating as their opponent, they showed a lower chess-specific self-esteem, which too was positively correlated with the results in the games. This lower self-esteem is most likely at least partly due to the knowledge of the stereotype : this could also explain the underperformance of women in chess.
It is to note that women score higher on individual tests evaluating chessic abilities than they do in tournaments, whereas it is NOT the case for men (in their case, both scores match). It is very plausible to believe, given all this data, that women would score just as much as men in chess tournaments would it not be for the existence of the pervasive – and false – stereotype that leads people to believe (women included) that men are better than women at chess.
Moreover, the authors checked for the participants' intention of playing aggressively for the win before their game. In the control condition, there was no difference between men and women as to how much they planned on playing for the win (as opposed to playing to avoid making mistakes). There was no sex difference either when the women in the experimental condition were told that they were playing against another woman. But when the women in the experimental condition were told that they were playing against a man, they planned on playing much more defensively, and effectively ended up doing so. The participants’ results in their games was positively correlated with their intent to play aggressively, so this could partly explain the women’s underperformance in chess : due to the activation of the stereotype, they play overly defensively.
Also, results suggest that men are not cognitively at advantage over women, since there was no significant correlation between mental rotation or imagery capacity, and results in the games.
Moreover, despite the women knowing they had the same Elo rating as their opponent, they showed a lower chess-specific self-esteem, which too was positively correlated with the results in the games. This lower self-esteem is most likely at least partly due to the knowledge of the stereotype : this could also explain the underperformance of women in chess.
It is to note that women score higher on individual tests evaluating chessic abilities than they do in tournaments, whereas it is NOT the case for men (in their case, both scores match). It is very plausible to believe, given all this data, that women would score just as much as men in chess tournaments would it not be for the existence of the pervasive – and false – stereotype that leads people to believe (women included) that men are better than women at chess.
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