As a chess player, I was often reminded of the structure of
a storm – Its outer blowing with an unforgiving speed together with thunder and
lighting, but then surprising, tranquility can actually be found in the centre
of the storm which is calm, peaceful, in control. I always thought to myself,
shouldn’t that be a perfect symbol for a chess player?
In modern day time, we are given tons of tasks at the same
time – Reading webpages on mobile phone, studying exam materials, listening to
music, planning your schedule. We pretty much are not working on one thing at a
time, always multitasking. I ain’t arguing that we are not able to fulfill
different roles, but what we should do, is to accomplish one role at a time.
So it explains the search of psychologist: I felt that with
the abundance of software and information these days, perhaps what we, on
comparative terms, have weaknesses in should be the psychological aspects. We
expect ourselves to function like a computer, maybe that’s the problem.
The following game shows Alberto-Lai:
Here Lai plays the aggressive Nxg4, and after hxg4 played
e3. I spent a great time studying the position, and came up with something very
nonsense Bxb7 Kxb7 Rf7+ Kb8 Ne2 with idea to cover all the squares. But the
computer does it more simply with Qc3+ Kb8 Rf7, and there is no way of
preventing the mate.
Instead Alberto chose the easy and floppy Bh3, after Qd5
Qxe3 Qh1+ Kf2 Rf8+ Ke2?? (Correct is Ke1) White loses later on in a more or
less equal endgame.
Given to any 1600-1800 players as an exercise and I don’t
think they would be pressed hard to solve it, but then such magnitude of
blunder by a 2100 is still somewhat surprising. I would say that perhaps
psychology of competition has more to do here.
