The eye of the storm

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.