The San Antonio Spurs beat the Nets 96-87 in Brooklyn Friday. Last season’s rookie of the year Victor Wembanyama had a team-high 19 points and 6 blocks for the Spurs, then made a stir in the basketball and chess worlds by asking where he could find a game of chess.
Wembanyama was directed to Washington Square Park, a chess hangout made world-famous in the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer”, as the site where chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin earned his spurs, so to speak. (I’ve been there. Had a good time, but got in trouble because it diverted me from the place I really had to be.)
No gamescores were shared, so I can’t say whether Wembanyama plays chess well. We can be sure, though, that he got lots and lots of advice, and that 90% of it was bad.
The science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon said “90 percent of everything is crap”, including chess advice. I work with chess teachers every day — more than 90 percent of what I hear from them is terrible.
What puts me in the less than 10 percent of chess teachers that aren’t crap, I’d expect you to say.
I’ll tell you what I’d tell Victor Wembanyama. My credentials in this case are different from another chess teacher’s — why do I write about basketball in the first place? Because chess and basketball are so much alike, and to analogize them with each other gives me a different point of view from other sportswriters.
Around the turn of the century, after Diana Taurasi and UConn won one of their three NCAA championships, Taurasi told a TV person what Coach Auriemma tells the Huskies: Rebound, play defense, and take care of the basketball.
Each of those instructions can be analogized over the chessboard, so I did. I wrote “The University of Connecticut Women’s Basketball Team’s Guide to Winning Chess” for the California Chess Journal.
I usually spin those analogies for the understanding of chessplayers, but if I were talking to the young Spurs star, I’d lean in other direction.
A chess position is generally comprised of three elements: force, time, and space. In any position, the player must do two things:
1) Assess the threatening moves — the tactics — for each side. When there are tactics present, nothing else matters, because that must be addressed above all. (Some chessplayers don’t bother learning anything but tactics, and they’re most dangerous, though incomplete.)
2) When there are no (consequential) tactics about, then the player must evaluate the positional elements — time, force, space — determine how those are imbalanced between the players, and ask: What am I going to do about that?
Basketball players understand the nature of threats on the floor much better than chessplayers understand the nature of threats on the board. The unparalleled chess teacher Cecil Purdy said: One cannot play chess passably well until one can recognize all the threats present, and especially recognize the unreality of unreal threats.
Basketball players get that if an opposing player can’t shoot from beyond 15 feet, then let that opponent roam behind the arc, because it’s not a real threat. Chessplayers react to each of their opponents’ moves as those they are genuinely harmful, but this is incredibly inefficient.
The only thing that never changes about a game of chess and a game of basketball is that the sides alternate turns. I get a move, you get a move, I get the ball, you get the ball.
When the chessplayer can determine that the opponent’s “threat” isn’t real, then the player doesn’t have to do anything about it, and is free to play however he likes. Chessplayers are never so comfortable (and dangerous) as when they can play at will, so if you’ve made a move that enables them to do that, you’ve screwed up. It’s a turnover.
The initiative at the chessboard is the ability to make threats. Maintaining the initiative by generating successive threats is like pulling one offensive rebound after another to prolong the possession. The only way to get the initiative on the court is to get the effing ball — by, in order of preference, causing a turnover; finishing a defensive stop with a rebound; taking the ball out after their score.
When you have the ball, attack the basket. When they have the ball, attack the ball. When you’ve got the initiative at chess, don’t lose it — preferably by attacking their king, which usually entails opening lines for the rooks and queen. (When they’ve got the initiative at chess, be especially alert to their unreal threats, and don’t defend passively and meekly. The best defense at both games is counterattack.)
Basketball players also understand attacking play (and related tactics) better than chessplayers do. In the 19th century, one chessplayer attacked, and it was considered polite and gentlemanly to let him. Around the turn of the century, they figured they’d defend themselves first, then turn it around. In the 1950s, players said screw it, I want to attack them before they attack me, all the time (which is what basketball players have known all along).
The problem with inexpert chessplayers is that they think they have to be sneaky about things, because that’s important in high-level play. Weak players give their opponents way too much credit — chessplayers want to think that they’re good (but they’re not), and that their opponents are on the same good level (but they’re not).
Really, chessplayers should try to play like those insane Loyola Marymount teams of the ’80s, which were running games into 300 totals. Chessplayers should go with Coach Mike D’Antoni’s plan of “seven seconds or less”.
Get the ball and go. Chessplayers are afraid to do this for a couple of reasons. One, they’re scared because they think their opponents are good. Primarily, two, they don’t know how to execute.
Chess at the club and student level is not about being crafty. At that level, it’s about “Oops, I didn’t see that.” This is how all chess games between inexpert players are settled: “Oops, I didn’t see that.”
My old chess teacher was logical about this. He examined thousands of games between bad players, and told his students: Your job is say “oops, I didn’t see that” less often than your opponents do. So, screw the subtleties, and cause chaos. Generate positions on the board in which the side whose board vision is greater — and whose tactical ability is superior — prevails.
Proficient chessplayers take as many shots in an empty gym as great shooters do. In chess terms, it’s the review of thousands and thousands of diagrams in which tactics are present. The best shooters have taken more shots in practice; the best chessplayers have ingrained more tactical patterns.
Sometimes it’s not enough to play chess like a Paul Westhead team, and you have to work at getting a look at the basket. Then we’re back to talking about the positional elements time, force, space.
In that sentence, “time, force, space” are equally important, and they should be paid equal attention on the chessboard, but 90 percent of chess teachers are crap (because 90 percent of their chess teachers were crap, and 90 percent of theirs, and so on). Because chess teachers are mostly crap — it’s also a problem with society — almost all bad chessplayers overvalue force, and undervalue time and space.
In chess terms, force is the fighting units on the board, (in other words) the pieces, the material. Chess teachers are terrible because they stress the material value of the chessmen.
You know who’s winning a basketball game. You look at the scoreboard, where one team has more points than the other.
You must not judge a game of chess in the same fashion. The worst chess teachers frame the relative values of the pieces and pawns in terms of “points”. This is the WORST thing to teach a little kid, because it starts them down the road of thinking that capturing stuff is how to win chess games, that capturing a rook is “5 points” to the good.
The sharpest I bark during a chess class is when a kid counts the units off the board as “points”. THERE ARE NO POINTS AT THE CHESSBOARD. You do not win a chess game by collecting dead wood. Once it’s captured, it is meaningless. You win a chess game by reducing their mobility (yeah, capturing their stuff reduces their mobility, but that misses the point).
Basketball players understand the relationship between force, time, and space much better than chessplayers do. In basketball terms, running a break “with numbers” is one of the easiest methods to produce a field goal. Hitting the open man — with the range to shoot (space) and before the defense can close out (time) — is a favorable imbalance in force, time, and space.
A 2-on-1 break is an advantage in force. The open shooter in the corner is an advantage in force. That’s positional evaluation. Executing the break, or hitting that jumper, that’s tactics. (Tactics always supersedes positional considerations. Take the 75-foot heave at the buzzer while the shooter is surrounded by defenders. Force = disadvantage, 1-on-3 or 4 or 5. Space = disadvantage, because the shooter is 60 feet outside his comfortable range. Time = disadvantage, as the last desperate possession. Ball goes in, successful tactics.)
Sometimes it’s not enough to generate a treacherous position on the board, and outwit them tactically. In positions with no tactics present, the task is to evaluate the relative imbalances in 1) material, 2) pawn structure, 3) piece mobility, and 4) king safety. Then ask: What am I going to do about this. No matter which of the positional imbalances one opts to focus on, Purdy said the most important thing is to use inactive force.
Basketball teams do this so much better than chessplayers. Think of it this way: We recognize the chess endgame when there isn’t enough force on the board to directly attack the kings, which means the kings must emerge from hiding to be active, attacking pieces. With few pieces remaining, one inactive piece makes up a larger percentage of unused force.
Early in the game, one inactive unit won’t kill you, but it will late in the game. Basketball teams are always five pieces, and all five must be active, moving without the ball, getting open. Everyone in the arena can see it when there’s one of five basketball pieces not working. Chessplayers screw that up all the time, leaving entire halves of the board undeveloped.
Successfully attacking the basket can happen inside or outside. If one shooter is open outside, there’s a field goal attempt. A 2-on-1 break usually gets an FGA close to the basket. Chess is more difficult in this regard because there are no long-range jumpers; the attack on the king is typically a number of offensive players storming the enemy fortress, but there’s less room in there to operate. (A attack on the king is like a football team inside the 5-yard-line. From the 30 or 40, there’s enough space for the offense to stretch the field for forward passing, but near the goal line, the defenders can’t be stretched up and down, just right and left.)