SECRETS OF CHESS INTUITION by Alexander Beliavsky and Adrian Mikhalchisin touches upon a subject that is quite controversial amongst top players. I remember listening to Arthur Bisguier analyzing a game and hearing him remark that he always played the first move that came to mind. That, when he was younger, he often would come up with a move instantly, then spend ten or fifteen minutes trying to analyze more deeply into the position only to end up playing the first move he’d thought of. As he got older he said he learned to trust his intuition more, but exactly what chess intuition is, is not so clear, as the authors explain in their introduction.

The difficulties involved in defining exactly what chess intuition is are perhaps best explained by the following exchange between one of the wise foxes of modern chess and the late trainer of Anatoly Karpov. In the opinion of the Dutch Grandmaster Genna Sosonko: “Behind the word ‘intuition’ lies our subconscious experience or knowledge of games and ideas, either our own or those of others. When I showed my games to the great Semion Furman, he asked, ‘Where did you get that idea from?’ to which I replied, ‘I thought it up myself.’ Semion then said, ‘No, you must have seen this before.’”

Furman’s observation is very much to the point. How much of our play is truly original, and what percentage is based on previous examples that we have studied. The problem, of course, is that often we don’t consciously remember the examples that have been burned into our chess hard drive.

This point is made by one of Poland’s first Grandmasters. “Polish Grandmaster Wlodzimierz Schmidt described intuition as subconscious knowledge. Again, one could spend hours deliberating how to interpret this, but the fact of the matter is, that understanding in some people develops much more quickly than in others.”

The topic of subconscious knowledge could be tied in with subconscious calculation. How many times have we seen a game played by an intuitive player in which afterward all the variations hold up to scrutiny? The answer, according to GM Alex Yermolinsky, which is not directly covered in this book, is subconscious calculation.

If this sounds somewhat metaphysical, the fact that some players can take one idea and apply it to another ten analogous positions seemingly instantly, while others take minutes, or even hours, to make the connection, is quite well known. I know from personal experience how Yasser Seirawan often makes connections between two seemingly dissimilar positions, almost instantaneously.

The challenge for SECRETS OF CHESS INTUITION is how to convey this skill to the reader. The two authors have divided the material into nineteen chapters including The Intuition of Mikhail Tal, Which Rook?, Intuition and Risk, and Intuition and the Opening. At the end of the book, there is a chapter entitled Test Your Intuition in which the student is given 22 positions to solve.

Beliavsky and Mikhalchisin deserve credit for writing a pioneering work on a very difficult subject. I don’t expect this book to be the last word on chess intuition or its closely related cousin, chess pattern recognition, but it’s a good first start. Players from 2000 on up to Grandmaster should find this interesting reading (for Jeremy Silman’s review on this same book, click HERE).

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