IS THERE MORE TO CHESS SUCCESS THAN MOVES? 

Mahmut Ugur Ozgu asks:

I’m a club player and I have 1952 ELO rating. I want to play better but I have been working in an insurance company for ten years! (I’m forty-years-old.) So, I won’t be able to give chess the time I would like to until retirement. I have been studying chess at nights and weekends, though.

I have a question: What are the chess masters doing before and during a chess tournament?

* Diet (before/after a match)

* Sleep

* Sports

* Preparing for an opponent

* Studying chess: Which subjects should be studied?

* Chess Psychology

Jeremy Silman replies:

Interesting question, but the answers tend to be individualistic – what’s right for one person would be completely wrong for another. Nevertheless, I’ll take a shot at each point you brought up.

* DIET (before/after a match): Grandmaster Walter Browne once told me that he would gladly buy any opponent a huge steak dinner before a game because the blood would rush from the eater’s brain to his stomach, leaving the poor guy unable to play up to his true strength.

I agree with this, and don’t think a large meal should ever be eaten before a game is played. However, you do need to keep your energy up and your blood sugar level, but the best way to do this is dependent on each person’s individual physiology. Fischer would sip on apple juice throughout a game, Gligoric would eat chocolate (This sounds like fun, but it would leave me in a sugar coma!), and I sucked on a ginseng root.

While what you eat before and during a game is of great importance, what you eat afterwards doesn’t really matter unless you have a game the next day. Personally, after an event finished I would eat two whole chickens, guzzle a few bottles of wine, and wash it all down with several whole cheesecakes. Then I would pass out and awaken the next day without having any memory at all of how I did in the tournament (finding money in my bank account would usually be an indication of a successful tournament, while discovering that my phone had been disconnected would suggest a poor result).

* SLEEP: This is an easy one! You are not a real chessplayer unless you go to bed no earlier than 3AM, and you don’t rise until Noon. My good friend, International Master John Donaldson, would easily get his grandmaster title if he would only stop rising at 8AM and instead rise at Noon, 1:00, or even 2:00.

Sleep deprivation is no problem for a chessplayer (thus looking at chess all night with friends is always a fun and useful thing to do) since, if the time control is 40/2, you can take a quick nap right at the board. I’ve done this on many occasions, though it did get “problematic” once when I woke, thought I was at home, stripped, and headed for the shower.

If you simply can’t stay awake for a game, another recourse is to toss down ten or twenty cups of coffee. A bonus is that your caffeinated shaking and your delusional gibbering will often annoy your opponent, leading to a blunder and a quick victory for you.

* SPORTS: Playing sports between tournaments is a great idea since it helps most lethargic chess pros (with their nice pear shaped bodies) get a bit of exercise. I particularly recommend boxing – you will be shocked to discover how several hundred blows to the head deepens your insight into previously misunderstood chess mysteries.

Another plus for boxing (as a chessplayer’s second sport) is the fact that chess has very few female players, and the male players are perpetually horny. The dreaded “low blow” in boxing will quickly make the question of sexual desire a non-issue.

* PREPARING FOR AN OPPONENT: If you’re not at the level where you can come up with a huge theoretical novelty in a common opponent’s favorite line and then patiently wait for several years to spring it on the poor sap, then preparation for an individual should be vetoed in favor of simply making yourself as strong a player as you can be. In other words, study, improve yourself, and the wins will eventually come against everyone.

* STUDYING CHESS (Which subjects should be studied?): Chess is a game of balance, and it’s important that you garner skills in every phase. Tactics are key, yet if you have no positional skills you’ll go belly up like a Christmas turkey on Quaaludes when facing an opponent with strategic smarts. The same can be said for a skilled positional player with the tactical vision of a mole. He’ll repeatedly build up crushing advantages and then fall victim to every cheap trap that’s tossed his way.

And don’t forget about slowly but surely putting together a solid opening repertoire, and mastering basic endgames. Balance is indeed the key to chess success, and if some ignorant fool tells you differently, smile, thank him for his penetrating insight, and prepare to make him your personal chess bitch for the rest of your association.

You can find recommendations about the creation of an opening repertoire in the site’s LETTERS ARCHIVE. Also, one of the best ways to study chess in all its phases is going over high quality annotated games. Click to see my article on STUDY OF MASTER GAMES.

* CHESS PSYCHOLOGY: I think the only area of psychology you should worry about is your own. If you freak out at the beginning of a game, you will need to look deep into your own subconscious, or seek out a doctor who can prescribe drugs and/or electric shock therapy.

If you fear losing (a very common ailment), it will affect your game on many levels. Here I can give a concrete recommendation: learn to love defeat! That’s right, find joy in going down in flames and soon you’ll feel an almost erotic rush every time you turn over your King.

Seriously, a fear of losing interferes in the development of so many players that I tell my students the following: never accept a draw unless there is nothing left to play for. If you have an interesting but equal endgame, play on! If you reach a boring middlegame and a higher rated player offers you a draw, laugh sadistically and play on! Making this “play forever for a win” mentality a part of your every day chess makeup offers the following plusses:

1) It quickly stops you from being nervous since you know it’s do or die. Once you accept that it’s all or nothing, you can just let loose and play without fear since you know that you will lose games, but you’ll also win far more than ever before.

2) As a student of the game, this “wring everything out of every position” mindset will make you a far stronger player. The games you lose will give you many lessons that would have been missed with a drawn result, and wins will taste all the sweeter due to your insistence on grinding down the opposition.

3) It’s a psychological bombshell to your opponents since you’ll quickly become known as someone that will torture them (not caring if the opponent is lower or higher rated) forever – as a man without fear!