Holiday chess books: what did I learn

Away on holiday for 10 days and as usual I took a couple chess books and a set. The two books I chose were John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book and the Second Piatigorsky Cup. The Piatigorsky book was an old second hand copy from an excellent bookshop in Norwich. It features annotations by the competing grandmasters which is what I liked about it. It's all very well playing though games but the tricky bit is knowing why they did what they did.

The plan had been to do the puzzles while chilling on the beach (as it turned out I read Saul Bellow's Herzog instead) and to play though a few of the games in the evening while getting slowly hammered on duty free Bushmills Malt Whiskey.

As it turned out the only use the board got was to play a couple games with Russ, one of the people who we were staying with. I mentioned chess and he said he'd like to play. A quick brush up of the rules and we were off. He was pretty good and played a thoughtful game. I won both games but I suspect if Russ had played in matches over the last two years he'd probably be better than me. As we played we'd each give our thoughts every few moves on what was happening.

There were several interesting things that came out of the game and the ongoing analysis.

Russ was suspicious of early castling which I advocated when we were going over the first game as he didn't like the idea of putting his king in the corner to be attacked so early on. There are times when it makes sense to wait for the other player to reveal some of their intentions it made me realise the importance of tempo and threats. "You might know where my king is but I'll get my attack in first so it won't matter" might be a useful summary.

Also most of the people I play in matches are better than me so generally I think they're seeing more of what's going on than me. Also their feel for the positions is more refined. By that I don't mean they're calculating more moves or variations but that their understanding of the position, based on experience allied with an affinity for the game, is more advanced than mine.

This expresses itself in the fact that they 1. play better moves than me and 2. they do it consistently. The third thing is that they probably play to a consistent plan which I've constantly failed to do. It's called prevarication.

In this instance the tables were turned. It's nice to play but it's also nice to win occasionally.