Ron Gross snatched a draw from the jaws of victory.
In 1984, Ron sat down with the great Bobby Fischer for a string of 40 or 50 speed games.
Fred Waitzkin relays Ron's words in Searching for Bobby Fischer:
One day Bobby won seventeen in a row, and then I drew a game in which he allowed a perpetual check… I was killing him on the queenside. I had a check over there, and he allowed it, and I couldn't figure out why.
Afterwards, he said, 'Why didn't you win the piece? You had a won game.'
I had been so overjoyed to get a draw that I hadn't looked for the win.
Sadly, this story, like many of Ron's claims regarding his friendship with Bobby, were likely fabricated. This probably didn't happen.
But, for the purposes of this article, let's pretend it did. Because that experience is so familiar to all of us, and it's a good story.
As my grandfather-in-law used to say, "never let the truth get in the way of a good story."
The story illustrates a universal experience of Chess.
There's a disconnect between the options in the position and the options our brains give us about the position. They are not the same.
It's not really that Ron missed he had a win, it's that his brain never even considered the possibility of a win.
There's an important distinction there.
When we sense a tactic but can't find the one move that makes it work, that's us missing something.
But when the killer tactic doesn't occur to us because it doesn't fit with the plan we're executing, that's a different issue.
In that case, we'll never find the tactic. As far as our brain is concerned, it's invisible.
If someone gave us the position fresh, we'd find the tactic in a heartbeat. If it was a puzzle, we'd nail it.
But in this situation, we miss it.
This is not a weakness of our intelligence or a comment on our wider Chess ability. It's a reflection of how our Intuition and Reason interact.
One of the most important roles our Intuition plays is to identify things that could help us toward our goals.
Here's an exercise to illustrate what I mean.
Take a second to look around the room you're in and count how many red things you can see.
Really do it. You'll get much more benefit if you do.
Done? Ok, I'll bet that was really easy.
All the red in the room jumped out at you. You probably even found some colors that were kinda sorta red, and called them red anyway just to add to your tally.
Now, without looking around the room again, list anything you just saw that was blue.
Way harder, right?
You gave your intuition a goal and it only noticed the things that aligned with that goal. It noticed the heck out of the red things, but none of the blue registered.
Your intuition acted like a filter, giving you only the things it thinks you need based on what you were trying to do.
This happens all the time during a game of Chess. This is what happened during Ron's story.
Our brains automatically notice the things that align with the goals we have in the position. For Ron, he noticed he could get a draw against Fischer. He was elated at the possibility, so that unconsciously became his goal.
And that goal became the boundary for his Intuition.
The moves that could help him draw jumped out at him. The move that would have given him the win passed him by.
He wasn't looking for the opportunity to win a bishop, so he didn't see it when it appeared.
When I asked you to notice the red, I activated the goal-setting power of your deeper thinking Reason. Your brain used a tiny bit of self-control to mobilize your Intuition. And your Intuition responded.
Reason told Intuition what it's trying to achieve. Intuition responded by noticing things that could be related to that goal.
It'd be wonderful if it always happened that way around. But often, it's our Intuition that decides our goals in the first place.
Take this example:
- Your opponent plays a move that threatens your queen.
- Your Intuition automatically and rapidly assesses the position and shouts at you to save your queen.
- Your Reason probably accepts this assessment as your current goal without much thought. To resist the assessment would take effort and energy, and it seems reasonable.
- Your Intuition and Reason work together to find a way to save your queen. You find one.
- You play that move. Your queen is safe.
All of that sounds fine. You didn't lose your queen!
The problem is that you had mate-in-1 if you'd just looked at what your rook could do instead.
You were stuck on the queen. The rook move, like the blue in the room, didn't even register. It was outside of the goal your mind set for the position.
Most of the process happened outside of your conscious control. You experienced it like this:
- "My queen is attacked."
- "Where can I put my queen?"
- "Oh nice, if I put it there my queen is safe and also attacking their pawn."
- Play the queen move.
The boundaries of your thinking were created automatically and you didn't even notice.
While thinking, "I can win their pawn", your brain ignored a chance to win a knight instead.
While thinking, "I can win their queen", you blunder checkmate.
While thinking, "Takes, takes, takes", your brain doesn't consider your opponent might not recapture.
There's a flow to these thoughts, a momentum that's hard to interrupt. Like knocking over dominoes.
Our Intuition suggests a goal. Our Reason likely accepts that goal without too much thought. Then that goal defines the boundaries of what we notice and consider.
While our working memory is the main resource we need to manage in Chess, Intuition is the main force we need to wrestle with.
If we get the balance between Intuition and Reason right, we play our best. Mess it up, and we're doomed to all sorts of inexplicable errors and misses.
We have three levers we can pull to help bring things between our Intuition and Reason a little more into balance.
The first is to make our Intuition's suggestions better in the first place.
The second is to increase our ability to parse and resist Intuition's suggestions.
The third is to build habits that help us put Reason in charge when we need it.
For the last 3 parts of this series, I'll show you some practical ways to pull each lever. To bring that balance between Intuition and Reason into a better location for your Chess.
You know how Intuition works now. It's time to get into what we can do about it.
Here's to the journey,
Aiden
