MARK RUBERY CHESS
The German grandmaster and endgame authority, Karsten Muller, has published a book with Luis Engel called ‘The Human Factor in Chess’ There he defines player types into four categories: Activists, Theoreticians, Reflectors and Pragmatists.
“The activists among the sixteen World Champions are: Alekhine, Tal, Kasparov and Anand.
The strengths of the active players: They rate initiative and attacking chances relatively high and do not care too much about material. They often have a good feeling for the initiative and for dynamics and they are regularly willing to accept static weaknesses for dynamic play. One of their strengths is the ability to calculate concrete variations based on intuition.
Their weaknesses: They sometimes make committal pawn moves that look good at the moment, but in the long run do far more harm than good. They tend to overestimate their attacking possibilities and underestimate their opponent’s attacking possibilities. They are worse in defence than in attack and usually always have the possibility of winning the game in mind. In the rarer type of “hyperactive player” - to which Tal and Nezhmetdinov belong - these characteristics are even more pronounced.”
Here is a celebrated chess composition from the inimitable Richard Reti..
The authors of ‘Endgame Magic’, Beasley and Whitworth, wax lyrical about the above study…
‘The play is only five moves long, yet what a lot has been packed into this this brief duel! If White starts with the most obvious attack Black can avoid defeat by setting up a position of stalemate. So White tries different attack only for Black to set up another stalemate. White destroys this second stalemate with a sacrifice , but Black declines the offer, promotes a pawn instead and seems to have achieved at least a draw. And then the climax, a beautifully quiet move by White, not a capture, not even a sacrifice, but it leaves White’s miniscule army threatening mate, and Black’s queen on a wide open board, is powerless to do anything about it’
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. – G. K. Chesterton
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