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..