Two-and-a-half move chess

Two-and-a-half move chess

Two-and-a-half move chess

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Every student hears tall tales of grandmasters who can look 10, 15 or 20 moves into the future. A GM annotating one of his games may claim he visualized the winning ending while he was still in the early middlegame. Or when he was in the late opening. Or when he was having breakfast that morning.

You should be skeptical about the way GMs embellish. But what is more important is knowing that you don't have to look far in your own games:

Most of the time you can find a good move - if not the best move - with a low level of calculation. How low? Two and a half moves into the future.

You already know that when you consider a candidate move you should try to foresee your opponent's best reply. This means seeing one full move into the future.

The 2nd and a half-move guideline means that in the majority of cases you can confirm that the candidate is good by seeing no more than another one and a half moves beyond that.

No one knows what the precise relationship is between the ability to look ahead and overall playing strength. But research on chess-playing computers gives us a rough idea. When the early program Belle could see four full moves into the future it was playing at master strength. So, it is reasonable that two and a half-moves is good enough to play at the level of a respectable amateur.

Calculating further than two and a half-moves becomes important only when the position is very tactical. It is the position, not the opponent, that determines how far you should try to see. Just because the person sitting opposite you is a calculating wizard doesn't mean you have to look far. Nor does it mean that he will profit from being able to look farther than you.

The Other half

If you don't really have to look far ahead, why is calculation so hard? The answer is that looking ahead is the easier half of a two- step process. The second and more important half is evaluation.

The player who can see five moves ahead - but misjudges the positions he has visualized - will lose over and over to a player who can only see one and a half moves ahead but evaluates correctly.

Of all the life lessons that chess teaches, perhaps the most valuable is that you need to be honest with yourself. You must be objective about a position even when it means overruling your hopes that it favors you.

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Andrew Soltis,

Studying Chess Made Easy