April 1978, Chess Life and Review:
p.210 The Middlegame...
There are so many moves to choose from... how can one orient oneself in this mass of possibilities?...
there are too many variations to calculate. The building blocks of a master's thoughts are more abstract ideas...
the key is first to form some kind of plan; then when you look at specific moves, you find that only a few alternatives
fit the plan, so you can ignore the rest... it is possible to form a bad plan... all players agree on one thing: even a bad
plan is better than no plan at all.
July 1978, Chess Life and Review:
p.370 The Middlegame
In the last ABCs column on the middlegame (April 1978) I talked about planning: how to form
a strategic plan, and how to use it to restrict your attention to a few relevant moves.
In the back of my mind I could hear the reader saying: "This is all very well, but the main reason
I lose games is not that I do not form plans, but rather that I put pieces en prise; whenever the game gets complicated I
cannot see three or even two moves ahead, and I make some crass blunder."
This is a good point: in practice the ability to calculate variations, to see a few moves ahead,
seems by far the most important attribute of the good chessplayer. Yet it is my contention that the two, abstract planning
and concrete calculation, are really closely tied together; that in one as in the other the most important thing is
the ability to focus one's attention on the few relevant moves, and dispose of the rest quickly and confidently.
October 1978, Chess Life and Review:
p.561 how much is your opponent really threatening? It is hard to give a
dispassionate answer to this question when his whole army is coming at you, but it is essential that you form an estimate
of the strength of his attack... try to get an objective measure of the strength of his attack. This will
be very, very hard at first; but the effort will make you find better moves
A curiosity...
October 1978, Chess Life and Review, Letters
Richard L. Gardner
Silver Spring, Maryland
Byte the Bullet
I am in receipt of a communication from Mr. Tim Redmond, a candidate for national office [within the
USCF]. Along with his rather perceptive grasp of the issues, he describes a computer which has been recommended for purchase
by the USCF [apparently, intended to run the business part of the USCF]
Most of the cabalistic terminology used to describe the capabilities of this omnipotent
machine are unintelligible to me... but one phrase leaps from the page to grasp my attention: 96 megabyte.
Does this mean that the computer has a capability of 96 millions bytes? If so, this works
out to about 2,000 bytes for every man, woman, and child in the USCF. Do we really need that many bytes?
[JLJ - At this period of time (October 1978) the USCF was going through a financial crisis and was considering
ways to reduce costs, including the $6 per chess diagram that the typesetters were charging]
