June 2, 2006

• I don't see it ... Do you see it now?

  This post was inspired by degeneral's comment to my first chess problem.  This is from a column that Bruce Pandolfini wrote for the website chesscafe.com.  Having come across it just now, I can't resist posting it.
  

  Question
  In the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, there is a scene in which
  you (portrayed by Ben Kingsley) sweep the pieces off the board in order to
  get Josh Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc) to analyze a position in his head. Did
  this really happen? Also, did you always place such an emphasis on
  analyzing without moving the pieces? Sy Hartman (New York)

  Answer
  The particular scene you’ve asked about never took place. Over the years,
  I’ve performed many antics to get the attention of my students, but before
  the film I never scattered all the chess pieces with abandon, nor did I
  ever do anything like that with Josh Waitzkin.

  This dramatic device was the
  invention of gifted screenwriter and director Steve Zaillian. He thought
  it up, and I think it works very well in the movie. So well, in fact, that
  it inspired me to add this artifice to my arsenal of teaching tricks after
  the film’s release –another illustration of real life imitating art. But
  it didn’t go anywhere.

  With regard to making
  students analyze in their heads, I see nothing eccentric about this. It’s
  the hallmark of the strong player, so why shouldn’t I require my students
  to practice doing this as often as possible? You’ll find that most chess
  teachers also encourage their students to analyze without moving the
  pieces, if merely to cut down on touch-move blunders. Students naturally
  resist analyzing in their heads at first, but regular effort on the
  teacher’s part, as well as a steady diet of winning because of it, can
  usually lessen the resistance to it over time.

  While I have always stressed
  analyzing without moving the pieces, there’s a little more to it. When I
  first started teaching I found myself getting sick fairly often. I
  realized that one of the reasons for this was the mutual touching of chess
  pieces between me and the students. These objects, whether Staunton design
  or not, can be loaded with germs.

  One wintry day, I went to a
  student’s house to give a lesson and found him to be terribly sick with a
  common cold. I wondered why the parent hadn’t called me to cancel the
  lesson, when he explained it all away, saying that the coughing and
  sneezing were nothing to worry about and that I shouldn’t be so paranoid.
  He even offered some tissues.

  That’s when I decided to
  introduce a new kind of lesson. Instead of sitting together with my
  student at the board, I had him take up residence on the couch, while I
  found my niche on a comfortable chair, twenty feet away. For the entire
  hour we talked chess without a set but with a twenty-foot buffer zone. It
  was a hard lesson, and an expedient one, though by its termination I felt
  something had clicked. What’s more, so did the student, who came away with
  a true sense of accomplishment. The father got the left over tissues.

  Thereafter, I had students
  analyze in their heads almost all the time, even when they weren’t sick
  and there were no comfortable chairs. Eventually I figured out how to make
  much of this head stuff work, and I really think my students were the
  primary beneficiaries, which is nothing to sneeze at.

  ---

  Copyright 1999
  Bruce Pandolfini. All Rights Reserved.

  • 10:10 pm
  • 3 Comments