Thanks for the explanation. Your explanation accords with what I’ve heard from my coach and what I’ve read. What surprised me in your original comment was this sentence in particular:
The first goal was to memorize a massive amount of opening theory and what is known as ‘book’ knowledge.
That sounded to me like much more than “studying the Ruy Lopez and Queen’s Gambit to illustrate basic ideas about central control”. It sounded more like “try to memorize every line of every variation of the Ruy Lopez that is in MCO”.
Yes, I see your point. It was strongly worded, I think I was just typing quickly and over-emphasized that. In my mind, I was lumping a lot of things together as ‘book theory’ but it is good to point out that for developing players, it’s not good to devote too much time to memorizing anything, whether it’s openings or solutions to chess puzzles.
What I mean about “intuitive play” being stifled early on is that one of the first things I was taught was that playing moves that “look good” or “seem right” is not the right way to learn. Very few people can be successful playing with this sort of intuition. Ironically, though, this is why many chess players list Mikhail Tal as their favorite world champion.. he frequently played by intuition and would specifically choose technically unsound positions just because they had much more complication, which just personally interested him more.
Thanks for the explanation. Your explanation accords with what I’ve heard from my coach and what I’ve read. What surprised me in your original comment was this sentence in particular:
That sounded to me like much more than “studying the Ruy Lopez and Queen’s Gambit to illustrate basic ideas about central control”. It sounded more like “try to memorize every line of every variation of the Ruy Lopez that is in MCO”.
Yes, I see your point. It was strongly worded, I think I was just typing quickly and over-emphasized that. In my mind, I was lumping a lot of things together as ‘book theory’ but it is good to point out that for developing players, it’s not good to devote too much time to memorizing anything, whether it’s openings or solutions to chess puzzles.
What I mean about “intuitive play” being stifled early on is that one of the first things I was taught was that playing moves that “look good” or “seem right” is not the right way to learn. Very few people can be successful playing with this sort of intuition. Ironically, though, this is why many chess players list Mikhail Tal as their favorite world champion.. he frequently played by intuition and would specifically choose technically unsound positions just because they had much more complication, which just personally interested him more.