Book review: Think Like a Super-GM

Michael Adams and Philip Hurtado have written a great book, based on a simple but interesting concept. It is connected to an experiment made by Adrian de Groot, who gave a position to Keres, Alekhine and Euwe, asking them to describe their thought processes. Even though all three found the right move, maybe Keres ”won” by being faster and not giving any dubious sidelines in the explanations.

https://saychess.substack.com/p/thought-and-choice-in-chess-how-do

The main question of Think like a Super-GM concerns how players of different strength evaluate different positions. Which moves do they consider and which ones do they end up with as their suggestion? Is white or black better, and why?

GMs like Adams, Julio Granda Zuniga and Eduardo Iturrizaga participate together with IM Harriet Hunt and many other players of varying strength, down to some players even I would beat.

Hurtado is 32 years old and presented as rated 1924, and many of the positions come from games he has played. This can at first feel a little strange, but the main thing isn’t that it should be about positions from top player games, there are some of those as well. Adams himself and Carlsen have some positions, but once one starts reading it soon becomes less relevant who played the actual game.

To me the training examples were rather difficult. Partly because I’m so used to the puzzle style approach when there is a diagram and one should do something. It is easy to get stuck in tactical thinking and forget that the best move can be something silent that doesn’t do much, apart from keeping the position equal. Some of the moves you might well play in an actual game, but it takes a while before you consider them if it feels like some sort of puzzle.

Giving one example from a Carlsen blitz game, where he spent approximately 15 seconds as white before finding his next move:

On some rare occasions even the GMs missed the best move or plan, but in general their depth of thinking is very impressive. One can’t help getting even more respect than before for players like Adams and Granda, and their reasoning, and still they were both beaten by Iturrizaga result wise. Adams is also as always very sympathetic.

The only complaints would be that there are too many ”weak” participants, most of them are below 2000 and quite a few below 1500. It is more enlightening with discussions involving Adams and Granda than reading some 1500 player stumbling around with as little clue as yourself. The final part of the book with some sort of eyetracking heat map experiment feels a bit unnecessary. And then maybe I would after all have preferred less of Hurtado’s own games and some more from top players. But the book gets a solid 4/5. 

puzzle 33 had no scoring, they erronously included the scoring for puzzle 34 as puzzle 33, and in doind so i so the soluton for puzzle 34 even before i attempted it, so embarrasing

I just recently bought the book.

The puzzles are a lot more subtle than, say, the chess.com Daily Puzzle: less obvious moves/ideas and more tradeoffs to make. Really forces one to concentrate and calculate alternatives.

They also reveal my weakness of being too optimistic about a particular attacking line, which is information I can use to practical results in a real game.