How were the Soviet players trained?

lol @ tal

+1

Does anyone actually know any facts about Soviet chess training beyond the generalities:

* Russia has a rich, popular chess culture.
* The Soviets had a well-subsidized system for locating and training chess talents, then fostering their tournament careers.
* Its modern founder was Botvinnik, a dedicated communist and prominent electrical engineer as well as a world chess champion.
* The aim was political: to publicize the superiority of the Soviet communist system.
* The Soviets dominated world chess from the forties onward.

I've heard 2 things, which may be true.

1: Play the ruy lopez! As soon as they started learning theory, they played the MAIN LINE ruy lopez. It's so positionally complicated, that it teaches excellent chess just by playing it.

2: They train the openings backwards! For example: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Bxc6 dxc6. In the west, we would start looking at the variations after 5. 0-0, finding out why it's the main line, and how to use it.

In the Russia, they started analysing this position:

Then they would put 1 set of minor pieces, and play the endgame. And slowly they would learn the middlegame, and at last, they would look up the theory.

chessmickey: The image of the Soviet Chess School may or may be exaggerated depending on where you start from.

My point, though, is that few of us in the West know much about the Soviet Chess School beyond the faces and careers of its masters and their occasional books and interviews. However, none of this tells us anything specific about Soviet chess training except that, unsurprisingly, it covered all technical aspects of chess.

This strikes me as odd. There is more public knowledge about Soviet espionage training than Soviet chess training.

Sure, I'd love to hear from any Soviet emigre grandmasters.

ViktorHNielsen: Good stuff. I'd run across the Ruy Lopez emphasis earlier.  I've also heard that talented young Soviet players have endgames drilled into them from the start instead of when they get around to it, as most Westerners do.

Given the propaganda value of chess, the Soviets spent large sums of money training their chess players, just as they did with their athletes. They were doing something special with all that chess talent. What exactly?

We don't even have any examples of their written training materials that I know of.

Here's a modern example, apparently, of Russian chess training developed by Irina Mikhailova, a grandmaster and trainer at the Petrosian Chess Club.

It shows a thorough, individualized approach to training a pupil from ELO 2200 to International Master. The only caveat is that it's also part of a promotion for selling Convekta chess software.

But I can believe that Soviet-era chess training was organized something like this, without computers of course.

@TetsuoShima

1.4 billion people live there.

I was talking with Dzindzichashvili once.. and he said all the Soviet school of chess really was in a nutshell,  was developing all your pieces before you attack.  Of course he may have been really dumbing it down to make a point about making sure you develop...  but good advice anyway.  

CapAnson: I'm sure that's one way of summarizing the Soviet School of Chess.

Here's an interview with Bronstein in 2003 in which he explained that Botvinnik's training system was based on opening preparation and modern chess had been reduced to a struggle to control the squares of the fourth and fifth ranks.

However, these claims are only intellectual conclusions about chess. They don't shed any light on the actual training methods of the Soviet School

BTW -- that's an excellent three-part interview with Bronstein, if somewhat dispiriting. Worth reading by any serious chess student.

Here is what I know about 'Russian training methods' from what I have gathered from various reads and professional chess coaches :

• lots of tactical exercises,
• studies are used as a training tool to improve both calculation and imagination
• endgame training comes before opening study in overall chess education,
• both tactics and endgames are trained in a structured (ie. thematic) way,
• study of Russian world champions classical games is highly recommended,
• opening study is expanded by playing out thematic early middlegame positions or endgame positions in quick games,
• practice of sports (endurance - swimming, jogging) is a complement to the technical chess training.

A lot of information is available in books (see Dvoretsky, Yusupov, Yermolinsky...), and a lot of training materials are available too - for example, many ChessOK's materials are recycled Russian training manuals (Bloch, Panchenko, Ivashenko, Golenishev...), and the famous Yusupov series is a pure product of the Russian chess school.

For more information, I would recommend you appoint a Russian chess coach (look here) and ask him to educate you further on this topic.

andy soltis seems to have written a mega size book on soviet chess with the same name.I like his writing style

MFCCoach: I looked it up on Amazon. It's $75 and almost 500 pages long! Impressive.

However, from the summary it appears more of a history of the Soviet program and the Soviet players, not a description of the techniques which is what I'm after.

hicetnunc: Good stuff! I noticed that ChessOK seemed hooked into the Eastern European chess world. A few weeks ago I downloaded their Botvinnik Peshka module (free) but the software was too buggy to bother with past a couple tests.

Your bullet list makes sense and correlates with some of what I've gleaned elsewhere. It's nice to know that I could hire an ex-Sov coach and ask some questions, but what I'm really looking for is a decent book or magazine article on the subject of Soviet training methods, not their successes or their conclusions about the best way to play.

The Russians made a clone of Bobby Fishcher ...... called bobby fisher 2.

This poor clone is tied up and forced to help the Russians train

and used to focus their anger of that humalition he put on them.

When they run of options they will make another clone.. .Bubbir Foshernov

to unless on the chess world as their next great Russian.

To read Kasparov's "My Great Predecessors," one gets the impression that in spite of the great rivalry, some of the top Soviet players had respect, yes, and a certain amount of affection for Fischer, and he for them.

Spassky of course was the prime example of this. After Fischer succumbed to kidney failure, Spassky telegraphed a friend: "My brother has died."

Respect!

He went into their country and beat them all night like they owed him something. So bad they woke up the Russian leader out of his sleep.

Respect..... No Revenge   James Brown says it best.

"I want some payback"

I was taught the Exchange RL exactly the same way so it might not be the soviet patent (I started playing chess when Poland was not depedent on USSR anymore)

44 comments so far.

Have we actual had a Russian comment on this subject?

Not so far. I hope this topic stays alive long enough for some of them to notice. I would like to hear from one.

I have played OTB against a Russian man who attended Soviet chess schools as a boy. He is one of the most disciplined, sportsmanlike classical players I have ever had the privilege to know.