Championship preparation, modern style
By Jack Peters
March 21, 2010
Viswanathan Anand and Veselin Topalov will be out of the public eye for the next month, preparing for the April 23 start of their 12-game world championship match. I wonder what the master of preparation, Mikhail Botvinnik, would think of refinements in the training regimen he pioneered.
Botvinnik, world champion from 1948 to 1963, described a five-stage process: reviewing interesting recent games, studying everything played by his opponents, choosing an opening repertoire, testing it in secret training games, and taking a rest from chess “five days or so” before the start of the event. The computer has prompted changes.
Today’s grandmasters must sift through a much larger collection of games transmitted almost instantly over the Internet and stored in chess databases. And they must know much more before they can add a novelty to their opening repertoire.
Secret training games have gone out of fashion, replaced by analysis with a computer. I suspect that Botvinnik would lament this trend. He claimed that training games provided opportunities to work on one’s weaknesses, such as a tendency to fall into time pressure. He famously conquered his aversion to cigarette smoke by having his trainer blow smoke at him during a series of training games. Would any modern grandmaster display such masochistic determination?
Botvinnik also advocated publishing analysis so readers could make helpful critical comments. Sadly, few stars today annotate games regularly. Part of the explanation may be capitalism, a foreign concept to a Soviet like Botvinnik. When top players make six- and seven-figure incomes, writing a magazine article or a book for a relative pittance seems fruitless.
Source: http://www.latimes.com
Botvinnik rules.
I think we can still learn a lot from these lessons in the past, such as Botvinnik’s. It’s still all about hard work.