PART 1 • Trick yourself into playing more chess
Establishing a rivalry with a particularly tough to beat personality, setting,
or level in a chess program is a great way to make yourself want to
play and study more chess. It's a “virtual” rivalry, but without the snide
comments and bad feelings you might be subjected to if you were playing
against a bunch of jerks (the kind I had to play back in the day). Best of
all, if you have a hard time beating an imaginary guy named “Toby” from
a chess program, nobody knows except you and “Toby”, and I greatly
doubt old Toby much cares either way.
SET UP A TOURNAMENT AND PLAY!
One of my favorite “tricks” when using chess programs with rated
personalities was to play in “fake” tournaments. A popular tournament
format is called a “quad”, in which all of the players a re ranked in order
of their ratings, then divided into groups of four players. In theory, each
player in a four player group should be fairly close to the others in rating;
each group has a round-robin “mini tournament” amongst themselves,
in which each player in the group plays each of the other three players
once (and, if you do the math, each player will thus play three games,
resulting in the combined number of games for the event being twelve).
Note that this approach only works well if your chess program lets its
personalities play against each other (some don't). The Chessmaster
series did allow the user to set up games between personalities, so that
program was frequently my choice. I'd scroll through the list of characters
and pick out three of them: two who were a bit more highly rated than my
real life rating and one whose rating was a bit lower. I'd then randomly
pair the first round by writing down the other three players' names and
picking one out of a hat, then flipping a coin or rolling a die for choice of
color in my game. I'd play my game against the first personality, save the
game afterward for later review, then let the other two personalities play
out their game. I'd repeat the process for three rounds, trying my best to
alternate players' colors from round to round.
If I did well in the tournament, I'd drop the low rated player in the next
“virtual” event I ran. I'd keep the other two players the next time and add
the next higher rated player from the program's full list to replace the
character I'd dropped. But if I did poorly in the event, I'd drop the highest
rated player the next time and instead play against the other two players
plus the next lowest rated player from the list.
80
chessking.com