Intro part V: Standards

Standards

What the heck are we supposed to be learning, anyway? Wouldn’t it be great if there were one master book with the title:

Everything You Need to Know (and be good at) to Get to 2200

If we could know objectively that it indeed contained all the requisite skill sets needed for Master level chess, what would it be worth to you? I know I’d pay $100, so long as it were hardback. Haha.

Silman did it (more or less) with his now famous endgame book. Which, by the way, I love, because I felt it made endgames accessible to me for the first time, in an incrementally-digestible manner.

We would just need similar titles for different areas of chess. Here are some sample (nonexistent) titles:

Openings

The Least You Need to Know about Openings to Get to 2000. 12 pages.

What More You Need to Know to Get to 2200+. 495 pages.

The Tactician’s Bible: The 2,231 Core Tactical Patterns That Every Master Knows and Can Solve Instantly Without Trying

A Positional Primer: Understanding Steinitz’ Elements and All Common Strategic Maneuvers Without Breaking a Sweat

And Silman’s book.

That should just about take care of it.

The reality, however, is more grim. We do not know exactly which, or how many, tactical patterns one needs to burn into their brain tissues, so we resort to randomly trudging through problems and sets and books and drills. We think we know all the positional concepts that are required, but then along comes Mr. Oudeweetering to remind us all how retarded we really are.

Thanks, Mr. Oudeweetering. I had thought I was ‘good to go’ with Silman’s interpretation of Steinitz’ 16 elements, but no, apparently there’s a whole crap ton of stuff I’ve never even heard of yet. Granted, Mr. O’s chess patterns are all predicated on Steinitzian principles, but still.  It goes to show how little we all know.

Why is this blog called Standards?

Glad you asked. I had forgotten myself during my ramblings.

In the world of Education, we have what are called standards. They are a roadmap, more or less, or what skills and sub-skills children need to learn in the various content areas (math, science, language arts, etc) before moving on to the next grade. These standards breakkkk down ambiguous ideas (learn “math”!) into chunkable sets of skills (learn multiplication, single-digit; learn multiplication, multiple digits; and so on). Of course they start at the Kindergarten level and become incrementally more difficult.

Sure someone, somebody, somewhere, has somehow put together a comprehensive list of these skills, yes? No?

No. To my knowledge, it hasn’t been done.

We do, however, have comprehensive programs of chess study available. Presumably, these comprehensive training programs would provide us with all the requisite knowledge.

We'll get into that in the next post.