James Schuyler - Your Opponent is Overrated

First published in 2016 by Gloucester Publishers Limited, Northburgh House,
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Copyright 2016 James Schuyler
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About the Author

James Schuyler is a FIDE Master. He was Nevada State Champion in 2007 and won the Virginia State Championship in both 2011 and 2012. He has been teaching chess for over 25 years.

Also by the Author:
The Dark Knight System

This book is dedicated to my wife Caroline. Her support has been essential to all my successes, but for this book she went above and beyond.

Contents

Introduction

The Problem
We all play about as well as we can manage, given the amount of effort we can spare for chess. We have our ratings and a certain average percentage of wins (plus draws divided by two) that we can expect depending on the level of our opposition. We read books to improve, and study openings, but after a certain point this doesnt seem to have any impact. Perhaps this is because our study is generally based on the premise that the only road to improving our results is to improve our accuracy. Some of us may need to think about chess in a much different way.

Your Opponent
We have a fallible opponent. Hes messing up every game. Even when he stumbles upon the right moves, its often for the wrong reasons. Id even go so far as to say hes overrated. And yet if we play our normal best game those errors may not appear frequently, and they may not be severe. Surely there is some way to expose his ignorance. But hes familiar with the common tricks and traps. Well need to be subtle. Cagey. Persistent. Overwhelming. So we will not merely go about our business we will at times go out of our way and actively induce errors in our opponents play. Right?

No Draw!
The originally intended title for this book was No Draw! As it turns out, avoiding draws and inducing errors generally amount to the same thing. There is no way to win otherwise drawn games without inducing errors, so it is really the same subject, and I believe I may use the phrases nearly interchangeably.

The benefits of avoiding draws are considerable, even if it does not improve a players results overall. It is a very common occurrence in tournaments that we need to win a particular game. Perhaps there is money on the line, or a tournament title, or a Master title that depends on temporarily achieving a certain rating. Naturally, we want to play as well as we can, but there is an additional consideration because a draw may be worthless, or nearly worthless. Should we play our normal best game, or can we do better by playing differently to avoid a draw? Obviously, it is pointless to avoid draws if all those draws turn into losses, but if some of those draws (lets say about half) can be turned into wins, we increase our chances of achieving our goals. That is what this book is about, though as we go on, we may realize that it is about other things as well. Allow me to elaborate on this, since it helps explain why it might be so important to play fewer draws.

Imagine two players, Mr. Draw and Ms. NoDraw. (See how progressive I am?) Mr. Draw makes the maximum percentage of draws. Therefore, if he plays a player of the same rating, the result is always a draw. If he plays a player in the next higher class, he will lose approximately half the time and draw half the time, while if he plays a player in the next lower class, he will win half the time and draw half the time. Whatever this players skill level, he will never win a tournament unless he is vastly superior to the rest of the field, and he will have a hard time winning prize money, because he will almost never have any exceptionally good results. (This is especially true for Swiss System tournaments, though it also holds true for round robin events.) For the same reasons, his extreme consistency will make it nearly impossible for him to earn the norms that are required for certain prestigious titles.