Chess
for Zebras
By GM Jonathan Rowson
Why Zebras? “If you are reading this book, you are very unlikely to be a Zebra,
if only because Zebras can’t read. Nor can they play chess. In the absence of
literate chess-playing zebras, you may therefore be wondering whether my publishers
misjudged their market when they accepted my proposal to write this book.”
So goes the first paragraph of Chess for Zebras, which was released towards the end of 2005. Thankfully
the English edition has done very well over the last 18 months, both critically
and commercially, so Gambit’s gamble paid off. Nonetheless, back cover blurbs
never give the whole story of what goes in to writing a book, so I am grateful
to have the chance to give some background for those who haven’t yet overcome
their fear of zebras, or who have just noticed the new German edition, Schach
fűr Zebras, and are wondering whether to buy it for their friends in
Sallmannshausen.
The title may remind you of the late Simon Webb’s Chess for Tigers, and many
have indeed seen my title as a kind of ironic twist on that popular classic.
They are not far wrong, for while Chess
for Tigers is a ‘feel-good’ book in title and content, Chess
for Zebras is more like a ‘feel-different’ book that is supposed to knock
you off balance slightly, and the content, though hopefully reader-friendly,
should make you think more deeply about the game, and the complexity of chess
improvement. Indeed the book’s title subtly exemplifies the main message, which
can be summed up in one line: “Improvement begins at the edge of your comfort
zone”. (Note that it is the edge for
a reason. I don’t want to wrench you away from all that is fine and familiar,
but rather to keep you on that edge, enjoying the sensation, neither bored nor
bewildered, but supported and challenged.)

The author of Chess for Zebras: GM Jonathan Rowson
My original motivation was actually to write a book about White’s alleged first
move advantage. I agreed with Adorjan’s basic ‘Black is OK!’ ideas (though,
I hasten to add, without the messianic zeal) and felt I could make a more sophisticated
case for the first move advantage being some sort of illusion, perpetuated by
linguistic conventions and a misreading of statistics. This was early in 2002,
it was cold outside, and there was no prospect of significant income in the
foreseeable future, so I just had to think of a suitable title for the endeavour
and I wouldn’t have to worry about how to pay the rent for a while.
A good friend suggested a cover with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator mode
saying: “I’ll be Black”, a slight modification of his immortal line, but I feared
this may increase racial tensions in California, so I needed something else.
It occurred to me that you couldn’t write a book about Black without making
extensive reference to White, so I felt something quintessentially Black and
White would be ideal. Chess for Badgers felt too much like Wind
in the Willows, but Chess for Zebras seemed to have the necessary allure,
and Gambit agreed, on the condition that it had a sensible subtitle.
What’s it about?
A few months later life took a new direction, and I went to study at Harvard
for a one year masters degree, on their ‘Mind, Brain and Education’ programme.
I learned a great deal about the neuroscience and psychology of learning, and
much of it resonated with my own understanding of the challenges of improving
at chess. I became particularly interested in the issue of players becoming
stuck at a certain age and level, and unable to budge despite their best efforts.
This is a curious phenomenon, because in most domains you become progressively
better with experience, but with chess we typically see rapid growth in youth,
followed by what might be called ‘cerebro-sclerosis’- a hardening of the categories.
We become stuck by our own ideas and habits, and all the new information we
take in is filtered through a limiting set of assumptions.
Over the course of time, I also found that I was playing better, which I attributed
to breaking down a lot of the preconceptions that held me back when I was younger.
Indeed by the time I started writing the book properly I was already close to
2600 (ridiculously close in fact) and British champion, so I felt I was on to
something worth sharing. The difficulty was that I now had about three books
inside me, but one outstanding contract, with a peculiar title, had to be upheld,
so I started looking for more information about zebras to see if I could find
a unifying theme.
In early 2005 I was lucky to find a book in a second-hand shop with the title:
“When you hear hoof beats, think of a zebra”. This is a Sufi saying to encourage
mindfulness of the dangers of natural assumptions (hoof beats = horses). The
relevance of this saying is captured by the sub-title: ‘Thinking Differently
about Black and White’. ‘Black and White’ refers not only to the first move
issue (part three of the book), but also conventional wisdom about chess improvement
(part one) and chess in general (part two).
How and Why was it written?
Most of the writing of this book happened in cafes in South-West London, Café
Nero and Starbucks in Barnes in particular, because I find I work best when
surrounded by benign-looking people who don’t want to talk to me. The photo
below gives some idea of my usual writing habitat, but some of the more serious
chess analysis took place at home.

Vaio and Starbucks – the working environment of a chess author
The problem with most chess books, as I see it, is that they could have been
written by anybody. The author frequently disappears in analysis and positional
platitudes, and when he or she does appear it is with a hackneyed joke, usually
followed by an exclamation mark, in case you missed it. Since the lifeblood
of chess is moves and variations, and most readers care primarily about improving
their results, the brute facts of the game inevitably clip the wings of even
the most adventurous author. Nonetheless, I have always felt that if you are
going to allow trees to be cut down in your name, you should make a contribution
that is as distinctive and personal as possible.
Central ideas in the book include: the difference between knowledge and skill
and why we should place more emphasis on improving our skill, the important
relationship between chess understanding and storytelling, how to cultivate
concentration, why chess seems so difficult, why we struggle to understand non-material
factors when evaluating positions, what stops us from defending better, and
whether there is any basis to the claim that White starts the game with some
advantage. These themes, and more, are illustrated with games from players of
a variety of strengths, and include lessons I have learned from my own games
with players like Aronian, Adams, Morozevich, Short and Miles, and conversations
with luminaries like Dr. Hübner, Dvoretsky and Yusupov.
The following excerpt comes from a chapter designed to show why
defending can be fun:
Gdanski – Arkell
European Clubs Cup, Neum 2000
The situation looks pretty grim for Black. He is a pawn down and White seems
to have good control of the position. Given two moves – say Kg2 and Nd4 – Black’s
position will become hopeless. However, at this very moment Black has a surprising
resource and it begins with one of the most extraordinary moves I have ever
seen.
I feel I should give the reader a few quiet moments to make sense of this move
before adding any thoughts of my own. 33...g5!! illustrates, I think, the core
reason why Kotov’s canonical method of calculation, in which we start our thinking
by looking for candidate moves, is flawed. 33...g5!! could never be an original
candidate move because it only begins to make sense after looking at the position
and finding that the more conventional approaches are not working, and then
gaining some insight into why they are not working. Indeed, although ingenious
and highly impressive, the move is actually quite logical once you start trying
to solve Black’s problems. You only have to examine the more obvious (though
still quite creative) attempt to free Black’s position 33...c5!? 34 Nxc5 Bxc5
35 Qxc5 Qd1+. Now you find that there is a check and you might also see the
idea of meeting 36 Kg2 with 36...Nf4+ followed by ...Qg4+ if White takes. Then
your heart sinks when you see that there is no perpetual due to 36 Kh2. But
then, while some would give up on the whole idea of ...c5, Keith thought to
himself: if only there were a way of checking the king on h2, and he managed
to reject the move 33...c5 but hold on to the idea. Black needs a check on the
h-file for the check on d1 to become a perpetual, and therefore has to get rid
of the pawn on h4. Hence 33...g5!!.
It’s hard to say what it takes to come up with a move like this. Even after
this explanation, you might still be left with the feeling that you could never
find the hidden idea. In this sense 33...g5!! is a good example of the relevance
of the hindsight/foresight distinction introduced in Chapter 1. Keith’s idea
of playing for perpetual check directly from the original position is a remarkable
feat of conjuring, and something that would not occur to the vast majority of
players during practical play. Yet such moves often spring from situations such
as these where your determination to defend as tenaciously as possible gives
you the glimmer of an idea, and then you just need to tweak it slightly, and
get a little cooperation from the opponent to make it work.
Apparently just after Keith played 33...g5, Gdanski, who was rated 2557 when
the game was played, looked bemused and just whipped the pawn off. Taking is
the best move, but he should have treated 33...g5 with a little more respect.
34...c5!
Now liquidation is a serious threat because most of the 4 vs 3 positions will
give Black excellent drawing chances. Even if they don’t look too pleasant for
Black, they are much more pleasant than the position before 33...g5, so White
has more reason than Black to be upset.
This was not the game continuation but I wanted to make the main idea prominent.
White didn’t fall into the trap quite so directly. He now saw Black’s devious
idea and deviated from this main line, but Black drew without problems in any
case: 35 Kg2 cxb4 36 axb4 Qa2! 37 Bc1 Bxb4 38 Qc8+ Kg7 39 Nd4 Bc3 40 Nxe6+ (after
40 Nf3, 40...Qa1! is the only move to keep the balance; 40...Qe2? 41 g6! and
40...Bb4? 41 g6! are both favourable for White) 40...fxe6 41 Qd7+ Kh8 42 Qe8+
Ó-Ó.
35 Bc3!? is probably best, exchanging the relatively ineffectual bishop. Then
White’s winning chances and Black’s drawing chances seem about equal.
35...Bxc5 36 Qxc5 Qd1+ 37 Kg2 Nf4+!
The hidden detail: Black forces a draw. Curiously, when I showed the original
position to a student, Gordon Rattray, he saw 33...g5 after a little prompting
but rejected it, because in the process of visualizing the resulting variations
he made a persistent miscalculation. He saw this far, but couldn’t see how to
deal with the fact that after ...Qg4-h5+, the white king will have the g3-square.
In fact, White will not have the g3-square, because Black’s queen is not limited
to light squares and can also give check on h4.
This is another good example of what happens when we confuse ideas with variations.
If you frame the idea of perpetual check in terms of ...Qd1-g4-h5+ you might
run into problems because your perceptual system might filter out moves like
...Qg4-h4+ as a ‘separate idea’, not associated with the perpetual. This is
partly a problem with the linear thinking. If we are not careful, one idea follows
another and our thoughts will be determined in advance, locked in motion by
the way we began our thinking process.
38 Kh2 Qh5+ 39 Kg1 Qd1+ 40 Kh2 Qh5+. Black draws by perpetual check.
A truly brilliant defensive conception from Arkell.
Who
am I?
I am a Grandmaster from Scotland, living in London and married to Siva from
South India. I am at ease with being thirty, but still haven’t figured out what
to do with my life and increasingly wonder if I ever will. I studied at Oxford
and Harvard and am currently a PhD student at Bristol University with an interest
in the concept of wisdom from the perspective of enactive
cognition, but I suspect I am too intellectually flirtatious to ever be
a serious academic. I write a weekly chess column for The Herald in Scotland, a regular review column for New in Chess
magazine, and occasionally try to write about something other than chess, with
moderate success. I do a fair amount of private tuition in London, mainly with
young players, but it was my experience of teaching adult players that inspired
the first section of Chess for Zebras.
Chess-wise, I consider myself a semi-professional, which is a way of encouraging
people to pay me for playing while excusing myself from the theoretical grind
that typifies more dedicated Grandmasters. I consistently tease myself with
the prospect of being 2600, but tend to drop a few points just in time for the
next rating list to keep the creative frustration alive.