The Chess Revolution by Peter Doggers

Author:Peter Doggers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Puzzlewright

A New Style of Playing Chess

Apart from reaping the benefits from analyzing and preparing with them, top chess players have also been influenced in their playing style by neural-network chess computers. As noted before, AlphaZero’s style was quite attractive, and its open-source offspring Lc0 and the new Stockfish have inherited similar traits. They taught human players lessons unknown in the 1,500 years that the game had existed, and modern-day grandmasters are using those lessons in their tournament play. A clear case is Magnus Carlsen himself.

In January 2019, the Norwegian star—still the classical world champion then—got hold of the book Game Changer. Few chess players have read as many chess books as Carlsen, and few chess books have directly impacted Carlsen’s play more than this book. The authors, Sadler and Natasha Regan, investigated more than 2,000 previously unpublished AlphaZero games and revealed its revolutionary thinking process. They presented stunning discoveries in areas like opening play, piece mobility, initiative, attacking techniques, and long-term sacrifices. The book’s title was not an exaggeration but prophetic: AlphaZero changed how chess is played at the top level. Carlsen has claimed he became a different player, inspired by the remarkable AlphaZero games. His second, Nielsen, wrote an article for New in Chess magazine where he demonstrated how Carlsen had adopted themes from AlphaZero, such as running up the board with a pawn on the outer edge, sacrificing pawns, and being more flexible with the concept of king safety—a truly inspiring story for any chess fan.

As always, new generations are adapting more quickly to new technologies. In chess, the young, rising stars use computers better than older players. This became all the more clear when I interviewed the Bosnian-Dutch grandmaster Ivan Sokolov in the summer of 2022, shortly after he had captained the young Uzbekistan team to victory at the Chess Olympiad in Chennai, India.

Born in 1968, Sokolov is a classical player and trainer who gained knowledge from reading books, studying top grandmaster games, and, of course, from his experience as a top player in the 1990s and early 2000s. But working with, for example, the Iranian-French prodigy Alireza Firouzja (born in 2003), opened his eyes regarding computers:

What I faced, not only with Alireza but also with some other young players that I worked with, is that, for example, they come up with a proposal that is very unconventional for a known type of position—unconventional based on old knowledge. I would usually say, “If this works, I need to quote my friend Jan Timman, who said, ‘If it works, I need to learn chess again!’” But then I would get a comment like, “Yes, but the computer loves it.” Then we would do some analysis, and sometimes it would turn out that the computer was wrong, in the sense that the evaluation only works if computers are playing. For humans, the assessment can be different.

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