When I was just starting out (I was an instant chess addict!), I used game collections, tournament books, and eventually Chess Informants to zip through anywhere from 200 to 500 games a day, every day. That’s not too amazing when you consider that I only used 20 to 40 seconds a game.When I started my effort to quickly go through every game in the back half of Chess Informant 152, I went through the 39 games and game fragments classified as ECO A in two sessions of 20-30 minutes. That is much slower than Jeremy Silman claims to have been his practice as a young player, but much faster than my pace so far through ECO B. This morning I went through game numbers 40-45, which, including annotations, was nine whole games and one fragment. My wife says I was at my computer about an hour. Six minutes per game is still very fast and superficial, of course.
Jeremy Silman, "Studying Master Games and Berkmaster's First Over-The-Board Tournament Battle," Chess.com (21 January 2014)
As I went through games 40-45 in Informant 152 this morning on my computer, I made notes in the margins of the print edition. Every game has at least one note. Two tactical positions are marked as possible material to use with my students.
From Lupulescu,C.--Nanu,C., Romania 2022, 152/44
White to move
White to move
Silman asserts that quantity of games develops knowledge of patterns--"positional patterns, tactical patterns, structural patterns, piece placement patterns, timing patterns."* He suggests that to become an IM or GM, a player needs to look at 100,000 games.
My ambitions to become a titled player, if I ever had them, dissipated a few years prior to my 60th birthday. Nonetheless, I enjoy the process of learning and seek a range of approaches to this process. I know that I have played through many thousands of games over the years, many very quickly and others that I have studied for many hours. A few years ago, I played through every available game on chessgames.com played by Rezső Charousek, of which there are only 171. The process took a week. The biggest impact on my play came from detailed study of a game that he lost. It inspired me to try my hand with the opening in that game (see "Losing My Virginity with the Ponziani" [2014]). This study of Charousek's games was influenced by Silman's claims.
I have played through a substantial percentage of Paul Morphy's games and have used at least thirty regularly in my teaching. I have been through more games credited to Gioachino Greco than can be found in any database, including my own because my hard drive crashed a few months after entering the 168 variations in William Lewis, Gioachino Greco on the Game of Chess (1819). Several years later, I entered all of the games from Francis Beale, The Royall Art of Chesse-Play (London 1656), which contains 94 games, many of which are not in the databases most people use.
As I work through these games with the objective of getting through all soon enough that Informant 153 does not arrive first, I am pulled one way by Silman's assertions that quantity and speed are beneficial. At the same time, slowing a little seems to offer better prospects of quality.
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