Hope Chess

If you're trying to get better at chess--and most people reading this presumably are--the type of instruction that will help you depends greatly on your current skill level. In order to get much value out of any of it, you have to figure out what level you're currently at and find materials that will help you get to the next level, whatever level that may be.

One well-known instructor and writer for weaker but post-beginner players is Dan Heisman. I discovered his chess column, called "Novice Nook," at Chesscafe years ago, when it was still available for free. Unfortunately in the years since Chesscafe started charging a membership fee for access to its articles, which is a shame for aspiring chessplayers. Most of the articles were later collected into a book, A Guide to Chess Improvement.

One of Heisman's first articles was called "The Secrets to 'Real' Chess." It was here that he identified what he called Hope Chess, meaning making a move without figuring out if your opponent had a threat that you couldn't meet in response. If you played Hope Chess you weren't playing Real Chess, where that process was absolutely necessary. If you played Hope Chess, then everything else you learned about chess was essentially useless because eventually you would play a move and the opponent would respond with a threat you couldn't meet, and you would lose. When I first read this I thought "This is obvious. Of course you have to consider all your opponent's possible replies to your move and account for them." I believed that I didn't play Hope Chess.

Then I started looking at some of my games. If I didn't play Hope Chess, then why did I lose this game when the opponent played this move that I didn't expect? Was it just a shocking, completely unorthodox move that I didn't see? No, it was a reasonable candidate move. I found many instances like this but resisted making the obvious conclusion for as long as I could before it became inescapable: I did play Hope Chess. Sometimes I got away with it; I didn't check all my opponent's possible threats and he had one that I couldn't meet, but he didn't notice. It's possible to win even when you play Hope Chess, it's just difficult or impossible to improve.

It was a big revelation to me that I did this, and once I figured it out I thought it wouldn't be that difficult to eradicate. That was absolutely wrong. Even when I went into games thinking "I'm not going to worry about the result, I'm just going to make sure I consider all my opponent's possible threats in response to all my moves and make sure I can meet them" I was unable to do it consistently move after move, game after game. Hope Chess is very sneaky, and I would often mess up when one of my moves seemed obvious or forced, or when I thought my position was easily winning.

Hope Chess isn't responsible for all blunders; you can check for your opponent's threats but miss them, or analyze poorly and play a bad move. But it's almost certain that you will blunder if you do it.

I've been battling Hope Chess for years. My attempts to avoid Hope Chess have created a secondary problem, namely that in my attempts to avoid it I often get into time trouble. Even so, identifying it as a significant weakness and focusing on overcoming it has been a big help, and it was only after I did it that my online ratings started going up. It hasn't helped my OTB rating yet, but I play so few OTB games that I don't think that's significant.

If you still play Hope Chess, I recommend reading Heisman's book. He also has a lot of free instructional videos on Youtube, although for me the book (or the articles it contains) was much more helpful. But don't think that just identifying the problem will make it go away. It doesn't.