So what's a plan?

It was years before I finally figured out what a plan was.

I remember I used to wonder about it though. Did you actually have to foresee everything from the start of the game? It seemed like it. I mean, from the way everybody was always talking in books. Like in The Most Instructive Games Ever Played.

Okay, Chernev's a nice fellow (and btw his Endgame Magic! is bountiful good fun, despite the fact that he's even more exclam-happy than I am!). The games in The Most Instructive Games are very good indeed (I still remember that one where Smyslov--I think it was--made grand use of the d5-square as White)...but all too often Irv's notes seem to be more adulation than annotation. As though he is gearing himself up to congratulate the winner-to-be with every remark.

The problem with that sort of thing--I mean, making every game (or masterpiece) seem inevitable and immutable and set in stone--is that it proves to be a mighty tough act for the student to follow. I remember I could barely hang on to what pieces I had left, and now I was supposed to concoct a Comprehensive Game Plan from square one!

Chernev was far from the only one throwing me off too. I remember coming across things like: "Rubinstein puts every move together as though erecting a monumental building stone by stone." I think it may have been Kmoch who said that (or something vaguely similar, at any rate).

Yes, that is indeed the way it should look afterwards (if you do it right). :) Just as though the whole game were really all just One Big Plan.

It's an illusion though. Players are much less architects than they are generals (not too surprisingly, considering). And here's a further war analogy: conventional wars are not won (or lost) all at once, but in a series of battles featuring tides and the initiative. Naturally there is much give and take and nobody is quite sure what's going on (through all that smoke and fog).

Anyway, the real revelation came for me with Znosko-Borovsky's book called How Not To Play Chess (and kindly be good enough to spare your wisecracks). There is a chapter in there which really shows what a plan--or sequence of them--looks like through an entire game.

I was already a B player by then, but as I say it was a real eye-opener. And also a relief. Thank God I wasn't gonna have to plot everything from the first move! lol

So what is a plan anyway?

It's a series of a few moves--let's say 3 to 5, since numbers make it all sound so much more scientific--with some goal in mind. You're improving a piece's placement...you're regrouping...you're safeguarding your king...you're getting ready to push a pawn...

Yes, that's often the main thing in a plan. Back to pawns again. I don't know about them being the soul of chess, but they're definitely the landscape. :) Or they give us our boundaries, at any rate. And incidentally, plans involving pawn advances can take a very long time indeed to work themselves out.

Of course, what's a lot more difficult to describe is precisely what you should be aiming for in any given position. And that's where experience and positional understanding come in.

The point though is that most master games generally move along in these little clusters of moves (for both sides)...unless an odd tactic like a piece win comes along to disrupt the flow for a moment...until the final kingside attack (if there is one). Or until something queens!

To a certain extent, there's even a bit of semantics involved here. After all, combinations are not called plans because "plans" are supposed to involve give and take whereas combos tend to be a lot more forcing. Also, if you were to (say) move your bishop to a better square before embarking on some plan, you could call that bishop move by itself a plan. But most players probably wouldn't, because "plans" generally are supposed to have more than one move (they would just say they were moving the bishop into place as preparation).

Tomayto tomahto. Anyway, the point is that once I started getting some grasp of this whole business, my USCF rating got a serious goose! :D