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The Grandmaster
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4/27/05
The Grandmaster on Synthesizing Information
Parts of Norman Fosback's "Stock Market Logic" remind me a bit of the chess lessons of Dr Tarrasch. Tarrasch warned strongly about putting a knight on the edge of the board and even today you often hear strong players explain that 'a knight on the rim is dim'. Yet on other days you can also see the same commit exactly this sin, do so very deliberately and yet win. So what's going on?
I think that it's something like this - strong players synthesize a large amount of information and come to the conclusion that a certain aspect of a position is the important one. Yet when they come to explain what they did, the main part of this reasoning is 'skipped' (a lot of it was probably it was carried out at an intuitive level) with only the key factors being mentioned in the 'answer'.
From my experience of teaching chess this is a source of great frustration for people who want to improve. A position can have doubled pawns, open files, king weakness etc but simply noticing these factors is not enough. What matters is to have a way of synthesizing and arranging this information so that you can decide on your next move. The better players will be the better synthesizers.
Where the good synthesizers will show the greatest advantage over rule based players is when the situation has changed from when the rules were created. When Tarrasch stated that a knight was always badly placed on b3 or b6 there was a lot of truth to it because of the sorts of positions that were fashionable then. Similarly rules like '3 steps and a stumble' (ie the Federal Reserve tightening interest rates 3 times before causing a fall in the stock market) worked reasonably well up to 1993. But does this still apply from such a low base as we've had recently?
This is why I think that success in fields like chess and markets are not so much a question of what someone 'knows' but how they think. 'Knowledge', so often seen as a key to mastery, is often nothing more than a way for people to confuse themselves or leave them trying to apply old rules inappropriately. Unless of course this knowledge can be synthesized
Nigel Davies is a trader and an International Chess Grandmaster residing in the United Kingdom. Visit his Web site at www.tigerchess.com.