Competitive chess players are becoming increasingly aware of the calamitous nature of blunders, those irrefutable errors which occur when one least expects them. From the level of the elegant super-grandmasters way down to the lowly 1300 patzers, blunders continue to plague us without respite. Can we prevent them from happening? I do not think so. Obviously, ghastly blunders will not disappear because we wish them to do so, nor with the wave of a magic wand. Blunders in chess, as in life, are here to reside among us. However, it may be possible to control the frequency of one’s blunders.
Soviet grandmaster Alexander Kotov tells us in his incisive bestseller, Think like a Grandmaster “everything that happens by chance has some explanation, and there is some strange logic in the appearance of blunders.” A grandmaster tournament is a struggle between finely trained minds which are capable of carrying out excessive mental work for hours on end. A grandmaster, through extensive practice and training, gets used to making the deepest of analyses, thereby enabling him to foresee the course of events many moves ahead. Yet, simultaneously, there is not a single grandmaster who has not made the grossest of blunders in his time. He/she may have overlooked an elementary checkmate, or given up his roving queen or parted with an active minor piece. How can a trained mind suddenly exhibit a blind spot? It’s puzzling.
In chess one of the favourite explanations for blunders is ‘a lapse of concentration. Were you concentrating less when you made the
