When it comes to the game of chess one of the most fascinating things about the game is that a person’s personality gets perfectly reflected in the way they play. One player may play a bloody lunatic, and another player may play so defensively that they hard to defeat, and so forth.
Certain chess playing styles are more effective against certain other playing styles. Kind of like Pokémon types, like how fire is super effective against grass types whereas fire types are weak to water types. Similarly, this also happens in chess. Magicians (players like Tal, Velimirovic, Ratnakaram etc.) tend to do well against technicians (Kraminik etc.) and certain positional types like Botvinnik and Spassky. However, magicians tend to have some serious difficulty dealing with solid positional players (anacondas) like Petrosian or Maghsoodloo.
One of the reasons for this is, technicians strive to find the most accurate moves in a position and will calculate deeply to find the right moves. Similarly, positional players like Botvinnik will play positionally by means of calculation. What makes magicians effective against these players is because magicians tend to generate extremely complex positions in which it is difficult to calculate through the immense variations, this poses problems for the players who greatly rely on calculations because they will not be able to work through them so easily. But for players like Petrosian who play extremely solid positional chess without necessarily calculating exact lines will give problems to magicians. That is because the magician will fail to find a point to attack because everything will be adequately defended. However, anaconda like players tend to have problems against attacking players that use deep calculation (assassins, champions, etc.) rather than intuition like magicians do. The reason for this is because by calculating for attacks the assassin will find inaccuracies in the anaconda-like play, and thus will snuff them out by seeing the long-term dynamic weaknesses created by pure defensive play. And the assassins will have a hard time dealing with the technicians which will find problems in the attacks of these players, thus defending properly until the attack burns out. And so forth.
This is why it is important to figure out your playing style, that way you can amplify those abilities to their full potential. Often times it is much more difficult to improve on your weaknesses because it often requires a paradigm shift, something which is extremely difficult to invoke these kinds of mental changes permanently. Thus, it is more effective to emphasise on your own strengths. A good website for this is: http://www.chesspersonality.com/ Every couple of months I check my playing style to see if it changes. For me it tends to remain constant. I get the Champion class almost every time.
“Play to your strengths.” – N.M.
Here are some of the different playing styles of some players.
Mikhail Tal: Had lightning flash combinative powers unprecedented, and an insane ability to complicate a position. In other words, a purely chaotic player.
Max Euwe: The complete embodiment of simple chess. Euwe had taking his inductive and deductive powers from his mathematical career to find moves that are often dead simple, but effective.
Tigran Petrosian: A player who was the master of the art of prophylaxis. Petrosian had an unprecedented ability to snuff out flames long before players ever got the idea to start one. He was also considered to be the most defensive player in history.
Bobby Fischer: Fischer was a gruesome attacking calculator. He often played aggressively but would calculate great depths to determine if an attack would work.