As useful as I have found custom model games, it’s challenging to make them the sole source of improvements to intuition. It’s great to link related ideas together in a single game, but it puts limitations on what you can learn. Just the fact that you can’t have three different endings without also having three middlegames and three openings is often undesirable. In fact, studying the endgame - which, as you may recall was one of the greatest weaknesses in my game - was especially difficult using a custom model games approach alone.

The approach I developed for dealing with this problem was one I called “sparring”. In principle, it was simple. Referring to a game from my “Things to work on list”, I would identify a position where my intuition was poor, and then I would play that position against Stockfish over and over again, reversing sides each time.

It was definitely more intensive than basic analysis of positions. I would have to really think through what I should do in each position and then make my best attempt, and then I would play the position with colors reversed and Stockfish would show me how best to play it. Then I would try it again, then Stockfish would show me again, and each time, playing each side, I would learn more about how to play one side or the other - either through seeing Stockfish play or testing my own concepts. I would usually stop the game on a given attempt once I had reached a clear conclusion - defined by reaching a point where my intuition was clear again (usually where I was clearly losing), and would stop the whole exercise once I felt that I had more firmly gained a grip on the starting position.

The benefits of this technique were clear. It was a way to spend a good deal of time struggling with a difficult position while repeatedly seeing and practicing good patterns in that position. The biggest issue, really, was that Stockfish was so much better than I was that it was humbling to frequently lose both sides of the same position. That wasn’t the point, though. Obviously I was selecting positions I didn’t know how to play well - and Stockfish could easily beat me from positions I did know anyway. The point was to learn from Stockfish how to play a given position better - to see the position played well and to try to imitate it, over and over again. Success wasn’t beating Stockfish, it was improving my play in problematic positions I had identified.

As with using Stockfish in analysis, even though it is exceptionally strong, it isn’t the perfect sparring partner. It relies heavily on tactics, and a strong human opponent might be better at showing a more intuition-based approach. Further, sometimes Stockfish didn’t play what I considered the most testing line - because it had seen so much more than I did. That said, I feel that sparring against Stockfish is more beneficial than sparring against a partner who is close to my level. I’m never exactly sure that I’m learning good patterns when both I and my opponent are stabbing blindly in the dark. Watching Stockfish execute plans in various positions has made me unmistakably better at playing those positions, and Stockfish’s greatest strength, other than its actual chess strength, is its availability. Strong opponents aren’t always available, but Stockfish is. If I have ten spare minutes while I’m waiting for water to boil, Stockfish is always around and ready to look at whatever. No human opponent can boast that.

Sparring does have the disadvantage of being a point-in-time activity. Unlike memorizing model games, which I revisit with some frequency, I generally don’t have a regular schedule for sparring a particular position. I suppose that I could, but with how I use this tool there are always new positions to spar - natural since it’s kind of a gap-filling activity to address holes that my model games don’t directly address.

Of course, the most important kind of sparring is an activity that we have yet to discuss: actual, over the board play. We will correct that deficiency in the next chapter.