Gene Milener

I am a chess philosopher. The second chess book I authored (2018) is titled "Kinetic Patterns in Reactive Chess" (KPiRC). This time writing the book was no accident. Part of the core ideas include the concepts I call kinetics and kinetic atomics. While studying shot puzzles I became increasingly irritated by the intentional omission of the two preceding moves that led to the puzzle position diagram. The two omitted moves are the kinetic information that the two actual players had available to them during the game. Kinetic information is rich with clues about what the best candidate moves are, and about what tactical maneuvers might be presently available. Anyone who buys Big Database from ChessBase.com can search through a million class level games and see that the legions of mediocre class level players have weak skills at extracting the clues from kinetic information. The good news is that kinetic skills are relatively easy to obtain, compared to deep calculational skills, or to broad positional assessment skills, or to memorizing deep trees of opening moves, or to cramming hours of daily study on 7001 shot puzzles during a few short weeks. And kinetic skills bring you a broader and more reliable vision of the tactical opportunities and threats present in the static position. Unlike shot combination skills that suddenly win games by exploiting the opponent's blunder, kinetic skills are useful on almost every turn during the middlegame. It is further argued that strong skills at shot combinations, or at deep or more reliable calculation, are utterly dependent on prior attainment of strong kinetic skills. Another core idea in KPiRC is that Proactive chess moves are a myth, and that Reactive chess moves are powerful moves. But to play strong reactive moves routinely during a long middlegame, you must have strong kinetic skills.

The first chess book I authored (2006) is titled "Play Stronger Chess by Examining Chess960: Usable Strategies of Fischer Random Chess" (PSCbyEC960). I wrote half of PSCbyEC960 accidentally, and then realized I had to continue and turn it into a book. One of the book's main points is that the chess world is missing out on a vast realm of opening concepts by starting all games from only the one traditional start setup. The traditional setup is very limiting due to its excessive abundance of both B-N5 pinning a knight (such as Bc1-g5 pinning Black's f6-kinght), and knight opposition (such as between Ng1-f3 and Nb8-c6 both pressing on the same squares d4 and e5). Most plausible back rank setups are not so constricted and dominated by these two endlessly repeated themes. Repeated use of one or two nontraditional start setups would demonstrate that Reuben Fine's 9 principles of opening play would need revising. To a degree, some of Fine's principles are merely esoteric tactical considerations about the one traditional setup. Other opening principles that are broadly applicable to plausible chess start setups might be missing entirely. Since I published PSCbyEC960, the name "chess9LX" (or the less searchable "chess 9LX") has gained popularity. And I have evolved to now champion the following motto: "Discard the 'Random' from Fischer Random Chess!". At the start of every decade, settle on one of the 959 other start setups, and stick with it for all chess960 tournaments during the decade.

I was raised in Oneonta NY (USA). My biggest hobby then was tennis. In graduate school I degreed in Human Experimental Psychology. To run our psychology experiments, I had to teach myself to program computers. I have worked at Microsoft for a quarter century, near Seattle WA. Outside of work I used to race radio controlled cars every weekend, but now spend more time golfing. My wife Amy is a Law Librarian at the top of her field. We have two daughters, Patia and Sara.

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