Temposchlucker

Today we started with The Open Dutch Championship 2005 Dieren . 9 days with 1 restday. 40 moves in 120 minutes + 60 minutes for the rest of the game. You can find the results/standings here under "Open kampioenschap en reservegroepen". Tournament Temposchlucker 1751 Margriet 1420 ACT score 4.5 5 ACT games played 9 9 NK Dieren score 5 3.5 NK Dieren games played 9 9 Totals 9.5/18 8.5/18 Day 1: I made a mistake in the opening and was in the greatest trouble against a 14 yo boy (1640). After I had finally equalized I had a terrible oversight, which costed me the exchange. A few minutes later I had another oversight, after which I was a full knight behind in a gruesome position. So I resigned. In Dieren there are always lots of children. I hate it to play against them. They are always underrated, when they do a good move they get their friends, who start grinning behind your back. When you resign they give you a hand and say "well played". It should be forbidden. Marg...

A note on last tournament. The "slump" I had at Whitsuntide is clearly over. I have no difficulty to hold my own against opposition of 1750, so the new level I reached in january is no coincidence. Allthough I didn't manage to "correct" my losses at Whitsuntide. Margriet did a good job and will increase more than 20 points. In all games except one I had the initiative. Even in the ones I lost. Overall it were exciting games. Timetrouble didn't play a decisive role in any of the games except one. A few draws in equal position could possibly be avoided if I had more endgame skills. The last draw reveals a character weekness: timidity plus tiredness plus love of ease = a draw. Staying at the board when my opponent is to move is allready a habit, much to my surprise. In game 4 and 5 I had a slight dip because of tiredness, but after 9 days I feel that my stamina has improved. A note on the scanmethod. The scanmethod didn't play a decisive role this tourname...

Here are a few pictures to get an impression of the ACT. The tournament had 438 participants and was held in two halls. Margriet in action. The hall with the section for the grandmasters. Sokolov in action. Tuesday we start with a new tournament for 9 days in Dieren. Maybe I should use my Brace-O-Maza there.

Margriet and I play in The Amsterdam Chess Tournament which starts saturday. 9 days in a row without a restday. 40 moves in 120 minutes + 30 minutes for the rest of the game (how do you abbreviate that in the US? 40/120+30 or something like that?) Then we have one day in between, before The Open Dutch Championship 2005 Dieren starts. 9 days with 1 restday. 40 moves in 120 minutes + 60 minutes for the rest of the game. I intend to use this post to keep you informed via updates. Tournament Temposchlucker 1751 Margriet 1420 ACT score 4.5 5 ACT games played 9 9 NK Dieren score 0 0 NK Dieren games played 0 0 Totals 4.5/9 5/9 Don't be worried when the updates suddenly stop. When the results are really good or terribly bad that may happen. Or when I need to focus. Wish us luck. Update july 16: I had a draw against a player with 1710. The scanmethod is workable in practice, I have not been in danger nor timetrouble. The scans change my style of playing. The chance that I get an endgame i...

I try to decompose the target scan in simple skills that can be drilled seperate. For example today I did "undefended target jogging". That is, the computer plays against itself at a certain pace and I scan all undefended targets for the color to move. Recently I started to relate the scans to the piece that actually moves. This diminishes the amount of scans enormous, since I don't have to scan all possible targets, but only the ones that are influenced by the piece that just moved. This trivial idea is really a great improvement. Being trivial as it may, it requires a lot of focus to drill that way and to use not my usual way of looking at a position. Two days to go to the tournaments.

In the past I would always loose to the computer at 6 ply, due to a stupid oversight of a simple tactic. To prevent that, I started with target scanning. I looked at every piece of mine and asked myself an amount of questions about it. It resembles the target filtering of Mousetrapper. The result was that my score against the computer became much better. There were a few important drawbacks: it was complex, it costed an enormous amount of time and energy. So I decided to split things up and train them apart. A part of this target-evalution existed of a scan around all possible attackers. To train this I invented rake-scanning. I need now 20% of the time for this rake-scanning due to training. In my previous post I evaluated this. The point is that scanning of the attackers, is only a tiny part of the target evaluation. I should say about 10 - 20 %. So the main drawbacks still exist. Because of the drawbacks my approach is somewhat different from Mousetrappers. A post of Tackchess about...

The last 4 days I have worked on my Chess Vision. Today I wanted to start with the target scanning. Since I saw that Moustrapper is wrestling with the ideal form of such scan, I decided to test first where I stand now. I played a few blitz games on FICS. I was hacked from the board a few times by players with less rating. For example Dread Pirate Josh pounded me with a few nice tricks. I found only once per game the time to do a full scan, so the extended microdrills aren't suited for playing blitz. I played a game against the computer at 6 ply thinking level. These two situations occurred to me during that game: I have white and have to move, the computer has just played Ba3. I have totally missed this move. Ok, it can easely be parried, but that is not the point. My scan of the black bishop included Ba3 and Bxb2. But it didn't occur to me that my knight was in danger. Another point in the same game: My last move was Na4, followed by blacks Nc6xd4 (winning a pawn). Another mov...

As you may know I had a bad tournament at Whitsuntide. Analysis of my games showed that I might need extended micro-level drills on a crowded board. The micro-level drills are step 1 from DLM's improvement plan. I had never done them because they are too simple and artificial. An extended version that suited my needs had to be invented. I romped during a week with the micro drills and the unsurpassed Chess Vision Trainer from Fussy Lizzard, but I couldn't find useful excersises that satisfied me. So I gave this route up. After a lot more research I came up with the idea that I had to work on step 3: transferring my pattern recognition to my OTB-play. I analysed my common blunders for that and I invented a scansystem to prevent them. I got much inspiration by the other Knights, especially from King and Mousetrapper. After that I invented a system to jog through the exercises. Now the dust has settled and I have an honest look at what I have made, I have to acknowledge that I ha...

King of the Spill has made a Gordian knot . When I had a good look at it I saw that it looked complex because a lot of grass rakes were drawn on the board at the same time. If I would do that for the Queen scan then it would look complex in a similar way. Once I realized that, I decided to keeps things simple. My Knight scan consists now of a scan two moves deep, just like the other scans. In a way it is similar to all the other rakes I'm working with (see diagram). Allthough in practice it feels more like I'm scanning an umbrella shape than a rake. Doing the Knight scan is much simpler in practice than I feared. All this scanning with strange patterns is very unusual to my mind. I find it to be much more difficult on a screen than on a board. The mind demonstrates a lot of resistance to this activity by feeling tired and even let me fall asleep, even while there is no physical reason for that. Especially the Queen scan is very vehement. I can only do sessions from about 20 min...

To scan only the most chanceful lines, I have drawn some teeth from the rakes. As I said in an earlier post, I combined the X-ray scan with the real scan. I will try to explain how that works. Basically if a rake meets my own pieces, I do a real scan. That is to say, I'm not trying to look with X-ray eyes through my own pieces. UNLESS my piece is in line with a hostile target. See for example the diagram below. Every color represents a rake. With the blue rake I use X-ray vision, which means that I look thru the pieces as if they weren't there. With the green rake my piece is in line with a hostile target. This means that a discovered attack might be possible. Here I use X-ray vision too. (I forgot the teeth of the green rake: d5-c6 e6-d7 f7-e8, sorry for that) The red rake I scan with real vision, which ends at d3. In practice, this last restriction diminishes the amount of teeth to be scanned drastically. Exercise does speed things up: Bishop scan was 30 seconds, now 5 second...

The last days I am doing Bishop-jogging. That works as follows: I let the computer play against itself. I can adjust the time between two moves. With every move of white I scan the rakes that are coming out of whites Bishops. With every move of black I scan the rakes that are coming out of blacks Bishops. The scan is a combination of an X-ray scan and a real scan. I will post later to explain this. I have jogged for about 3 hours now. The time I need for the scan of 1 Bishop is diminished from 30 seconds per ply to 10 seconds per ply, and is still dropping. What is even important, is that it starts to consume less energy. So this is a hopeful development. Basically you can look at the scans as extended microdrills on a crowded board. A blunderscan and a scan for tactical shots is broken down into its compounding parts. These parts are trained seperate. In the hope that a total scan can be done at a glance or two in the end. The idea is that this total scan will trigger my pattern recog...

To develop a scan for the Knight I made some pictures which I didn't want to deny you. It is remarkable that every square of the same color can be reached within two moves (except for 5 squares on the diagonals) when the knight is in the center. Now it becomes clear why a knight on the rim is dim. Last friday I had an easy win at the club against 1715. He played the Cunningham variation at my King's Gambit. (1.e4 e5 2. f4 ef4: 3. Nf3 Be7 4. Bc4 Bh4+) However theory clearly states that this check isn't good when whites King can go to f1, everybody plays it. But even with everything going smooth, I missed a Knightfork at King and Queen against me. It was pure luck I good parry it. I hope a Knightscan can prevent such oversights in the future.

King of the Spill commented here that we might have found a winning scansystem (or at least drawing:) If I look at the figures (before 0+ 0= 35- after 1+ 8= 6-) I am convinced that IN POTENCY that is the case. The scansystem has one main drawback, it consumes an enormous amount of time. I need about 5 minutes per scan. That is way too much. I have to stay focussed during this time which costs much energy. This is exhausting so an error is easely made. Hence the minus 6 score. The X-rake scan from my previous post was an attempt to diminish the required scantime. What is the idea behind this rake? I will try to explain. White to move (diagram above) The scan reveals a rake with one tooth. . . This rake allows you to have a look in the future. If white doesn't do anything about it, he will loose his rook within 4 ply. White to move (diagram above) The route to the rook is hindered by the pawn on b5. The danger is that black trades pieces on a6 and that the rook is lost within 6 ply ...