A new Knight.
Please all give a warm welcome to our newest Knight Phorku . I dub him the Phorking Knight . Welcome to the round table! Update. And another Knight joins the club! Please welcome him. I dub him The Ambitious Knight.
Posts
Problems breeding in the dark.
CTS has released another 1000 problems these weeks, which results in a wider problem window. The more problems we solve, the lower their RD, the more problems are released. Life will be calling next week so I will probably not manage to do 400 problems a day. Just now it allready sips up every spare moment. I started with dieting. I put a lot of effort in chess improvement, so I want not my opponent to escape by an hartattack or so;) I have done this 3 times before, but was always overtaken by the jojo-effect. Loosing 30 kg never was a problem, but to stay that way is an entirely different matter. Now I have found out how to tackle that problem. My daily cycle at CTS always look a bit the same: the first 200 problems my mind doesn't work very well, the RD is relatively high, hence the drop in rating great. Then about 150 problems that my mind speeds up, my RD becomes low and my rating increases again. The last 50 moves I get tired and my performance drops again. Day after day I...
Dream along.
Today my rating at CTS went for the first time beyond the 1530 mark. I was afraid to plateau at around 1510, but that's clearly not the case. This means that the first criterium for improvement is satisfied: it is possible to increase rating at CTS by just training every day. The reason I could pass this mark is evident. I start to recognize a lot of the problems due to repetition. About 15% of the problems I have seen before, and I remember the pattern. So I don't see any reason why my rating shouldn't improve as long as I train every day at CTS. Until all the patterns are familiar, of course.:) There is no mysterious development of the mind going on here, nor is a more effective thinkprocess enlightening my brains. It's just plain recognition of the problems I have done before. The figures show an improvement of 30 points per 10,000 problems. At a pace of 400 problems per day that means 25 days per 30 points. (Hey, isn't that about 400 points a year?. . .) It is t...
Does CTS work?
And again I am in the happy state that I can speculate over all the good fruits that might be yielded from my study. Not disturbed by allready known facts from harsh reality. In order to yield results from problemsolving at CTS two criteria have to be forfilled. The first is, that it is possible to increase your rating at CTS. The first 10,000 problems were accompanied by a rating progress from about 30 points, from 1470 to 1500. Now I seem to plateau at 1510. On the other hand it is hardly to imagine that the rating would NOT increase by doing 400 problems a day. So I have to look again when 20,000 problems are solved. The second criterium is, that increase in CTS rating leads to increase in OTB rating. I have compared Dutch -, USCF-, and FIDE ratings and I found them to be about equal. To compare CTS and OTB ratings: CTS OTB 1450 1700 1900 2300 CTS seems to make you fast. That is to say, your rating there can only grow when you become faster. Everybody with a...
10,000 done, only 60,000 to go!!
Estimated average rating: Circle 0: 1470 Circle 1: 1500 Circle 1 done 10,000 ready 60,000 to go. Prosit!! Update: Vic has gone 404.
Answer to Nezha.
Nezha commented on my previous post. I will try to address his questions. Nezha: I am curious, do you feel - has the circles with CTS helped you? If I was wise, I would answer this question with something like: “this is only circle 1, so it’s far too early to say something about it. When I have done all 7 circles you can see at my rating how it worked out.” But since I cannot keep my mouth shut I will give it a shot. To understand fully what I try to explain, it would be interesting if you do the same experiment as I did. That is, play against the computer a tempo (= max 3 seconds per move for you). Decrease the amount of plies the computer is allowed to think until you score 50% against it. I had to lower it to only 1 ply deep! This gives you a very good indication what the level of your pattern recognition really is. It explains fully why we are so ridiciously bad at chess, and that it should be easy to improve. If it was only possible to see the simple things a tempo in stead of aft...
End in sight.
The end of circle 1 comes in sight. Start rating CTS: 1470 CTS circle 1: 9,200 / 70,000 The rating wobbles 1500 +/- 25
No time to think.
Today I had great trouble to keep my rating at 1500+. I never noticed before that 3 seconds is so short. CTS circle 1: 7,900 / 70,000
Speed does matter.
Some time ago I experimented with playing against the computer. At first I played a tempo. Because if pattern recognition plays indeed an important role, it would probably manifest itself in the first few seconds of looking at a position. No matter if one is drunk or having the flu. What happened was that I had to adjust the level of the computer time and again, because I lost every game. In the end the computer was allowed to think only 1 ply ahead. And even then I scored only about 50%. I was astonished. But I started to use more time myself and my results got better. So I had to adjust the level of the computer until it was 5 ply deep. And I forgot what happened when playing a tempo. At 5 ply I needed about 15 minutes to score 50% against the computer. Experimenting with 6 ply lead to loosing everytime due to oversights of rather simple combinations. At this place I started to experiment with scanning and board vision techniques. The “rake experience”. I started to book results agai...
More than 10% done
CTS circle 1: 7,100 / 70,000 I hope I can maintain this pace. 3 days in a row above rating 1500. It's just jogging and scanning really.
New Knight
Please give all a warm welcome to our newest Knight Springer. Since Celtic Death is allready nicknamed as The Dark Knight, I will dub our newcomer The Hooked Knight. You can find a few basic rules here . CTS circle 1: 6,300/70,000
Am I satisfied?
Nezha supposed that I am not satisfied with my performance at the two tourneys. Well, he is right. We had a great time. It was nice to meet all tourney-tigers again, we drank a lot of beer and we laughed a lot. A lot of our friends did two tournaments too. (Some are now busy doing a third one after them. . .) The games were spectacular (well, most of them). It's a great way to spend your free days. No regrets here at all. (BTW, it rained all the time, so good chessweather) The results are not bad. For me, 5 wins (4 by knockout), 4 losses, 9 draws. Performance rating (as I believe you call it) 1735 in Amsterdam and 1712 in Dieren. Average 1724. So definitely above 1700, which was a plateau for quite some time. I have no reason to say that my performance rating should be different, it represents adequately my level at this moment. Margriet scored 1490 in Amsterdam and 1333 in Dieren. Averaging 1412, which is about her rating. I think her performance at Dieren is so bad because of exh...
The 7 circles of CTS.
We had a great time doing two tourneys and played a lot of spectacular games. Allthough 18 days of chess is maybe a little too much with only two resting days. I have not yet analyzed everything that happened during our mega event. But a few things are already clear: everything that can be done automatically at a move must be done automatically. Under tournament conditions only automated tasks will survive. The scanning processes have proven to be useful for blunder checking. I had about 6 (minor) oversights in 18 games. Compared with the average 3 oversights per game at the tourney at Whitsuntide this is an enormous improvement. Since I had not done very much scanning exercises (only two weeks or so) before the tournaments, I can't say if they can be useful for other tasks. I had 9 draws in 18 games. There are 2 reasons for so much draws (mind you, I play mostly gambits!): tasks that have to be done automatically are done by thinking. So I often had to accept a draw in better posi...