Haunting for succes

Some of you might have noticed that my rating at CTS has made a nose dive in the 3 weeks I had a break from CTS. Even after 2 weeks working again I haven't regained my old level.
Where has my rating gone?

What you probably haven't noticed, is that in the last 2 weeks that I exercised again my succesrate has increased from 79,0% to 79,4%
Since that is the average over all 31,000 problems, that's quite a difference.
In a way succesrate and rating at CTS are interchangable. So there is nothing to worry about.
I'm sure you don't.
But I did.

Round Table Chess

Any Knight in for a game of Round Table Chess?

Since yesterday I'm experimenting at CTS.
I do a series of problems as usual.
Then I push the session-button.
I repeat the problems with a negative score.
First I calculate the right solution.
Second I close the eyes and play the solution in my mind. I concentrate especially on the underlying patterns.
Let's see how this method works out.

Time to experiment.

Rapid Cream Chess.
Yesterday I played in the 33th Cream Cheese rapid tournament.
There were about 160 participants.
I played a 5 round robin tournament G/30 against opposition with an average rating comparable to mine (1712).
I scored 2.5/5 which is decent.
There were a few thrilling games with beautiful sacrifices on both sides.
It was a really enjoyable event for Margriet and me. A lot of players we meet here are acquaintences from the Corus tournament. We laughed a lot. Between the rounds that is.
Traditional this tourney is a good measure for adjustments in the training discipline for the Corus tournament in januari.

So where am I standing?
My performances in the summer lead me to step up my efforts at CTS.
I have done 30,000 problems since then.
In an earlier post I declared the following:

100,000 probs = 10 months = 240 points at CTS = 100 points OTB

My performance at the tourney confirms my feeling that I'm not on track.
The last few weeks I have analysed the reason for my defeats over and over again.
I can't find any flaws in my reasonings so I stay with my original conclusion:

"CTS has a database with simple problems. Exactly the sort of problems I need to learn to solve a tempo. The sort of problems represents the sort of mistakes I make in my games.
The mistakes that cause my defeats."

No doubts about this.
But the question arises if problemsolving at CTS is the ultimate way to master the database.
Doing 30,000 problems at CTS is comparable with learning a language in the following way:
You take a list of 10,000 words of your desired language and try to memorize it by reading it 3 times.
How many words will you remember after doing so?
This is not a very effective way to learn a new language. On the other hand If you continue to repeat the immense list you will probably learn the language in the end anyway.

The coming weeks I'll start with experimenting at CTS to find out what is a more effective way to work with the database. Yesterday I saw a program on Discovery Channel (does that exist in the States too?) about mental practicing of racers by visualising the racetrack in the mind before a race. That gave me the first idea's for experiments.
I'll keep you informed.

Another Knight joins the table.
Please all welcome Sam Dluzewski in our midst, who is trying to combine the fine art of serving beer with the road to chessmastery. I dub him The Unbarring Knight.

How to add the Knights at your sidebar.

A question that most new Knights ask is "how can I add the list of Knights to my sidebar in an easy way?"
I decided to make a post of the answer, so that I don't have to repeat it everytime.

To add all knights at once:
Go to a knight in your browser. DG and I are always up to date.
Don't forget the graduated Knights. (Hall of Fame on my blog)
Choose menu/view/source in your browser.
Now you see the html-sourcecode of the page you are looking at.
Select all the links at once and copy and paste them in the template of your blog.
Don't forget to add the knight from whom you are stealing:)

If you have additions or corrections at this post, please let me know.

New Knight

Please all give a warm welcome to our newest knight Athlumney.
He has taken the old adress of Dutchdefence which was kind of confusing at first, but it's clever too.
If I'm not terribly mistaken spelling and computers are not his forte so please have a little patience with his blog:)
I dub him The Exchanged Knight.

Circle 3 done

And another 10,000 problems bite the dust.
30,000 done 40,000 to go.

Change of URL

Fellow Knight Dutchdefence hasnt gone 404, as you might think, but his new URL is http://www.lrci.blogspot.com/ So please change your sidebar.

My memoires.

It seems to become tradition among the Knights to write their memoires after they are doing tactics for about a year.
Here is a summary of my experiences.

Earth shaking revelation #1: The importance of tactics.
Training tactics started for me 3 years ago.
The first 2 years I didn't repeat a single problem, because I believed that the sheer amount of problems guaranteed repetition of equal motifs.
This proved not to be the case.
I rebuilded my openingsrepetoire to gambits.
I did some experiments with visualisation which didn't work.
Rating improvement from 1532 to 1701.

Earth shaking revelation #2: The importance of repetition.
The third year I started to repeat problems in bundles of thousand.
The results were promising at first. From 1701 to 1751 in a few months.
A bad tournament at whitsuntide however let my rating drop to 1680.
Analysis of the games made me start endgame study. Especially pawn endings to begin with.
Further analysis showed that most points were lost due to simple tactics.
I started experiments with extended microdrills, scanning methods, rake-jogging.

Earth shaking revelation #3: Long lines consist of short ones.
If short lines allready cost you a minute to find, how on earth will it ever be possible to find long lines? So you have to learn to find the short lines a tempo. The so called tables of multiplication.
Especially the experiment were I played a tempo against the computer where the computer was allowed to think only 1 ply deep was very shocking. I managed to score only 50%!!
CTS proved to be a good tool to learn simple tactics a tempo.
My rating is improved from 1680 to 1712 again.

If I compare my improvement over the last 3 years with anybody else on the club (or other clubs, for that matter), no adult players have improved significant in the same period. Only two youth players have.
I don't think CTS is ideal, because the heap of problems is to big and hence the rate of repetition is to low. So I don't expect much of it before I have done 100,000 problems.
And that is what I plan to do.
In the mean time I think about a method to generate a problembase myself and to break the problemset up into more managable parts, systemized by motif.

Allthough my rating didn't grow much I'm actually very pleased with my findings thus far.
I feel I'm on the right track.

During my break the last few weeks I noticed that I have difficulty with knights at the other side of the board. Due to perspective aberations I sometimes see the wrong squares to be under attack by a hostile knight. I'm looking for a method to improve my vision.

Further I decided to cut down a little with commenting on other blogs. It simply costs to much time. We have a lot appearances with our choir, so studying music will be a major issue the next months.

Fallen off the earth.

So that was a nice break of blogging and study!
It was totally unplanned, it just happened.
I had studied chess for exact one year with an average of 3-4 hours a day.
I can't remember I missed a single day.

Past weeks I was engaged in other things, among them making two websites for both the choirs of Margriet. For some reason I became obsessed with embedded fonts for both MSIE and Firefox. Usually my attitude towards technology is "don't use it if it is immature". But here we have a technique that should have been mature for ages, but for unknown reasons it is not.
Anyway, there are zillions of occupations out there which are by far more silly than playing chess.

I did play my weekly games at the club though. Analizing my games, I'm more convinced than ever that CTS is the right way to go for me, so I will try to pick it up coming weeks.
We have subscribed for the ""33th cream-cheese rapid chess tournament" which starts in two weeks.
That consists of 5 G30 round robin.
I hope I will perform bad there, because that will boost my study efforts for the Corus tournament in january.

I'm not sure my unplanned break is over, but we'll see next week.