Temposchlucker

The Corus tournament is always the main event we look forward to. Every year we go with 10-15 men from our club to Wijk aan Zee. The whole village breathes chess. The last few hundred meters you have to drive careful because chessplayers jump before your car, deep in thoughts. Playing with 700 persons in one hall is a hard to describe experience. The athmosphere seems to exhale chess vibes and the smell of pea soup. If you go to the bathroom you fall in a discussion about the advantages of bishop a6. Before the first game there is a lot of handshaking to all those old opponents you played in previous years. You play with 10 persons of the same level in a 9 round robin. Playing nine days in the same group develops chess bonds between persons that last ever since. After the game there is the "straffe Hendrik" and other strong beers and a lot of laughter. You are in a different world. It is really vacation. I was with 1712 the lowest rated player in my group (1712-1795). Except ...

Margriet and I are playing in the Corus tournament . We play 9 games G/120+60 round robin. Total amount of players is about 650 for the 9 round event. Here you can find the results every day. I'm in groep 5F and Margriet is in groep 8B Please respect privacy. Continuous update. Day 9. I had a beautiful win with white against 1738. The whole week he had played 1. ... e5, but since he knew I'm a king's gambit player he decided to play the Pirc. He had better not!! I played my home-made attack which I developed years ago. I invested an exchange and a knight in a crushing attack. He had to give a bishop and a rook back to prevent mate, but at a certain moment he was two pieces behind. For some reason he didn't resign and I lured him in two other tricks, which handed me his last pieces. So I was a rook, two knights, a bishop and a few pawns up, but he kept playing. Some people really have difficulty to say farewell to a point. Maybe he waited for my cellphone to beep? Anyw...

To a hypothesis belongs a prognosis. In a few days I will start at Corus. What will my TPR (= tournament performance rating) be? Today my dutch rating is 1712. This reflects my performance in the summer tournaments. My average rating at CTS was 1470 in the summer. My rating gain at CTS is 60 points since then. I formulate the hypothesis that an increase of 60 points at CTS will result in a 30 points gain OTB. To gain 30 points in 9 games I have to score a TPR of 1802. Let's see what will happen.

Since I have a rather relaxed schedule at CTS at the moment (120 new+240 repeated problems a day), I deciced to score some cheap patterns by repetition of problems I have already done 7 times. Today I did for the second time step 3 of TCT (which I have done 7 times in the past 8 months ago). When I repeated step 3 for the first time a few days ago , it was rather disappointing. But today I seemed to remember a lot more. My results a few days ago I compared with doing step 3 for the first time. But my results today were comparable with doing it for the 5th time. So all these circles in the past have their value, only you have to repeat them sometimes. I intend to use during the next 9 days before the Corus tournament all the free time generated by the lazy schedule at CTS for repetition of problems I did allready 7 times in the past (I hope this is still English). I.c step 3,4,5 from TCT and 1359 problems from George Renko's intensive course tactics part I.

Circle 4 is done: 40,000 problems of 70,000 My rating at CTS is min. 1500 avg. 1520 max. 1540 I started the new system at januari 1st, 2006 To a new system belongs a new prediction: I estimate that at march 1st my rating at CTS will be min. 1550 avg. 1570 max 1590. I.c. an improvement of 50 points in 2 months. The daily workout: Solve 120 problems at CTS Select the 30 worst problems of those 120 for spaced repetition. Daily # for spaced repetition is 240 (= total of 8 days) Let's see what happens.

To prevent people from thinking I'm on vacation I beefed up my efforts. Well, actually because the Corus tournament comes nearer:) My new method is working extremely well. The last days I do 240 problems a day at CTS, to select 60 problematic problems which I use for spaced repetition. So that's 8 times as effective as my previous method (see previous post). In 3 days I have collected 3 x 60 = 180 problems for repetition. Today I did 400 problems of TCT step 3. I did the 7 circles with TCT about 8 months ago. I wanted to find out how much I picked up from it. That was rather disappointing. I remembered only 5% of the problems. It took me 3.5 hours to solve the problems with a succesrate of 96%. Which is the same as I started with at TCT. Conclusion: my 7 circles with TCT have given me very little. I allready suspected that because of my meagre results at the summer tournaments. The 5 % I did remember were the more difficult problems, which I had given more attention. From all m...

Blue Devil inspired me to have a close look at my working method at CTS. That revealed that I had learned 1,300 problems by heart. At first that didn't look too bad. After all, with CT-Art you only have a look at 1,000 problems or so. But when I realized that it is going to take me 19 years at that pace to learn 50,000 patterns, it was clear I had to improve my method. What I do now is the following: I solve ca. 120 problems at CTS. About 30 problems are failures or consume >30 seconds. I make a list of these 30 problems. I repeat these problems via a spaced repetition system (spread over several days - weeks), until I know them by heart. So I learn 30 patterns a day. Since my old method provided me 1,300 patterns in 6 months = 7 patterns per day, my new system is more than 4 times faster. 50,000 patterns can be learned this way in 4.6 year. This starts to look more like what DLM was talking about with his 400 points per year! Another good point is that this new method takes me ...

Blue Devil put up interesting questions in his comment on my last post: The main question is, what is the best way to learn pattern recognition? Via learning a zillion patterns (Tempo), or via learning a relatively small alphabet of patterns (Heisman) around which your skills accrue? Until now I haven't given these items much attention because I thought I had not the time to develop something my self. So I accepted a less than optimal method as CTS. But let's have a close look on this issue, maybe some good idea's arise. First I would like to reformulate the second question as follows: What is a better methaphore, to compare pattern recognition with learning the tables of multiplication or with learning the vocabulaire of a new language? The tables are limited to 120 items, a vocabulaire of a new language is 20,000+ Prof. Adriaan de Groot mentions somewhere that a (grand-?)master knows 50,000 positions by heart. Other sources speak of 100,000 positions. An article that espe...