Thursday, January 05, 2006

Pump up the volume.

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 my efforts in the past I have learned that these two things are crucial:
  • The AMOUNT of patterns you learn per day have to be in relation with the total amount you have to learn. Otherwise it will cost you 20 years before you get results.
  • Make sure you REMEMBER the patterns you learn. A forgotten pattern is useless.

So these two rules give good direction. If one of them is not met, your efforts will yield no results. It are simple rules and it are logical rules, still I haven't followed them most of the time the past 3 years. I'm very glad I understand why my efforts didn't work well untill now.

To improve my rememberance of the patterns I take some time to visualise the crucial elements in my mind. Then I play thru the solution in my head, with my eyes closed.
Further I make use of spaced repetition. After only 3 days I feel allready that it makes a difference.

7 comments:

  1. Interesting experiment. It would be interesting to see how the other knights do on CT-Art after a few months away from it.

    You actually went through TCT seven times?!! Egads.

    Impressive performance on TCT. I am in the middle of the final section of tests in part 3, and consistently getting below 70% on this first minicircle.

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  2. What hour is best for CTS in your view? Has become very slow, this piece. Overworked, so to say. I suppose you have found appropriate time slots to do such a huge volume of problems, haven't you?

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  3. Hi Mouse, welcome back!
    Since 2 weeks the performance of CTS degraded dramatically. I found that the # of tacticians logged in doesn't matter. Before 11:00 h CET seems to be the best time. But it differs.

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  4. Blue, I went thru TCT step 3,4,5 seven times and thru George Renko's CD intensive course tactics 7 times.
    I went once thru papa Polgars brick and once thru the 3 other CD's of Renko.

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  5. Tempo, to answer your business question: Yes! Monthly sales volumes from september: 4k, 17k, 8k, 16k, and january already 3k.

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  6. 400 days from the start of program is over for me. Now my rating on FICS is 1886, at start of program it was in avarage 1800. Less then 100 points. I have not waited for all 400, but planned to have at least half and 2000 rating. Does this method work as name sounds? Has someone of knights his 400 points for 400 days? I close my experiment with MDLM method and start to invent my own method. I tried to check how MDLM method works for me, so played were small amount of rated games when I was in good condition and motivated (to be compared with OTB tourneys). That was my care about rating to check it. But now I am free of that goal. Again rating is not goal, ability is goal. Really my ability has grown after 5 monthes everyday tactic, but rating not. Thats why I'm talking about. By name rating should grow, but really not. So because of name I cared about rating. I feeled obligation to do my best to grow rating during that 400 days cause of name of method. Now I get rid of that burden. But again I wonder has anyone of knights his 400 points?

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  7. PC, in my sidebar you find a link to the ratingprogress off the Knights.
    http://temposchlucker.blogspot.com/2005/05/ratingprogress-of-knights-errant.html

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