Temposchlucker

Update: I just added 20 points to my personal record at CTS: 1616 . So I finally passed the 1600 mark!! My estimated average rating at CTS improved from 1470 to 1570. 100 points is a substantial improvement. Enough to base conclusions on. First conclusion: Problem solving at CTS results in a higher CTS rating. Maybe you smile about this, but I remember very well in the early days that we saw no significant improvement by guys with 10K+ at CTS. So I nearly quit because of that. But my infamous crude calculations convinced me that 10K is way too little to see significant improvement. I'm glad I managed to hang on. The second conclusion, about what it will do OTB, will have to wait. It is vacation time now, so no rated games ahead the next two months.

The comments from readers of this blog are often very inspiring. This was Mousetrappers' comment on my previous post: Pattern recognition seems to be an equation with many variables. One of them is the number of patterns stored in LTM. Another one is the search patterns that make jump them from LTM into awareness. And yet another one is the ability to check if patterns are valid or not. In CTS it often happens that I see a pattern A (say a back rank mate) and try to exploit it with my move. Bad luck. Because within 3 seconds I missed a counter-pattern that avoids back rank mate. Instead, there is a pattern B (say a skewer of the queen, winning a knight). Had the problem before been a skewer, too, my mind (search pattern) would have been tuned to skewers, and I would have exploited it instantly, neglecting the back rank pattern. It inspired me to leave CTS alone for a few hours to search the web. I have to work on my board game addiction anyway:) I found the following (due to stupid...

Just back from CTS. . . Generalkaia asked me about my experiments at CTS. Since I haven't reached conclusions yet it actually is way too early to report about it. On the other hand it might inspire somebody else to start his own experiments. And I can use every help I can get. Before I start I think it is appropriate to apologize for my crude way of thinking an calculating. It is my beloved method to measure two or three points of a graph, to draw a line thru these points and look to where it hits the sealing (or the floor). At this way I stamp on subtleties and nuances of course, but it is a very fast way to find midway by its extremes. Why these experiments in the first place? For every ratingpoint improvement at CTS I have to solve 570 problems at average. 400 points in 400 days would mean 570 problems a day. This rises the question: can this be done more efficient? These are the issues I'm experimenting with: Repeating every problem 3-4 times. Concentrate on the essen...

Below you see my rating graph since I started with club play in 1998 . . A 1998 - 2000 2 years plateauing no matter what I tried. And I tried alot. And I mean ALOT. B 2000 - 2002 I gave up all flawed methods and I started with tactical training. WITHOUT repetition. I gained 170 points in 3 years. I did: Tasc Chess Tutor step 3-5 Papa Polgars Brick Intensive course tactics I from Renko C 2003-2004 Plateauing again. I kept doing the CD's from George Renko: Killer Moves Deadly Threats Intensive course tactics II plus 1001 x checkmate (not from Renko) D 2005 I discovered MDLM and started with REPETITION of problems. I repeated 7 times: Intensive course tactics I Tasc Chess Tutor step 3-5 Initialy my rating seemed to boost with 50 points to 1750 but. . . E 2005 Whitsuntide my rating nosedived with 80 points (in only 6 games!) to 1670 Analysis of my play revealed that it were the simple things that went wrong and not the complex ones. I deciced that Renko...

At our club there was an old guy who was very good at blitz (G/5) games. He has won many blitztournaments with players U2000 rating. But in long games he wasn't that good, he had only a rating of 1650. The reason for that was that he hadn't the patience to think long, and his ego wanted to impress the opponent by playing as fast as possible. Often having only 5 minutes used of a G120 game. It was not easy to play against him, because you had to realize that he deprived you from half your usual thinking time. You couldn't think in the time of your opponent, since he thought so little. And there was a young lad at the club. He only played once a week a serious game at the club. He didn't study or something like that, but there was only one thing he did besides his one long game per week. He played thousands and thousands of blitzgames with the old guy. Below you see a rating graph of the young lad. From september 1994 till september 1997 his rating went up from about 1520...

Today I had a beautiful example of how a patzer approaches a position. Have a look at diagram 1. Diagram 1 White to play. Since I had no clue, I started with trial and error. I tried the following moves in my minds eye: 1. bxc5 1. b5 1. Rxd5 1. Qxe5 1. Bxa6 1. e4 1. Rxg6 1. Nb7 1. Nc8 1. Nxf7 1. Nc4 None of these tries triggered something in me. Until I tried 1. Nf5 exf5 At that moment I saw the double function of e6 (protecting the bishop and defending f5) and all pieces of the puzzle felt together. The knightfork, Qg7#, the exchange sacrifice on d5). It is clear I used an enormous amount of time. Maybe the thought process that Mousetrapper is developing would have helped me here. What is remarkable is that the first move of the solution (1. Rxd5) didn't trigger anything in me. The basic pattern of the combination was only revealed to me by imagining 1. Nf5 exf5, which is actually the SECOND move of the combination. This indicates that you first have to see (as a pattern, in the...

june 12th I reached a new record at CTS, a rating of 1564. july 12th I reached 1567 july 19th I reached 1596 Since last week I haven't scored below 1564 at all. So things are definitely going better at CTS. Is there some cumulative effect at work? That would be the first time that it works in an upwards direction! Or is it just a statistical anomaly you can expect every now and then when doing so much problems?

I'm toying around with the issues from my previous two posts and the valuable comments on it. Maybe new idea's arise when formulating the same issues in other ways. Let's try. Say, we have a complex middlegame position. What does our grandmaster do with it? In the experiment with brainscanning, the people played against a computer. The scan was taken during the first 5 seconds after the computer made a move. That stood not in the original article, but research on the web revealed that. Our grandmasters Long Term Memory (LTM) is triggered and analogous positions from the past are consulted. This happens at a subconscious level. Most of the elements (both tactical and positional) of the position are recognized. As response to the stimuli (the new position) the LTM releases 2-3 potential moves. The GM starts to calculate, and one of the moves is chosen. What happens in the mind of our experienced amateur (rating 1700 or higher and at least 10 years experience in tournament pla...

Today finally my new personal chess trainingsstool arrived. The Blitz-O-Maza trainingsstool is manufactured by RatRace (TM) shock&punisystems Inc. It works via a simple capital reward and -punishment system with which you will learn chess at lightning speed. An electrifying experience! They guarantee that you never make the same mistake again. Or any mistake for that matter. Gamma-burst inflatorcap is optional. When it comes to training, what variables can we play with? Category of problems. The direction of our study can be determined by the choice of the problemset you work with. There are different categories of problems possible: Tactics Positional Endgame Strategic Opening Medical (if you want to be able to treat your opponent) The sky is the limit. I can't think of a reason that when we find a system that works for tactical problems, it wouldn't work for positional patterns. After all, a move is a move, no matter if it adresses a tactical matter or...

CTS helps to improve your OTB skills. For me that is a proven fact. But it is clearly not a very effective method. You have to work like a frantic dog, doing 50,000 problems in 600 hours to get some measurable results. There must be a better way. In an attempt to try and find it I do some brainstorming. I'm just thinking out loud. My startpoint is an article from about a year ago: A new study discloses the fact that it is not only lots of study and practice that is essential to master chess, but experts and amateur players use different parts of their brains during matches. Research by scientists in Germany involved scanning the brains of 20 men as they played against computers. Half were grandmasters the loftiest ranking in the chess world while the other half were merely good amateurs who'd practiced and played for at least 10-years. It was noticed that for a few seconds after each player made a move, tiny bits of energy called "focal gamma bursts'' appeared in h...

Update Please all give a warm welcome to another Knight getting his breech on: Daland . May his rating rise to such heights that ICC gives him a free membership! At the club I'm crushing opponent after opponent. Even much higher rated players are crushed or drawed. Yesterday I played two G60 games against an opponent which had the same rating as me a year ago (1710). I always scored 50% against him. But last friday I had difficulty to belief that we were ever of the same level. It was clear I had much more overview. He just couldn't see all simple tactical buildingstones that made up a complex position. He was blown away two times. I even let him take a move back because he would lose his queen (it wasn't for a competition, it's vacation time now). To no avail. Where does this sudden improvement come from? Since september 2005 until now I have done only two things: CTS and pawnendings. Because I don't win by grinding out pawnendings, the improvement can only be attr...

Today I had a look at an old post of mine . That yielded a few figures: #probs rat % recognized 35,000 1520 32 50,000 1540 85 What use is it to repeat the same problems over and over again? It are pretty simple problems. Because CTS only presents me with problems that I can solve within 10 seconds at average. What can be the beneficial effect of trying to solve problems that you can already do in 10 seconds so fast that you can do them within 3 seconds? When I put it this way it looks like nonsense. But the strange fact is there that (grand)masters at CTS score much better than me. Which means that they DO recognize most positions within 3 seconds. The question arises, is this a mere side effect of their training which contributes little to their performance as grandmaster (except for blitz and simuls) or is it the core of their skill? I don't know but I intend to find out. The meaning of the rating improvement from 1520 to 1540 is that I stored another 1...

Please all give a warm welcome to our newest Knight Dr Munky !! May his rating follow his skill to wuthering heights!

50,000 problems solved at CTS. 20,000 to go (repeating the problem window 7 times) I'm experimenting with stress, what seems to be good to reinforce memory. Maybe MDLM was very stressed while training hence gaining 400 points in 400 days. Or maybe he just hacked the USCF server? Update: The problem window for me at CTS is about 10,000 Since I have done 50,000 problems, I have done each problem 5 times at average. Alot of problems at CTS I have seen 20-30 times though. Meaning: the random choice algorithm within the problem window is not linear. Possibly it is more a bell curved function. So the rate of repetition of problems is much higher than I initially thought. Today I did some counting. I recognize about 85% of the positions at CTS as "hey, I have seen this one before." That doesn't translate in an extraordinary boost of my rating at CTS. Why not? Though I recognize the position, I don't remember the moves exactly (yet). So I still have to think for the moves...

PCT is a great program. So far I did the following: Tac-01 unit-13 End-01 unit-5 Str-01 unit-5 Total: 509 exercises done. I intend to do at least one unit a day per area and as much tactics as I like. The endgames are going terrible. I just hang on to increase familiarity. The strategy exercises are sometimes a little questionable. But maybe that's why I'm not a grandmaster:) The automatic (spaced) repetition of exercises is great! Margriet has done about the same amount at PCT.

At CTS I have a Rating-max of 1564 My Rating-min is about 1520 I'm speaking about low RD's meaning high probabilities. There seem to be two brainprocesses that are important when problem solving. Pattern recognition Calculation/evaluation/decision making Pattern recognition always operates at lightning speed. "within 3 seconds". "a tempo". Rating-max is dependant on your pattern recognition. The decision making part of the brain is highly influenced by what I like to call the "viscosity of the brain". This thickness is sensitive to sleep, alcohol, tiredness, illness, coffee, exercise and presumably, doping. The thicker your brain, the lower the speed of operation of this brainprocess. This viscosity makes at what level you perform between Rating-max and Rating-min. It's "the form of the day". BTW, did you know that Max Euwe experimented with amphetamines for better performance? Now you know what maximum effect you can expect f...