Monday, July 31, 2006

Two records at CTS

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.

10 comments:

  1. Congratulations! That's a lot of rating points! I'm sure you will continue to see improvements in your OTB play as well. You are an inspiration for CTSers such as myself who only have a few thousand problems done. Way to go.

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  2. way to go! it was the very FIRST thing that i noticed when i logged in tonight. the best. fanastic.

    everybody hard at work today: you, wormwood, dk... the low RD boys... slogging it out.

    as i push to 1530 around 1515 to 1525, im finding my recognition of new problems to be WAY far less, so my % success can no longer rest at 85-88% daily. im struggling daily now to hold my 83.6%--mightily.

    its like im having to learn all new stuff.

    my point is that all the more respect to your new threshold. i mean you were low 1500 when i flew back from eastern usa in late june. for a moment in the outage you were even 1485 if i recall--briefly!

    so as i push up, i can no longer use the same problem set, but all new or much new or more new. its easy to drop 20 or 30 points and see what youve seen before and just whip it out. but you! as you raise, lots of new stuff or at least on the margin newer. more of it.

    ***

    alternative? for me here? slow down and sink to 1499. no thank you.

    now what shall you do at CTS dirk?

    go for 1700 or work to a new goal of application? dk

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  3. My goal is simple. Burn all the reachable 17,000 problems of CTS in my implicit LTM (I can't reach the lower 7,000 problems due to my rating). I don't really worry about succesrate. My natural cautiousness will prevent it from falling down too much, and in the end it will rise anyway.

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  4. Speaking of efficiency, have you ever compared the results of spending more or less time on tactical problems per day? I wonder how the Law of Diminishing Returns factors into tactical training. Writers who quit their jobs to write full-time are sometimes astonished that they don't produce that much more than when they were working part-time.

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  5. Likesforests,
    actually I did stop chess and training almost altogether during 4 months this spring due to the rehearsels and appearances of the choir I'm singing in. After my restart things went well indeed. What people tend to forget when they cite The Law of Diminishing Returns is "when all other factors stay equal". My goal is to make all other factors NOT equal. But changing all the other factors is a matter of trial and error. Mostly error. But there will come a moment that all other factors work together in one direction. When that moment comes, you will be the first to know:)

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  6. Hi,
    i did gain 120 Pts at CTS and hit 1600 today ( well almoust ;-). So i did look at your blogs to see what my otb-improvement might be.

    you published twice your ratings as graph with explanations here:
    http://temposchlucker.blogspot.com/2006/07/my-rating-graph.html
    and here :
    http://temposchlucker.blogspot.com/2009/02/chess-exam.html

    interesting you did gain 170 otb-poins by starting tactic training without repetition. CTS (with repetition) did give you 50? otb-points.
    That the tactics-rating-increase leads to a 30% otb-rating-increase was ( maybe ) a correct estimate of you. ( the value 30% is close to the value in the "Chess Excam" to).

    But the "repetitions" dont seem to help.(?) Maybe Silman is right: tactics is important ( but cycles maybe not!)?
    My problem with CTS is: you have to stop thinking to improve your rating. But to stop thinking is not good for OTB.

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  7. Uwe,

    that's correct. The repetitions don't seem to work. At least not better then doing problems once.

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