Temposchlucker

Yesterday at the club I played our former club champion (2117). In the past I always lost to him. He played a King's Gambit, which I hate to play against, of course. The game showed me two things. My strength: Attack. If I was him I had kicked black from the board. He attacked too early. My weakness: I was better in the end of the middlegame, but there I have to rely on the think-modus of my brains, which is too slow for a real game. I felt very satisfied after the game. Still today. Here is the game . I'm experimenting with chesslog.de for hosting my games.

If I was an Ideal Amateur, I would only care about the beauty and the joy of the game. I would consider rating as something that is a little dirty and as totally irrelevant to chess. I must admit that it is not possible for me to commit myself to such Saintlike standards. I allready have used the word "I" 5 times in this post, so I can't keep up the appearances that I have no ego. In earlier days I tried to deny that I was flattered by a high rating, which is of course a form of hypocrisy. The day I decided to leave hypocrisy, I started shamelessly to indulge my rating-desire (I hope this is correct English). It is of course of highest importance that such shameless behaviour is executed in a proper way. Otherwise it's not only a shame, but it is stupid and useless either:) Of course you are standing miles above this. But since you have to avoid such behaviour, it is of course important to know how it works. . . I noticed that the rating system is somewhat counter-int...

The microdrills aren't so easy that a person of my rating can do them automatically without thinking at once. That means that the drills aren't so simple that I don't need to do it. The build up of knight sight is somewhat strange: first you look one move ahead, then three. I flicked in a drill where you have to look two knight moves ahead myself. That's not easy at all. I'm drilling for more than a week now. It's too early to say something about the effects.

It was in the wee hours. My opponent was a moderate goodlooking guy with impressive biceps. As most chessplayers, he suffered from a form of OCD. He had the nasty habit of adjusting his pieces all the time. While I looked in his bloodred smouldering eyes, I scratched my cheek. This morning I cut myself with my razor. Occam's aftershave is rather irritating, maybe I should change my brand. My opponent played the Dark Side. On the board was an unorthodox position which showed some vague relationship with the French defense. But it was clear that my opponent had no respect for the positional rules of Einsteinitz. His pieces where placed with variable space between them. This had the strange effect that it seemed as if his pieces at the outer rim were able to move faster than the ones that were more close to the center of gravity of his position. Somewhat like in the accelerated dragon. Just an optical illusion, of course. I had gambited a pawn, which was taken without suspence. I got ...

In the past I put a lot of effort in improvement of my visualisation skills. You can read about that here . It improved my board vision, so that I started to see chessboards in my dreams in 3D en technicolor, but it didn't help to improve my rating. So I dismissed visulisation of the board as not usefull for chess improvement. I experimented with blindfold chess too, but found it too difficult to improve my vision via that method. I could win a blindfold game from a bad player, but I didn't improve. Every good chessplayer is able to play blindfold chess. It is a bonus where they don't have to train extra for. It's just an extra aspect of their ability to perform well behind the chessboard. During my board vision experiment, I felt that board vision alone is not enough. It is easy to visualise the path of a rook in the minds eye, since we are used to rows and colums since our youth, but the path of a bishop is hard to visualise, let alone the path of a knight. During th...

Yesterday I realized that there are a lot of "circumstancial criteria" that play an important role in my theoretical ramblings. These are just simple facts, and any theory or hypothesis must be in accordance with these facts, otherwise the hypothesis can't be true. Since these criteria are self-evident to me, I often forget to inform you about it. A few examples are: Susan Polgar used 2.6 seconds per move at average during a simul where she scored 96.6% Grandmasters show brainactivity in a different area in comparison to amateurs. MDLM isn't special. Papa Polgar produced 3 prodigies, not just one, so a prodigy is nothing special, it's just a matter of good training. There are more, but it is better to tell about them whenever a context needs them. A circumstancial fact that made a great impression on me and that is very important to understand what I'm after is the following. During the years I have played a few prodigies. 10 to 13 year old, on their streak to...

A blog is no book. In a book you represent the end result of your thoughts in a readable way. In a blog the thought processes itself are described. I realize that the rattling of thoughts in my skull are not fun for everyone to follow. I often am confronted with the fact that it looks confusing, but hey, I'm used to it! I like to apologize for that. For me it is a great help to sift my thoughts and to get inspiration. Especially the interaction with other bloggers and readers is very useful! I have the illusion that my ego isn't bound to any of the theories I advocate here, so feel free to critisize. Just realize that after you have called me crazy for three times in a row, I don't consider it to be news anymore. For me, believe it or not, my thoughts aren't chaotic at all. I often compare it with a maze, where I go to the left at each crosspoint. Even if a road looks like a dead end, I have to follow it. Just to make sure I can exclude it. Allthough it is a very labour...

It is shown that there is a (negative) statistical correlation between the #times I have repeated a problem and the solution speed. Which means that at average I solve a problem faster when I have seen the problem more times before. This was based on a wee problemset of 56 problems that I solved correct. I plan to investigate a bigger problemset in the future. So massive repetition works. It doesn't work very efficient though. The question arises, what is it what works in massive repetition of problems? We can define a broad spectrum. On the one end of the spectrum, there is a big database of 50,000 - 100,000 basic patterns you have to master. If you are confronted with a chess position you have to recognize one of these basic patterns. Since the amount of basic patterns is so high, you can say that the "pattern recognition factor" (an own invention) is low. Science did an educated guess that learning much basic patterns is a possible scenario how a grandmaster became go...

The Dutch chess season has begun. Every week we go to our club to play an unrated game G120. Today I drawed against our club champion who has a rating of 1965. Our styles don't match. I can never get grip on his position, while he can't stand my unorthodox openings. Every year it is getting tougher for him to beat me. I have more draws against him than losses lately. But I never managed to win. He used to have a rating of 2200, but he is slightly going backwards each year.

I wanted to know what the solution time is in relation to the times I have seen the problem before: #times seen before #problems avg seconds median seconds 0 5 11.0 8.6 1 15 11.4 7.9 2 15 7.5 5.1 3 11 8.1 6.2 4 5 6.9 5.0 5 3 8.9 6.1 6 1 3.1 3.1 7 1 2.3 2.3 The selection is a bit wee (56), but it is a lot of work and there are other things to do. The first 40,000 repetitions of 64,000 are not taken into account, since the history of CTS is somewhat short for unknown reasons.

Yesterday I found that I was familiar with almost all problems that I had right at CTS. Today I investigated how familiar the wrong answers were. I had a look at 32 failures at CTS. Here is the distribution of how often I had seen the problems before I did them wrong: #times seen before #problems familiarity 0 6 new 1 8 vague 2 11 familiar 3 4 familiar 4 2 familiar 5 0 familiar 6 1 familiar 1.75 avg 32 I had seen 6 problems 0 times before, 8 problems once, etc.. The problems that I had seen never or only once, looked unfamiliar or vague to me while the rest looked familiar. The familiar problems I had wrong because I fell for "cheapos". That is basically what happens when you try to speed up familiar problems: you fall for cheapo's while gambling. So the school that goes for accuracy at CTS is definitely right. But neither ...

Today I had a closer look at my performance at CTS. I did a series of 70 problems. I had 15 errors. The average solving time from the other 55 problems was 8.4 seconds. During the solution of the problems I counted the problems that I recognized. Much to my surprise that was close to 100% of the problems! So the problem is not that I have not memorized the patterns, since I have. The problem is that my braincells still need 8.4 seconds to release the answer at average! That's why my rating doesn't increase at CTS while I learned more patterns. The question arises if this is a matter of stockpiling the patterns in the wrong memory or is it a pre-phase of storing them in the right memory?

The last 3 weeks I focussed on repeating old sessions of CTS. I memorized about 1200 positions. If our old theory of 1 problem=1 pattern and 34 patterns=1 ratingpoint is correct, that should lead to an improvement of 35 ratingpoints at CTS. But I noticed no improvement whatsoever. Even a little decline. There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that this is a normal statistical anomaly. I have seen that in the past. But I have never seen that it lasted for 3 weeks. The other explanation is that the theory isn't correct. So we might have found extra circumstancial evidence that massive repetition isn't the way to go. I reworked my system of mates with The Mother Of All Mates (MOAM) . I found 29 MOAM. They are derived from King of the Spills unsurpassed Fundamental Checkmates . If you look at the 29 MOAM I think that everybody would agree why there are exactly 29 and not 28 or 30. From this I derived 55 variants of MOAM by adding pieces to the positions. This hap...

I found all 55 basic mate patterns to mate a black king on the backrank. The position of the black king can be from b8 to to g8. So I didn't cover the mates with the king at the left or right rim, nor the mates with the king in the middle of the board. Yet. All other mates are lookalikes from the 55 basic patterns. Before I cover other mates or other traps I'm going to experiment with these 55 positions to see if a viable system can be developed. The 55 basic positions are END-positions. Since every end position can be achieved via different pathways, the amount of basic positions can multiply. Let's experiment!

Yesterday I developed a logical theory about the basic patterns and their lookalikes. Since I have to obey logic, the road ahead is evident as Hobson's choice. Today I analized a set of 68 problems. The set was derived from CTS by me doing them wrong. It's far from clear how general or biassed the problemset of CTS actually is, since they don't answer questions about it. But now I personal picked them myself by doing them wrong, it is at least clear that it is not a representative set of problems. But I do them wrong while good chessplayers don't, that's good enough for me. I analysed the tactical key elements of the problemset: Tactic Key element Non key element Trap 24 8 Double attack 18 3 Pin 12 5 Discovered attack 7 1 Skewer 2 3 Overworked piece 2 Intermediate move 1 2 Stalemate 1 Invasion 1 1 Total 68 23 ...

We have found a lot of interesting stuff lately. Especially the analogy with pattern recognition and clouds is very strong (see the comment on my previous post). On the other hand my fellow bloggers Mouse, Takchess and Sciurus remind me that there are still some loose ends to cover. What have we found thus far? The mind is very economical. From objects only a few remarkable outlines are stored in memory. Most of the picture isn't stored at all. When you need the picture because you want to think about it in your minds eye, the outlines are recovered from memory and the details are reconstructed on the fly. You can easely see this for yourself. If you try to visualise your attic (or garage, or shed or whatever) for your minds eye, what you see is very incomplete. It is not as if you are in your attic and can easely look around. You see only a few outlines, and when you try to focus on details, you have to fantasize them, to reconstruct them. But most details remain simply in the m...

New memories are labile. If you learn a sequence of finger taps, and soon after you learn a second sequence, the skills (speed and accuracy) of the first sequence is disrupted by interference. Over a period of several hours, the memory undergoes consolidation, making it resistant against interference. Now learning a second sequence will not disrupt the first. Surprisingly after a memory has been consolidated, brief rehearsel returns the memory into a labile state. Normally rehearsel would refine the learnt sequence. However this can also have negative consequences. After a brief rehearsel of sequence 1, the memory becomes labile. If you you then practice sequence 2, the skills of sequence 1 will be reduced. Memories improve during sleep. The performance of a learnt motor skill is enhanced during the night. I have done quite a few experiments lately to find out what's the best schedule. Those experiments revealed a lot of delusions in my thinking about memory. I always thought it wo...