Drilling along
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.
Tempo,
ReplyDeleteAre you just doing the DeLa Maza drills? Dan Heisman has some "board vision" drills as well that you might find helpful. If you look at chesscafe.com they have archived all of the "Novice Nook" columns. The one from September 2003 "Chess Exercises" has some vision drills that attempt to train the same kind of thing as the DeLa Maza drills.
(That article also has a few other interesting training suggestions. They're not what you're working on right now, but could be useful down the road.)
Loomis,
ReplyDeleteI do the DLM drills, along with some inventions of my own. I will check the article, thanks.
Interesting. I did exactly the same. Looking two knight moves ahead. I don't think that it helped me. But it may help you. Time will tell.
ReplyDeleteMouse,
ReplyDeletemy mind is pretty resistant against this kind of exercises. That means that I have to do a real effort. Which reminds me of the effort in exercises you and Shakmat were advocating lately.
In comparison to others at CTS I score relatively bad with knightforks. I never look at those at first instance, but only after nothing else works. Since I find it not easy to do these knight vision exercises automatic, there would be a major improvement at the moment I manage to do these exercises fast.
The point is if this translates to a faster problem solving of knight forks at CTS. From the failures I make at CTS, about 15% are knightforks. So an improvement should be measurable.
I guess it will take me at least another weak to get rid of the need of thinking during the drills. If it works, I can imagine a whole bunch of new drills that would cover the other elements of tactics.
Well I get most knight forks quickly at CTS. So maybe these drills DID help, regardless of my impression. Just go ahead with the drills and see what you get. I just prefer to do such things in real positions rather than in the sterile way MDLM suggested. BTW your knightfork weakness is my pin weakness. I have to take great effort in exploiting pins. Maybe I should do pin-drills ...
ReplyDeleteMouse,
ReplyDeleteI just prefer to do such things in real positions rather than in the sterile way MDLM suggested.
A real position is probably more difficult than the drills. I exercised it in real positions (if we call CTS and other tactical problemsets like George Renko real positions). I expected that that would make me to perform better in the more simple drills.
Which is clearly not the case.