Monday, October 02, 2006

Status report

My rating at CTS is stagnating for two months. I don't think there is reason to panic.
At july 2th I reached a new alltime high of 1564. My rating has been above this mark ever since for 99% of the time. Stagnation during a few months happened before.

The point is that even when I know the answers immediately, I move slow. Thus getting no points or even losing them. That is frustrating. I have to be extreme familiar with a problem before I can do it really fast. Only when every hesitation and every thought is banned I get the full reward of the problem.
So the transfer to procedural memory has to be complete before you can move on. That's very good in itself.

At the club I had a draw against 1965 and 2117 and an easy win against 1421.
The first indicators signal that I have made a big leap forward in my OTB play.
I'm no longer facing time trouble every game and I have more confidence.
It seems to me that the efforts at CTS translate much better to OTB than I expected. That's another reason I don't mind that the progress at CTS is slow.

There are alot of aspects of the game that are not covered by the problemset of CTS. I can see that clearly during a game with a higher rated player. For instance in my last game my performance at the end of the middlegame detoriated. For me it's quite evident that that part of the game can be trained in the same way as tactics.
That's why I focus on investigation on improving the method of massive repetition. Once I found a way to speed the progress up, it will be a piece of cake to apply it to other parts of the game.

One part of the investigation is about knight vision.
I'm doing knightsight drills every day for almost two weeks now. My knight vision is slowly improving. I have re-read the articles of DLM a few times. It's evident that the microdrills formed an important part of his system and that he thought very high of it.
So I take my time and set my standards high. Until now I haven't seen any indicators yet that it makes any difference in problemsolving. Neither positive indicators nor negative. But I don't think very high of my knightvision yet so it's just a matter of hanging on.

4 comments:

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  2. Congratulations to both your games and your improvement OTB. It is always inspirational to hear that these things work! It must also feel great, since you have been working so hard at this. Keep it up man and don't forget where you came from when you reach the elo 2000 ceiling. ;)

    /Chris

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  3. tempo, we have not spoken for awhile. i was working a bunch of days, and now have time off.

    yes, i noticed your progress and situation both...

    i finally got the big 85.0% at CTS and am eager, as i said, to get back to CT-Art after a two week hiatus, pushing hard for 85...

    lastly, i was finally able to make a tiny comment or post at chess.emrald.net messages without a remark or backbite from, what my dear friend likeForests aptly pointed out and who nows calls:

    *******

    or:

    ****D*g

    for the uninitiated...

    i promise to catch up at your posts, but, then again, never hear from you any more... and miss even the occassional temposchluckerisms or temposchluckeresque commments, or temposchlukcerisations, or temposchluckerations, or temposchluckerings distinctly unique to you alone.

    poor topy.

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  4. Thanks for the chesslog.de idea! I've been looking for a place to publish my games, and I don't like using slow-loading java applets.

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