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.

Useful comments

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 stupidity I didn't write the URL down, sorry):

In cognitive science they found a very important difference in visual span between amateurs and (grand)masters.
When they looked for 5 seconds at a chess position with more than 20 pieces, the amateurs could recall the position of only 5 pieces at average. (Typical what a short term memory can hold). The (grand)masters recalled all 20+ pieces. They found the following correlation: recall 5 pieces extra per 400 ratingpoints. They located this advantage in the brainpart for unconscious visual dataprocessing. When the presented position wasn't from a real game but randomly generated, most of the advantage of the grandmasters disappeared.

And this you can see happen on a daily basis at CTS: the positions that pose us difficulties because we have a time shortage, are easily solved by higher rated players who seem to see all pieces in such a short time. It really has a whiff of magic!

So if you want to design a chess training for yourself, make sure you adress this issue of magical speed!

No conclusions yet

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 essential underlying patterns when repeating.
• Visualizing the whole line with the eyes closed.
• Speaking out loud what I think during the problemsolving.
• Redo the session history afterwards.

OK time for some crude calculations:)
A grandmaster has stored 50,000 to 100,000 patterns in his system.
Let's take the most bad grandmaster (rating 2500): 50,000 patterns.
And let's take a person at the top of the bell curve: a rating of 1700.
I do the following assumption: a person with a mediocre rating (1700) has stored half the amount of patterns as a bad grandmaster.

rating #patterns
1700 25,000
2500 50,000

The amateur has to store another 25,000 in his LTM to increase his rating with 800 points to become a bad grandmaster. This means at average 31 patterns per ratingpoint.
I consider a problem, together with its solution and variants to be 1 pattern.

To increase from 1470 to 1600 (130 points) at CTS you need to store 4400 problems in your LTM. That means at average 34 patterns for 1 CTS-ratingpoint.

The database of CTS contains 24,000 problems.
17,000 of them are reachable to me over time. For the other 7,000 problems my rating is too high. Mastering those 17,000 patterns would give me an additional rating of 550. That's a point which we can measure overtime:)

My rating graph

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's CD's were way too complex to learn. Maybe in a later phase.

F 2005 summer
And so I started with CTS. Since then I regained most of my ratingpoints. I'm 1743 now.
Not longer plateauing and on the move again.

Blitz is OK

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 to 2020. Which is 500 points in 3 years.
After that he plateaued. He has tried ever since (= the next 9 years!) every form of study to break thru his sealing. Without succes.

It has costed me a long time to find out what has happened, but now I think I can formulate it.
The old guy had a lot of tactical patterns in his LTM. If he hadn't had these two flaws in his character (impatience and impressing opponents by fast moving), he would have had a rating of 2000+. Due to the flaws he had only 1650.
The thousands of blitz games made that the young lad got a "copy" of the database with tactical patterns in his own LTM. Since he hadn't these flaws in his character, he became a 2000+ player with it.

One of the lessons that can be learnt from this is that it's ok to play blitz, as long as your opponent is stronger than you.

You can see that he plateaued almost instantenously. He was 19 years old by then.
I think there are two factors at play: first he ran out of new patterns, second he reached an age where improvement doesn't come by itself anymore.

Trial and error

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 minds eye) the end position and then work your way back. Which is called calculation.
I have to be more precise. It was not exactly the END position what was recognized.
It was actually the position of diagram 2

diagram 2
























Of course this sort postions are not stored in LTM exactly as this diagram. With every pawn and all. Only the main properties are stored and recognized:

• The knightfork
• The mate with Qg7
• The pin along the g-file
• The black Queen can't prevent the mate without sacrificing herself

The matter I have to solve is:
How can I make that my LTM releases diagram 2 at the moment I see diagram 1.
Or: how can I store diagram 2 in LTM in a better retrievable way.

When you have a close look at diagram 1, you see that the rating of the problem is 1727.
In other words, all 1727 rated players at CTS will solve this problem in 10 seconds at average. What do I have to do so that I can do the same?

I'm experimenting with different methods. Whithout reaching a conclusion sofar.

A cumulative effect?

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?

Playing around

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 play) when confronted with the same position?
The LTM is almost not consulted at all. This sounds unbelievable, but the brainscans proof it. Furthermore, it is consistent with my own experience when I played a tempo (moving within 3 seconds) against the computer which was allowed to think only 1 ply deep. What you can find within 3 seconds is quite based on what is stored in your LTM. The quality of the emerging move within 3 seconds clearly indicates if there was something analogous stored in your LTM.
Our amateur sees the position as new and starts a process of trial and error. Heavily depending on the Short Term Memory (STM)
But this process can't emulate the responses of the grandmasters LTM.
Even a sheer unlimited amount of time is of no help. Nor is a thoughtprocess. A thoughtprocess at this place is a try to make the trial and error process more efficient. A more efficient trial and error process can only give some relative results against opponents of the same level who use their brain in the wrong way too.
From this trial and error process emerge 6-8 candidate moves. The amateur starts to calculate and one move is chosen. Scientific research revealed that the ability to calculate doesn't differ much between grandmasters and experienced amateurs. Which is consistent with my own experience. After 3 years of doing tactical exercises, my calculation ability has reached its top. I can't imagine there is something to gain for me along the road of calculation improvement anymore.

While the grandmaster actually SEES most elemental structures in the position with his minds eye, most of these elemental structures remain hidden in the blind spot of the amateur. You can only see with your minds eye what is stored in LTM, which was what I found out with my experiments on visualisation.

Update:
My all time high at CTS improved with 13 points to 1590!
My estimated average rating improved to 1550 (was 1470 when I started with CTS)

Inside the mind of Temposchlucker part II

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 a positional issue.

Quality of problems.
If you have a problemset with bad moves, you will learn wrong patterns.

Frequency on the board.
If you learn to solve problems that you will not face at the board within a lifetime it is spilled energy. For instance compositions fall in this category.

Depth of problems.
All complex positions consist of a lot of simple tactical structures. It is really important two learn the one-, two- and three-movers first. Lots of them.
It is my own experience that that helps you to solve complicated problems too.

Thematic approach.
We should test if a thematic approach to problems works best. Chess is a way too complex game for the human mind. Hence we simplify matters and isolate simple parts in problems. What masochistic tendency is that to artificial complicate matters again my randomizing the themes? Pattern recognition works via repetition of patterns and is stored in the procedural (implicit) memory. Thema's are stored in declaritive (explicit) memory. Who cares about the latter since that is of no use in a game? (see article previous post). Let's just experiment!

Size of problemset.
To ensure enough repetition the size of the problemset must not be too big. Less than 500

Total amount of problems.
Since a grandmaster has incorporated 50,000 to 100,000 patterns in his brain, 2 problems a day is not going to work miracles for you.

Amount of problems per hour.
This is connected with the move-depth of a problem.
You can do 80 simple problems in an hour (typical for CTS) or 2 complex problems in an hour (CT-art level 10?).

Speed.
The much critisized time controls at CTS are actually very good. When I started with CTS I thought it was impossible to have a look at everything within just 3 seconds. But patterns work so efficient that you can see it often in an instance if your plan is going to work. Just amazing!

[The End]

Inside the mind of Temposchlucker part I

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 his brain.

Grandmasters had relatively calm medial temporal lobes - an area thought to be crucial for performing new tasks and establishing short-term memory - during the games when compared to amateurs.

In amateurs, "focal gamma bursts" were most prominently detected in the medial temporal lobe and in grandmasters researchers measured the bursts most often in their frontal and parietal cortices, parts of the brain linked with long-term memory and the ability to perform complex motor skills.

The results of this study, which was carried on by the University of Konstanz, indicated that experts and amateurs use their brains in fundamentally different ways during a match.

The lead researcher of this study says that precisely how and why brains are used in different ways remains to be explained. He however explained that with each new move, amateurs must focus on analysing what essentially is new information. While experts are able to retrieve "chunks" of long-term memory while relying on brain circuitry outside the medial temporal lobe.

Grandmasters while studying chess get to see hundreds of thousands of different (chess board) positions. They store these 'chunks' in their brain. When they see a similar position, they retrieve the data from their memory.

Lead researcher Ongjen Amidzic said that amateurs never encode in long-term memory the information they cull over the years from a chessboard. Why remains a subject for additional study, he said.

A neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles said that this research appeared to be the first one to distinguish between experts and amateurs. And the results themselves were not entirely unpredictable.

Reading in Wikipedia revealed the following:

Depending on storage time the memory is divided in:

• Sensory memory (milliseconds - secs)
• Short term memory (seconds - minutes)
• Long term memory (days - decades)

The long term memory can be divided in:

• Declaritive (explicit) memory
• Procedural (implicit)memory

What's in declaritive memory can be explicit put into words. It requires conscious recall.

In the procedural memory there is implicit "how to"-knowledge stored. Recall of information works unconscious. It works more on a stimuli - response basis. You can't put it into words.
Complex motor skills are handled by this memory.

The article seems to suggest that grandmasters record their knowledge the same way as one learns new complex motor skills, that is in their procedural memory. While an amateur stores his knowledge explicit in his declaritive memory, where it is of no use when playing chess.(They only can talk about chess with this knowledge:)

I think this is what is meant by DLM when he talks about the difference between chess knowledge and chess ability. I remember lively discussions amongst the Knights about the difference between memorization of problems vs. plain pattern recognition. The base of the discussion was that most of us felt that these two "tasted" different.

I have studied SOPE in an intellectual way half a year ago. Now it is put to the test by pawn ending problems at PCT all this study proves to be of no use. I still score terribly on pawn endings.

So I think we do best when we look upon learning chess as acquiring complex motor skills. (Now I lose the romantic part of my readers:)
J'adoube describes it beautiful in an old post of his called Tetelestai:

Blue Devil Knight asked about percentages. If I take my time, then 100% correct. All of them. All the time. How could they not be? I've done these problems so many times it really is like playing a video game. I can do Level 10 in 18 minutes. That's smoking.

Exercise until you walk thru the problems like playing a video game. That's the way to go. I believe that the much critisized time constraints of CTS to solve a problem within 3 seconds actually is its strongest point. You can only solve a problem within 3 seconds when it is handled by your brain as a complex motor skill. Stimuli - response. A tempo:)

What's the way to acquire new motor skills?
I found two things: repetition and visualisation.
I experimented with visualisation by playing thru the solutions in my mind with my eyes closed.
At the time it seemed to work. Looking back in retrospect I don't think so any longer.
On repetition: it's not clear if the method of spaced repetition is equally suitable for procedural memory as it is for declaritive memory.

(to be continued. . . .)

Payday

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 attributed to CTS.

Why seems the improvement to concentrate in the last two months?
I belief that that has to do with closing the gap between screen vision and board vision.

So what have I found?
A. Improvement at CTS pays off in OTB play (which was a major worry).

B. It is possible to decompose complex positions into a lot of simple tactical elements. Learning these simple tactical elements improves your overview in complex situations.
To give an example: if a position consists of 10 tactical elements and you use 3 seconds per element, you will have an idea of the position within 30 seconds. Since all elements are handled by longterm memory, mistakes are not very likely.
On the other hand, if you have to think a little about every element and it takes you 10 seconds to process the data (the pre-CTS state of a pattern, so to say:), you wil need 100 seconds to get an idea of the position. And you will have to make use of the short term memory for the thinking part. The short term memory will be stretched to its boundaries with 10 elements.
Hence it is more prone to errors.

C. CTS is a steady and sure way of improvement but it is a hell of a job.

CTS indicates the direction where to go, but can a more efficient method be invented? The first idea is to limitate the # of problems to make more use of the system of spaced repetition. Any other idea's?

This little post of mine

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 1000 problems in my system so that I can do them within 3 seconds in stead of 10.

Newest Knight

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

Jubilee!!

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 everytime.
Further I have problems to move "a tempo", because of my cautious nature.
The recognition of the problems is still somewhat vague, which triggers my caution.

Let's see if things are going to change the next 20,000 problems.
I feel like exploring Terra Incognita.

A great program

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.

Doping

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 from doping.
200 exercises at CTS will do about the same.

Training at CTS has as goal to transfer the things that you do now with the calculation-part of the brain to the pattern recognition-part of the brain. So from short term memory to long term memory.

Since the Tour de France has begon I thought it would be appropriate to say something about doping;)
BTW I'm not quite sure when to use the word "drugs" and when "doping"