Thursday, June 21, 2007

The weakest link

The whole process of analysing a tactical position can be divided in 3:
The reasoning, seeing the moves, visualize the steppingstones.

Today I tried to visualize the whole tree with 25 branches and 125 moves from the position of Kotov's book. I was pleasantly surprised that that was fairly easy. The start was somewhat difficult, but I began to feel stronger and stronger while progressing. After a few hours it wasn't a problem to reconstruct the whole tree complete with my eyes closed. So this makes it quite clear that the reasoning is the weakest link by far.














I intend to exercise all 3 techniques apart. Since I'm so bad in reasoning, I intend to make use of ROS (TM) Reasoning Out Loud in stead of inner speech. Further I allow myself to move the pieces by hand to make it easier so I can concentrate on reasoning. After I solve all elements of the position and after checking it against the solution and the computer, I will close my eyes and visualise the whole tree. I really look forward to it.

The poor image that is procuded by the physical eye is enhanced by the brains to a beautiful picture. It's a pity that we can't use that brainpart to enhance our poor image which we create during visualisation with the mind's eye.

2 comments:

  1. Impressive that you can do it with your eyes closed. I'm still trying to learn one quadrant of the board with my eyes closed!

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  2. I have found based on my experience at chess tournaments, that the most profound reasoners often rock back and forth, and appear to be using their inner voice, but is some form of twin speak.

    I don't know what's going on, but it sure helps their chess!

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