Exercises a la Tempo

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There are three main "inventions" concerning exercisesI have discovered the past few years. So far the very discoveries itself has costed me so much energy and time that I have never made a serious effort to bring these techniques into practice myself. Due to my latest search for a method that is less taxing for my short term memory I decided to live up to two of these ideas: backward thinking and formulating narratives. But in stead of doing this after I have looked up the solution, I start with it immediately. That means, I skip totally the phase of trial and error.

I start immediately to formulate narratives that describe what is going on in the position. I write them down and only after this I try to find candidate moves that make use of the findings in the narratives. After this I look up the solution in order to see what characteristics I didn't catch in my narratives. The first attempts to solve complex exercises this way look quite promising.

Let me give an example:

diagram 1






















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White to move.

I formulated the following narratives:

• The black king has no space
• Pawnphork on d6
• Mating square c8 is protected 3 times
• It seems that the d-file must be opened to make progress
• The black bisshop is protected 4 times
• Black bishop is pinned potentially

I missed the following:

• The rook at c7 is trapped
• d6 frees e6 and hence blacks minor pieces
• with the d-line closed it will be difficult to convert the win of the exchange
  
• A knight on b5 cannot be taken (=solution, this is better than Nf5+ which leaves the d-file closed and gives up e6)
  

The next week I will investigate if it works for more calculation intensive problems either. The advantages of this method are:

• Due to the flexibility of narratives the method can be used for all kinds of problems, not only tactical
• No spilling of time due to trial and error
• Less taxing for the STM
• Learning what characteristics of the position I miss every problem