Sunday, March 22, 2009

Two track policy
















.
.
.
I'm now 3 weeks busy with visualization exercises. It basically boils down at the moment to doing DLM's microdrills with no board and no pieces. I'm making considerable progress. It is already easier to evaluate a position away from the board. This is going to be a long process so it is ideally suited to do it for 15 minutes a day over a long period of time. In general two weeks would be enough for any visualisation exercise, I guess, so I can do a lot of different exercises in a year or so. Right now I'm busy with knightvision exercises. After the basic visualisation exercises I intend to continue with visualisation of long lines with no branches. Slowly adding complexity to the exercises, step by step.

While playing I noticed that after visualisation of a future position, evaluation is dearly needed. In order to evaluate, I must be able to recognize the patterns in the position first. Since most positions during a game are of positional nature I have restarted in Aagaard's excelling at positional chess, which has great positional exercises. I add consciousness feedback to the training by writing the characteristics of the position down in the form of little narratives before I compare them with the annotation of Aagaard. I'm preparing for a tournament at Witsuntide.

2 comments:

  1. Like you I have Agaards book. But there seems to be a great difference in our appreciation of this book. It did not work for me at all, and maybe caused by disappointment, I find the presentation of instruction and examples flawed.

    All of this does not however diminish my appreciation for the exercises you are developing. Keep us posted on the results.

    Cheers for conscious learning and deliberate practice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I had the same disappoinment with Buckley's book. I stopped bothering about if the solutions can be flawed. I only try to absorb the ideas, no matter if it actually works in the specific position or not. I guess you advocate step 6 for me? (which I haven't done yet BTW). I have two books of Dvoretsky too so I don't worry to run out of positional exercises anytime soon :)

    ReplyDelete