V . . ual . zat . on

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Phaedrus said:

I will leave the question open for now if I think that Visualization is the key for further improvement for me.

But if it is, I do not know if there is an easy fix. Yet if there is, and you would help me find it, I will carry you on my shoulders through the streets of your town to a bar where closing hour is only declared when the last customer stumbles home, or when the beer has run out!

LOL. I hope he has a strong back:)

Let's see if we can earn some beer. First we have to make an educated guess how big the chance is that visualisation alone can be the core of the problem. So far I have identified 3 tasks that have to be performed simultaneously:

• Pattern recognition.
• Evaluation.
• Visualization.

From these, two tasks are performed best in an unconscious automatic matter, so that they don't put strain on the short term memory (STM). These tasks are pattern recognition and visualization. Evaluation, thinking and guiding the line of thought is done best consciously.

Transfer.
Training should bring about the transfer of conscious performed tasks into the procedural part of the brain. If you perform tasks that are done best unconsciously in a conscious manner, you make heavy use of your STM. That is shown by a tendency to repeat the same actions over and over again, since the information in the STM fades away quickly and it needs constantly to be refreshed.

List of patterns.
For pattern recognition a short narrative is the cue that helps retrieving. See the picture above which is summarized well by the narrative "a car". As you see pattern recognition is so strong that you even can't look at the picture above without seeing a car. So pattern recognition in itself is not the problem. The problem lies in creating a list of items (car, rabbit, ship etc.) to be recognized in clouds. Or in chess positions.
A good way to create such list is to denominate the characteristics of a chess position and to compare your list with the list of a good annotator. Quality, frequency and impact on the game are factors that are paramount for the items on the list.

Visualization.
To enhance your visualization suitable low level drills are needed. To identify what needs drilling I will try to use the following criterium: what I tend to repeat during calculation. Since the tendency to repeat is a clear sign of a fading STM.
Perfect visualization (100%) I call with my eyes open moving pieces on an analysis board.
I estimate my visualization skills at 15% or so. To settle the visualization stuff once and for all I intend to go another mile with it. The pattern recognition department doesn't seem too difficult now I know how to approach it. But visualization means skills.
I cannot give Phaedrus good advice when I haven't tried it myself succesfully so I started again with board visualization exercises. The maximum I can hope for with that is perfect board visualization which equals to playing a chess game on an empty board. Since playing with a visible board (100% visualization) but with invisible pieces is still a very difficult task I can't expect much improvement from it ratingwise, but I hope to get a clear picture of how board vision should be drilled. Since an efficient drilling system would help once I start with the invisible pieces.

Effect of good pattern recognition and bad visualization.
If I translate the words of Phaedrus he claims that he has above average pattern recognition skills (for his level) and under average visualisation skills. What should that mean for his play?
His list of patterns is larger than of his opponent. It probably means his list doesn't contain tactical patterns soleley but positional and endgame patterns too. He is less inclined to find moves by trial and error but instead he recognizes a pattern and "thinks backwards" to find the moves that lead to it. He will not calculate further than the first stepping stone usually. He will avoid complexity and choose quiet solid openings. Is this true?

Another question is, is Phaedrus able to visualization improvement at all? Did he for instance improve while playing Troyis?

Close observations

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Due to some close observations of what exactly happens during calculation everything falls into place. All 3 discoveries which I made in the past play a role plus, I hate to say it, visualization.

Those 3 discoveries were:

• backwards thinking.
• narratives.
• drills that enlighten the burden of the STM by transferring subtasks from conscious thinking to the procedural memory (think of playing Troyis).

The "Tempo exercise" itself consists of 3 parts:

• Identify the characteristics of the position.
• Evaluate the characteristics.
  
• Visualize the future position.

diagram 1






















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White to move.

Identify the characteristics.
To identify the characteristics of the position you have to formule little narratives. Those little narratives consist typically of only one sentence. Like (see diagram 1):

• Black threatens mate on g2
• Bishop on e7 is unprotected
• Knightphork a6
• Queen on b7 has little space
• Both rooks are on the same diagonal (skewer)
• Whites B and Q converge at g7
• Pawnphork on d6
• Knightphork on c6
• Pawnphork c6
• Backrank mate threatens
• b6 controls a5, where you would like to put your knight

Evaluating.
A lot of the narratives above evaluate to"utter nonsense". Others look more promising. This conscious evaluation has to take place to direct the process of calculation. The very fact that you start with narratives and evaluation in stead of random trial and error of moves makes this backwards thinking.

Visualization.
After doing lots of visualization exercises I used to dismiss the necessity of these exercises with the following argument: I can't even solve these complex problems with perfect visualization (=eyes wide open plus using an analysis board) so visualisation is not paramount. So why bother? Of course you must make your visualisation as perfect as possible, otherwise it lowers your rating. But don't expect too much from it.

If you have a look at the position above, then a few characteristics of the position are missing. Those narratives can't be formulated at this very moment since they haven't emerged yet.

Take for instance the following diagram after 1.Nxb6 Nxb6 2.Na5 Qa7 3.c5

diagram 2






















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Black to move.

All of a sudden a discovered attack cxd6 emerged. That characteristic simply wasn't visible in the first diagram. This means you have to repeat the same process of characteristic recognition every few moves. At every junction of branches of the tree of analysis, that is. This nicely fits in with Aagaards stepping stones, by the way.

Calculation.
To improve at calculation it is necessary to make both characteristic recognition and visualisation as automatic and perfect as possible. At the moment I miss typically about 30% of the characteristics in a complex position, and I need a lot of brainpower for it. Which means that it is taxing for the STM.
The same is true for visualisation. Which means I have to repeat the same moves over and over again in order to keep them fresh in my STM.
No wonder that I'm bad at calculation!

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
  

Redesigning the thoughtprocess

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In order to improve calculation, the thoughtprocess has to be redesigned in such way that it is less taxing for the Short Term Memory (STM). Aagaard, Dvoretsky, Tisdall and others speak of generating candidate moves. While I was comparing that with my own experience I realized that that expression put me on the wrong foot. There is nothing that has to be generated by me. It is already out there, in the position. It only has to be recognized.

So the first step is to recognize the ideas that are already there in the position. While pondering about this I reinvented backwards thinking. All of a sudden I remembered that I already had invented this before. Due to a change of my course towards endgame strategy I had forgotten this. If you think backwards the tree of analysis is automatically pruned drastically. Once an idea is recognized, you are ready to generate candidate moves. Not at random, as I used to, but selected moves that are the most likely to materialize the recognized idea. Which is according to the statement: a grandmaster calculates way less candidate moves than an amateur.

Well, backwards thinking, Aagaards two books (excelling at positional chess and calculation), Stoyko exercises, that must be sufficient to start an experiment. See if I can iron this out to a thoughtprocess. The final test will be the very exercises of the chess exam which are about calculation and which I failed.

Picking up the gauntlet

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According to the chess exam I'm a fairly balanced chessplayer. I only suck at calculation. I suspected that a bit, but now I know for sure. All my tactical efforts and all the methods I have used didn't adress that problem. I am not the only one. Blunderprone recognized the same problem after doing the circles of madness. That indicates an essential flaw in our methods.

The strategy I followed the last year was to avoid complex positions with heavy-duty-calculations. For instance I throwed all my gambits out of the window. I was pretty succesful with that strategy and it gained me more than 100 points.
Which is in a certain way an indication of what the influence of bad calculation is. I'm sure that I can make more progress on that path (avoiding complexity), maybe another 100 points or so. But in the end I will inevitably hit the wall: bad calculation. This means that if I want to make some serious progress I must fix this problem.

I have no idea what calculation actually is. What the exact problem with calculation is. Otherwise I wouldn't have deceived myself by thinking that I made progress with calculation. I made certainly progress while doing tactical problems. But I didn't made progress with calculation. So that is the first task, to identify what calculation is about and what it's place is in the total area of chess thinking.

There are two main areas of chess thinking.
The knowledge/insight/conscious/declarative/slow/sequentieel area and the skill/unconscious/procedural/automatic/fast/parallel part. To simplify the text I will identify these areas with the terms knowledge and skill.

If I compare that with a clarinetplayer, a clarinetplayer needs skill to operate his instrument. But skill alone is not enough. Besides skill he needs the knowledge about what he should play. Without that knowledge he simply continues to play his toneladders and arpeggios without a purpose. Knowledge provides the insight in what direction to go. What to play and how. The instrument is played automatically by skill.

What is the relative proportion of knowledge and skill in chess?
With knowledge but without skill you know what to do but you are not able to do it without losing material on the way or other unexpected results.
With skill but without knowledge you can schwindle your way out of difficult situations, but you make serious positional blunders when there is not much to do.
The best games by the best CC players that aren't OTB players are a few hundred points lower rated than the best games by super grandmasters who play OTB.
It is reasonable to assume that CC players are able to equalize the skill of a grandmaster by using 10 days per move in stead of 3 minutes per move. Which means that it is the knowledge of the super grandmaster that makes his games of a higher quality. He evaluates the positions better. Because he has more adequate knowledge.

Calculation operates on the cutting edge of both knowledge and skill.
In itself calculation is a conscious process, but in order to take place it is assisted by a whole bunch of skills which are performed unconscious. Every conscious process has a serial flow and makes heavily use of the Short Term Memory (STM). The STM has about 5-9 placeholders for information and information in it decays within a minute or less, so it has to be repeated constantly to prevent it from fading away.

A serial process seems hardly suited to process Kotov's tree of analysis. A tree can have lots of branches which sprout from various junctions. This means that you have to simulate parallel processing in a serial way.

There are a lot of tasks to perform. I identified the following tasks:

• generating sensible candidate moves
• visualisation of the moves
• keeping stock of which branches you have processed
  
• evaluation of the position at the end of a branch
• keeping stock of those evaluations
  
• keeping stock of the pieces that are traded in a line
• try to make incomplete lines work
• get new ideas
• work backwards from ideas to make them work
• keep stock of two simultaneous lines if there is both an attack and a counterattack going on

It is a miracle that we are uberhaupt able to perform conscious calculations with only 5-9 placeholders in STM, and with information decaying within seconds. No wonder that I'm continuous repeating the same moves over and over again in my mind!

What are the possibilities to improve calculation or to lessen the effect of bad calculation?:

• Avoidance of complex calculations.
  
• Improve the performance of my STM.
  
• Transfer of tasks from conscious processing to unconscious processing. Which can happen parallel and doesn't make use of STM.
  

At the moment I'm working on the first option. Throwing calculation intensive openings out of the window worked fine for me lately. But I expect that the progress I can make this way is rather finite.
About the second option: I can't imagine that that is possible.
That leaves the third option. Given the fact that I already tried a whole load of methods to little avail the question remains: how?

Chess exam

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• Overall rating 1768
• Opening 1920
• Attack 1902
• Strategy 1839
• Defense 1826
• Middlegame 1814
• Tactics 1759
• Sacrifice 1710
• Endgame 1691
• Standard positions 1684
• Recognizing threats 1575
• Counterattack 1534
• Calculation 1319

Well, that is about the opposite of what I expected!
Painful, of course, as it always is to lose an illusion.
But quite interesting too!

So all the circles and tactical training didn't effect my calculation skills. At all.

At least it explains where my latest boost in rating originates (see ratinggraph)














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After long plateuing I finally found the way up again. That is the immediate result of changing my opening repertoire from gambits to positional openings. From heavy duty-calculation to less calculation intensive. The lack of calculation skills explained why I always got in time trouble with gambits. By playing simpler chess I get not in time trouble anymore hence I win from lesser rated players more often hence my rating improves lately. I wrote about simple chess here.

In the mean time it becomes clear that I cannot expect all that much from my positional approach. At Corus I noticed that there is still room for improvement by following the positional road, maybe another 100 points or so. But to make any serious improvement I will have to adress my calculation weakness.

Sigh. . . well at least I now can avoid a whole bunch of methods that don't effect calculation skills.

First I must know what Khmelnitsky means with calculation. I will study the questions again that are related to calculation and that I missed. In order to find out what they have in common and what my problem really is.

Why you need somebody else

At the moment I'm doing the Chess Exam of Igor Khmelnitsky. I like the idea of the book very much. I'm very curious how my score will be. Doing the exam is positional training at the same time. Take for instance the following diagram:

diagram 1






















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White to move.

There are two multiple choice questions related to each diagram.

Question 1: Evaluate the position.
A. White is significantly better
B. White is slightly better
C. Nearly equal
D. Black is slightly better

Question 2: What is the best move?
A. 1.Ba5
B. 1.Qh4
C. 1.Rd2
D. 1.f4

Solution [Q1: A Q2:B]
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If such position had occurred in one of my own games I wouldn't have realized that d6 is weak (my blind spot). You need somebody else to tell you that. That is why analyzing your own games all by yourself is of limited use. d6 is well restraint and cannot be pushed forward. Hence it is weak. I immediately dismissed Qh4 because it wrecks the white pawnstructure and I didn't see the point behind Rd2 at all.

You really need somebody else to show you what's in your blind spot. The black Queen holds the black position together. Blacks pieces are undeveloped, but that is a temporary advantage. So white must act quickly. With 1.Qh4, white attacks the only defender of the black pawns. The fact that it ruins your own pawnstructure is of less importance than that the black centre pawns will fall. 1.Ba5 and 1.f4 are both met by 1. ... Nc6.

Flexibility

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In my story about the 3 battles (pieces, pawns, time) BP pointed rightly out that I had forgotten about a fourth battle: the battle for the centre. One of the important aspects of dominating the centre with pawns is the manoeuvring space that you obtain behind those pawns. But why is central space more important than space on the flanks? The answer which arose was that it is because of flexibility. Tarrasch said that the threat is often stronger than the execution. I always thought that that was limited to tactics, but the same is true for the best piece placement. Aagaard already pointed out that to halt your piece development one move short before it reaches its best square is often stronger than to place it on the best square right away.

Actually I experienced that myself too. When I place a piece on its best square my opponent always takes his countermeasures right away. But when I place my piece on a flexible square from which I can reach two or more good squares on which my piece will stand active, it is much stronger since my opponent can only take countermeasures against one of my options in one single move. It has a lot of similarities with a double attack. But in stead of attacking two pieces at the same time, you "attack" two active squares at the same time.

Central squares happen to be the most flexible. That's why you should centralize your pieces. A bishop for instance can look towards active squares on both sides of the board from a central standpoint. So if you wonder where your pieces should go during development: look at the most active squares, draw a line through them and at the crospoint you will find the most flexible square.

A new height

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The new dutch ratinglist is just published:

• Temposchlucker: 1856 (+37)
  
• Margriet: 1508 (+40)
  

A new alltime high for both! This is still without our performance at Corus.

Great tournament

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We had a great tournament at Wijk aan Zee. Lots of fun, friends, chess, beer. We are very tired. Luckily I have taken an extra day off.

Tempo: shared 2nd in a group of 1836 average rating. 5/9: 3 wins, 4 draws, 2 losses. TPR 1870
Margriet: first prize in her group. 7.5/9: 6 wins, 3 draws, no losses! TPR 1631

Margriet finally breaks through her plateau. Not so easy to enter 1500+ when you learned the chess rules at age 45! She already played very well, but the last years she was used to blunder a piece every other game or so. Since she has stopped to try to imitate my style lately and have found her own style the blundering has stopped. I wouldn't be surprised when she passes the 1600 mark within a year or two.

I have proven I can hold my own in a 1836 field, with which I'm very content. A lot of positional errors is made on this level (by both my opponents and me) so that is very reassuring. Lots of room for improvement! For the first time I haven't looked at my opponents openings before a game and just played the board. I played the Polabia with both black and white and two Caro Kanns. So my opponents had plenty of time to prepare for me. To little avail.
For the first time I haven't been in time trouble at all during the whole tournament. That's highly unusual for me! Merits go to positional play in positional openings for this. Damming in the complexity derived from gambits.