Temposchlucker

. . . The inspiration of NM Dan Heisman has brought me alot further. A few definitions from his article bootstrapping analysis skills : Thought Process – The entire progression of thinking that takes place from the time a player sees a position until a move is made. The two main components are analysis and evaluation. Analysis – The process of creating a move tree; this includes identifying candidate moves for both sides at all depths of the tree. Calculation – The ability to analyze forcing sequences, e.g. “I take, he takes, then he has to move the knight…” Evaluation – Determining in a given position which side stands better, by how much, and why. Evaluation is usually performed at quiescent nodes of the analysis tree. Quiescent – (“Quiet”) A position that contains no forcing moves (checks, captures, and threats) of any consequence for the player to move. And the three types of “visions”: Visualization – The ability to keep track of w

. . . The past 10 years I often complained that 1 + 1 <= 2. That's to say, I always got what I trained for, or less. There was never a bonus, never a self accumulating effect, no rent, no unexpected fruitfull side effects, no magical brain changes overnight. So if you would have asked me if chess training is good for anything but chess then I was inclined to answer it in a negative way. It is of course a nice idea that if you want to raise funds for your chess hobby to claim that it improves your school results too or so. But I didn't found any proof of such beneficial side effects. Recently matters have changed. If you train a skill, your brain all of a sudden shows a self organizing effect which I haven't seen when I trained in a conscious way. If you give your subconsciousness no other instruction than to improve the speed at which you can see a knightfork then the brain reorganizes itself and assimilates a strategy to do so. Take for instant Troyis. I never took th

. . . 27? Yes, I did not count the amount of tactical tags well at Chess Tempo. But all 3 Fritz exercises are done in 3 seconds at average. Wich is 2 - 3 times faster than before.

. . . 3 seconds limit. For the moment I stop with the board vision exercise of Fritz where you have to point out the pieces which are under attack. I'm now able to do it 2,5 times as fast as I used to. I can now do a single instance of the task in 3 seconds at average. I consider 3 seconds the limit of automation. Slower than 3 seconds per instance and you are thinking in stead of doing. Of course it should be possible to do it even faster, since there is still often hesitation, yet it is good enough for now. How much work is it? I needed about 23 hours for 17.000 repetitions. Those figures are close to my findings with Troyis. That leads to the following hypothesis: To automate any simple task you need 22 hours of practice and do 15.000 repetitions. Hence for 3 board vision tasks and 23 tactical tags of Chess Tempo you need 26 x 22 = 572 hours or about one year at a pace of 2 hours per day. One down, 25 to go. Back to the salt mines!

. . . At a pace of 2 hours a day it will take me about a year to do all exercises that form board vision and tactical vision. Besides that, I wil have to work on my analysis. As NM Dan Heisman put it: Analysis is the process of creating a move tree; this includes identifying candidate moves for both sides at all depths of the tree. I will stick to this definition. For two months I have played 20 minutes blindfold chess per day. Somehow it doesn't feel that it quite satifies the needs to learn to analyze. It sounds reasonable enough, "with blindfoldchess you will learn to keep track of the pieces without actually seeing them". I'm sure there are elements in blindfoldchess that are quite usefull for analysis. Yet there are other elements that aren't covered. Even in blindfold chess you have the problem that you have to analyze a position. It is important to know more about this process of analysis. I haven't reached any definite conclusions yet, so let me first

. . . The brain seems to have a preference to do tasks with the slow conscious part of the brain. In order to automate a task you need to speed up your exercises. Only when you try to do the task faster than your conscious brain can follow the brain is forced to transfer the task to the automatic part of the brain. Last saturday morning I was training with Fritz board vision exercises. My brain wasn't quite awake and I could not go faster than 15 targets per minute, what was my average the days before. 4 seconds is about the highest speed the conscious brain can go for low level tasks like deciding if a piece is under attack. After trying to speed up for one and a half hour, all of a sudden something changed. Suddenly I became aware of where the essential pieces were and what they were doing. There was no focus or interest of a particular piece, but I just was aware where they were without actually seeing them. There was really overview of the board. I was in the zone like that Fre