Temposchlucker

. . . Board vision and tactical vision is being dealt with. That leaves one topic to be investigated: "Visualization – The ability to keep track of where all the pieces are (and “see” them as a position) as you move the pieces in your head, analyzing future possibilities" (NM Dan Heisman). I isolate the following 3 topics: The current position. The transition to a future position The future position 1 The current position. The current position has features that are manifest and that are not manifest. The first thing to do is to identify the manifest features. Board vision is meant to see what the pieces are currently doing. Tactical vision is an aid to see which tactical elements are present. Time by geometry. See an old post of mine how time manifests itself as geometry on the chessboard. Geometry as a method to look in the future All these techniques reveal a bit of the forseeable future. After these 3 points have revealed a few features we start to probe the ...

. . . To give everybody a chance to participate I copied a few comments of Anonymous from 2 posts back (maybe you can nickname yourself?). I did read all the heisman nooks (about a year ago), I saved 29 of them from cca 100. Just before I have written this I revisited "the seeds of tactical destruction" which looks suspiciously similar to idea I tried to convey in my 2nd post. (btw, what if we want to prearrange with a plan/opening to reach them as a piece configuration and obstruct the opponent to achieve as many as possible before we launch the attack?) I remembered I read something similar from him. So, I should make myself clearer here too, because I came down as if I think Heisman is an idiot, but he isn't of course. Still CCT isn't my cake. I agree with your conclusion about visualization. It is a strong must. To be a bit funny, it is so important you concluded it more than once throughout the years. Actually I was very excited because we came to prod...

. . . AoxomoxoA pointed to a few scientific papers about chess development here and here . I read them with great interest. It is a pity to see that science is still lagging miles behind this blog. At the other hand it is reassuring that at least their claims aren't in contradiction with my writings. Science has of course quite a few disadvantages when it comes to speedy conquering new area's of knowledge. The scientific language. First of all there is of course the scientific language that hampers communication. Scientific language is born in the time of the inquisition, where there was a necessity to write in a cryptic secret language in order to outsmart the bishops and the cardinals. As long as the clerics couldn't quite follow what you said they weren't sure if breaking your bones was what the Supreme Being demanded from them. So cryptic language was a matter of survival in those days. Later on, when the life of scientists was no longer on the line, saying simple...

. . . 3 area's. There are 3 area's of improvement to investigate: Board vision Tactical vision Visualisation of the tree of analysis (ToA). For the first two area's I have developed a method and I have proven that the method works. Based on the statistics of one game:) High time to investigate the third area of improvement. Visualization of the ToA. When it comes to managing the ToA the kind of tasks involved are split in two separate area's of investigation: Branches - Visualisation Nodes - List of candidate moves Due to the make up of the mind these are processed in different ways. The conscious brain is only suitable for a sequential or serial processing of topics. A branch without nodes is an example of a sequentially organized object. The conscious mind isn't able of multitasking or parallel processing. Only the unconscious mind can do that. When it comes to handling the nodes, our conscious mind runs into trouble. When there is no unconscious recognition of th...

. . . Yesterday I won my first game solely due to the new acquired skills to see knightforks and pins fast and easy. I played against an opponent who is tactically quite strong. It worked exactly as Dan Heisman said it would work: There was a series of captures with a knightfork involved. At the end I had the possibility to pin a knight and win a piece due to the pin. Nothing complicated, everything pretty straightforward. But I had seen the pin at the end of the series of captures which my opponent had not. I expected my method to work, but my expectations proved mostly to be wrong the past 10 years. So it is a relief that this one is confirmed. Finally. As Heisman put it: "I had a USCF 1900 rating after two years of play and was easily defeating 1600- 1700 players who were much older than I and had been playing (and reading chess material) for 10-20+ years. In the post-mortems we would review lines and my opponent would say, “I thought you would do that, but I didn’t see that at...

Papablanca asked: "Hi Tempo, I am interested in your vision on how CCT relates to seeing moves by drilled skills and/or pattern recognition. In my opinion CCT and recognition are complementary but do not function at the same time. CCT demands concious effort while recognition demands (drilled) skills. In my practice I do not rely on CCT immediately, since i have the feeling that this would dehance the benefit of pattern recognition. So first I look to a position trying to spot patterns and only then I do a CCT. Also I think when you do tactical problems using CCT (from the start of looking at the position), your pattern recognition skills are hardly trained. I am very interested in your opinion on these matters." Pattern recognition is a skill we can't help we possess. It is limited by the database of patterns we have. Just as the amount of animals we can recognize in a cloud is limited by the amount of animals in our database and not by the amount of cloudsshape...

. . . I used to think that CCT of Dan Heisman was some kind of blundercheck. Since I don't drop pieces very often, I didn't consider it to be very usefull. But in search for tasks to automate during calculation I stumbled upon it. In fact looking for CCT is a method for pruning the tree of analysis. In stead of learning to calculate branches very fast, it is much better to know when there is no reason to calculate a branch at all! The idea behind it is fairly simple. If there is no CCT, there can't be no tactic. If there is no tactic, there is no need to calculate. I have a tendency to end up in time trouble. I tried to manage that by avoiding complex openings like the King's gambit. The first tests with CCT during serious long games show that I calculate way too much! Using CCT is not as straightforward as it sounds. So I'm first going to apply it to the >2000-rated tactical problems of Chess Tempo to get the hang of it. Once the thoughtprocess is clear, I will ...