Sunday, December 18, 2011

Enjoying tactics again.














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Now I work out the why behind every tactic I'm enjoying tactics again.
But two questions come to mind:
  • What is the difference between a Stoyko exercise and correspondence chess?
  • Why do cc players usually not improve their OTB play?

6 comments:

  1. CC-Player dont improve their OTB? realy? I thought they learn a lot about opening for example becouse they look up GM-games and read in books and so on. In these days CC might be translated as Computer-Chess but :long-time-games at chess.com should have some positive OTB-effects, because engines are not allowed there.

    Buut i always had an eye on Kacparovs explosive improvement in chess:

    Kacparov did start with tactics training at CT with an Elo ~1800+ and had short after his FM-title with ~2300
    Since then he is doing chess.com "online" chess ( 1 move each ~3 days). He is doing his "Online" chess as "fanatic" as he did his tactics training (4000++ games in the last 2 years). Since quite a while he is not improving anymore...
    But he is now in an age where chess is maybe not everything for him anymore?

    http://www.chess.com/members/view/Kacparov

    http://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1136720

    http://chesstempo.com/chess-statistics/kacparov

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  2. I have done cc for about 5 years and it didn't improve my OTB play.

    Kacparov played 4898 cc games in about 1060 days. That is about 140 moves per day. I don't call that cc, I call that rapid.

    Besides that he was stalling at age 14. This blog is about adult players which are plateauing so you can't draw any conclusions from a 14 yo kid.

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  3. At the Beginning i did Standard at CT. My Rating did get higher and higher, but... i was getting slower and slower to. My Fide Estimate based on Standard did get down while my Standard rating did raise. I stoped Standard.



    I think: no pain, no gain.
    Just sitting and thinking a little is not enough to force the brain to "wire" new routes

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  4. I think there are at least three reasons why CC doesn't really help your OTB :

    - in CC, you lose the flow of the game, so you don't develop a thought process which rests on what you have seen during the previous moves
    - you don't calculate that much, because you can move the pieces and write notes (moving the pieces again...)
    - you don't have to agonize over the opening, which makes the game less difficult

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  5. I would say, the reason why cc does not improve your play is due to rule no. 3:
    http://aoxomoxoa-wondering.blogspot.com/2011/07/learning-improving-without-repetition.html

    For those who are to lazy to look it up, I will quote rule no.3:

    3.) "Learning ( =improving) without repetition is not possible."

    I would add: "...for an adult." because children can memorize things better. My son can reproduce a whole sentence in a foreign language he has never heard before. In contrast to my son, I (= an adult) even have to ask for a single new word within otherwise well known words.

    Nevertheless, repetition helps my son very much, too. So to avoid splitting hairs, rule no. 3 can remain as it is.

    The main point is: we need to repeat what we learn, otherwise we forget it. This is not only valid for learning chess!

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