Temposchlucker

In order to show you why we have such difficulties to improve, I show you a problem that is very simple. With hindsight, it took me 2:48 minutes to find the first move, and 2:08 to find the second move. That was two days ago. The problem has a rating of a measly 1472. You should expect that everybody who plays chess for longer than a year, would solve this problem in less then 10 seconds, so simple is the solution. So what's going on? White to move Solution Today during a repetition session, I took another look at the position, and it took me again about a minute or two to see the solution. But now I was more alert for what was going on in my brain. Of course I saw that I could take the black bishop for free with fxe4. But my gut feeling told me that then my rook would be in trouble due to the pinned bishop on d3. The last move of black was bishop d5 to e4, and I believed that the sacrifice was not a true sacrifice, otherwise my opponent wouldn't plat that move. My...

Now we have formulated the goal of our training as transcending thoughts by pictures, maybe we can draw a few other conclusions as well. There are 30 tactical themes and 28 mating themes. These form our database of patterns. What we want, is to recognize these patterns in the actual position at hand. We seem to have problems with our cues, though. In the cloud metaphor, we have stored a series of animals in our database, yet we fail to recognize them in the clouds. We have not enough cues that trigger the retrieval from memory. If there is someone next to us who whispers in our ear "kangaroo" we would recognize the pattern immediately. A tactical theme like the skewer of the previous post, can appear in a position in a zillion different forms. For long I believed that a verbal reasoning process should provide the cues to trigger the retrieval of the right tactical theme. But any verbal reasoning process is taking way too much time to complete. Before you know it, you are ...

In search for the holy grail of tactical skill improvement, I look for ways to circumvent thoughts. Thinking is notoriously slow. Susan Polgar played a simul with 346 people with a success rate of 96%. She used 5 seconds per move at average, while their opponents had 27 minutes per move. This means she has found a way to circumvent thinking. Since you can't think about much in 5 seconds. Given the fact that she had to move to the next table too in those measly 5 seconds. If we want to copy that to some degree, we must abandon thought from the process as well. There's no way around that. We dabble around with all kinds of thought processes. I think these processes are mutually interchangeable to a certain degree, and you should stick simply with what works for you. We use terms like themes, motifs, function and the like, and we all use our own definition of them. Either fanciful or just simply borrowed from others. We should be flexible here. While I was investigating the po...

Making mistakes is highly personal. Two players of the same rating fail at quite different problems. That makes it difficult to communicate. And even a bit embarrassing, if you are sensitive to that kind of stuff. But since those mistakes are marking your personal problems, chesswise, they are the most important assets to learn from. If you want to learn from this too, you must imagine that you are the same bungler as me, temporary. Diagram 1 Problem 45650 4Q3/4r1p1/1q2pkPp/p3p1b1/2B1P3/P1P5/KP2R3/8 w - - 0 15 It took me 8 (!) minutes to find the solution. I saw it all of a sudden. The pattern is highly familiar. As usual. Of course it is an excellent opportunity to get rid of those 8 minutes. That is the kind of speeding up we are looking for. In those 8 minutes, I'm waiting for the right trigger to fire. I tried to influence it by verbal (logical) reasoning. But reasoning is by its very nature a terrible slow process. When you look at the board, you eyes are seeing only...

I didn't intend to write about counter attacks, but while I was preparing this post, I stumbled upon it, and I realised that it is the main cause of confusion for my brains. But actually, I wanted to write about step 3, the training of vision. Step 3 is under construction, and the thinking out loud that blogging is for me, has always been helpful, along with the feedback that stems from your comments. Vision. So why do I think that training of vision can help to see simple positions as simple? Why do I insist that most problems at CT are actually simple? How will visual training look like? The diagram below stems from CT problem 100388. Its rating is a remarkable 1784 , and it took me almost 3 minutes to solve it. Diagram 1 6k1/5p2/2r5/5p2/8/1r4P1/1N2RPK1/R1b5 b - - 2 7 Solution . Once you know the solution, it's hard to imagine why it took so much time to find it. And it rises the question: how can I see what is going on in this simple faster, the next time?...

Too many possibilities. In daily life, I don't like to tie my self up to any opinion any time soon. I have changed my vote several times, all over the political spectrum. I like to keep all options open, until that is not longer possible. The upside to that is, that I always can find new angles of view. It took me 12 year to formulate the final conclusion of my efforts to improve as an adult in chess: adults can only improve marginally in chess. But even then, after a two year break, I see new possibilities and reopen this cold case. The downside to this of course is that I suck at chess. I see too many possibilities. Time trouble is a recurring phenomenon. Analysing problematic positions the way I do lately, makes me see that, with hindsight, there were way less possibilities then I thought there would be beforehand. I try to figure out why I see too much possibilities. The three methods of attack: time, space and matter. I identified duplo attacks as one of the three ways ...

Summary Solve the problem. Decompose the problem Train your vision with the result of the decomposition. Repeat the vision training for the 10% positions you had the most problems with initially   Step 1. Solve the problem. Diagram 1  I did solve this problem from CT. I'm not sure if I failed, or if it only took me a terrible lot of time. Anyhow, it ended up in my pile 10% worst performances. After I found the solution, I wasn't able to grasp the whole position. Time to take a better look at it. Step 2. Decompose the problem. The goal is to get a better grasp of the position. What are the elements of the combination? What defense is used? Can I make a narrative that tells the story of this combination?   Diagram 2 . This element shows the tactical motif "double attack" against K and R with 1.Re8+ There are 3 defences against this: Annihilation of the attacker by 1... Rxe8 2.Rxe8+ Blocking the line of attack by 1... Rf8 Escape ...

I have a clear picture now of what I want from a tactical training. I know what to train, but not how to train it. Let's see if we can add some prerequisites for the training. Let me first try to explain more explicit what the training should accomplish. When I try to solve a chess problem at CT, often a lot of thinking is going on. I have tried all kinds of methods to streamline that thinking, I even developed my own approach, but in the end none of these methods gave me a diminishing in solving time. On the contrary. Any method is time consuming, and OTB that kind of escapades leads inevitable to time trouble. So in the end, what is left is my usual clueless trial & error approach. A good training method should replace the thinking about a solution with seeing the solution. It is all about vision. Since I tend to look too much at the pieces, I have to learn to look at the invisible. The essential squares don't scream at me “hey, look at me, I'm over here!!”. A go...

After a break of about two years, I started to think about chess again due to a question of someone. Thanks to the break, I forgot a lot of ballast, which is always helpful. After a week or two I reached a conclusion which you can read in the previous posts. I do some problem solving too, and it is crystal clear what the problem is. My brain is lead by the variations, in stead of being in control of it. In daily life, there usual is some logic in the things that happen, and my actions are in accordance with it as a result. This common sense seems to be gone when it comes to chess. If I make a double attack, I don't continue with the question "heh, is there a possible way he can address both threats? What if......?". In stead I continue by trial and error to find the continuation. Is a bit like chopping down a tree, then forget that you chopped it, looking around what to do next and then starting to wash your car in stead of logging the tree into little fire wood blocks ...

In the previous post we saw that we don't have to learn to recognize patterns. It is an innate ability, our legitimate inheritance. We only have to add an animal to our memory stock, and we recognize it everywhere right away. The same with a tactical motif. So what's the problem then? What do we have to learn? The point is, that we talk about invisible patterns. We are so inclined to look at the visible pieces and their geometry, that we tend to overlook the seemingly empty squares. Even more difficult, when it is not empty, but we don't have to look at the piece, but at the square it is on, as if it was empty. So it is essentially about a way of looking. We have to learn to see the invisible. If you see something that is invisible for your opponent, that is how you win a chess game. The past 12 years I have tried every single training method  I could think of to improve my tactical ability. By far the most of them didn't work. Yet I made a considerable progress...

Since prof. De Groot wrote about pattern recognition in chess, there have been a lot of people, including me, who tried to construct a database with patterns in memory. Especially for tactics. De Groot made an educated guess that such database might consist of about 100.000 patterns for a grandmaster. But his guess wasn't restricted to tactics alone. Those 100.000 patterns comprise openingspositions, positional play and endgames too. The approach of the pattern-database-in-memory constructors always has been rather straight forward, and with little knowledge or understanding of the subject. The adagium always has seemed to be: the bigger the database, the better. But let's have a fresh look at it. What do we know about pattern recognition in dayly life? If you look in the sky at a cloud, you might recognize an animal in it. There are a gazillion ways that clouds can form a familiar animal. The miracle of pattern recognition by our brain, consist of the ability to recogn...

Everybody who fails to grow despite investing considerable effort fails to learn from his mistakes. What is a mistake? That is highly personal. If you solve problems at CT, for instance, then there are problems which you solve a tempo, problems that cost you an unreasonable amount of time, and problems that you fail to solve by coming up with the wrong move. If you compare yourself with somebody of the same rating, you will see that he has difficulty with quite different problems. When you are clueless for a long time or even reach the wrong conclusion, we have a mistake at hand. Take for instance the following diagram: I deviate a little from my own definition, since I found the solution just in time, yet I have the feeling I should see what is going on a tempo, and I do not. But that doesn't matter for the idea I try to explain. I just feel that these kind of positions take me way too much time. The reason for that is I have to calculate this position mo...

After not having played a single game for two years, Jaap Amesz asked me about my conclusions now. In twelve years I tried every system I could think of, and I fell in every educative trap under the sun. After thinking about the question for a few days, I reached this conclusion: I didn't learn from my mistakes, chesswise. I tried to solve this by solving more problems, but what I should have done in stead is trying to not make the same errors over and over again. Solving more problems is, paradoxically, the lazy way. Not in the sense of effort, but in the sense of not using your brain in a conscious way. In stead I should take more time to analyze my errors, and to think about how I can prevent to make them again in the future.