Temposchlucker

Back to the basics. Having done a lot of mate in 1-hard (M1-h) lately, it becomes clear that it is important to have your chess atoms in top condition. Under chess atoms (the chess basics) I comprehend the four basic actions of Radovic: Attack Restrict Block Protect  In a way 15 seconds per M1-h is not so shabby, when you consider the workload you process in those 15 seconds. Yet I feel it should be possible to do it much faster. But in order to do so, I have to become much faster at the basics. I don't think it is a waste of time to work on M1 solely. When I do chess problems at CT, it is evident that I suffer from the same weakness, being slow with the basics. I expect that improvement of the basics acquired doing M1, fully transfers to the other regions of tactical problems. Comparing mate in 1-easy (M1-e) to mate in 1-hard (M1-h).  I compared the M1-e with the M1-h. The main difference that I found is that with the M1-e the king is often at the rim of the boar...

Aox has, a bit by accident I presume, developed a nifty program to train aura vision: mate in 1 - hard. As usually I'm overly critical about everything and take nothing for granted. That makes me quite annoying, not in the least place for myself. But there is nothing mean, or personal, or stubborn or nagging meant. I just doubt everything, that's a habit I had all my life. Twelve years of fruitless chess improvement has made me an expert in being wrong. Kinda. So I hope you will bear with me. A bit about automatic training. Although this post is about aura vision, I can't resist to talk about speed. In the past we talked a lot about speed and automatic training. I came to the conclusion that training has to be conscious to yield results. There remained one clear exception though that contradicted this statement. I became better at playing Troyis by just playing it without any thinking whatsoever. In fact that even made me perform like a 2600 rated grandmaster at this...

The experiments with vision have lead to two important conclusions, until so far. The first is that a good thought process is paramount in order to guide your focus. The second conclusion is about the importance of visualization-I. We will talk about thought processes later. Let's focus on visualization-I first. Visualization-I. Visualization-I = seeing the course of the future positions before the minds eye. It turns out that this type of visualization heavily leans on a specific subtask. If you do not master this specific subtask, then visualization-I is virtually impossible. Beyond a certain threshold of complexity, the burden on STM becomes to great and the visualization collapses. This specific type of board vision that is a subtask of visualization-I, I would like to call "aura vision". Aura = the squares that are covered by a piece. The lines or geometrical figure that emanate from the piece. If you can't see the aura of the pieces of the current position ...

I have experimented with the master level exercises of ICT 2, lately. One thing that became clear, is that we need an "inner Robert Coble" chess module, that tells us "Qc4+!!" (ok, I will stop joking about that). Aox (luckily) never got tired to tell us, that we need a thought process. He is right. Just sitting back and focussing out works somewhat, at least it prevents tunnel vision, but it is not enough. We need to interrogate the position somehow. To some extend, a thought process is highly personal. If you never miss a pin, there is no need to add it to your thought process. It is already internalized. I have done my share with thought processes. I  trained the systems of other guys, and I invented my own brand. Usually, after a few weeks or months, I forgot the exercise and it went into oblivion. Yet I have a habit to sweep the board for targets and attackers, which stems from those periods of training a thought process. In general, those training sessions w...

Latest update Jan 19, 2016 To get a little order in the mess, a few definitions are given. The goal is to simplify the discussion somewhat. There is no pretension of correctness or completeness. The definitions are only applicable for chess improvement. In broader domains these definitions are not usable. Please feel free to add suggestions or corrections. I will add this list to my sidebar. Aura = the squares that are covered by a piece. The lines or geometrical figure that emanate from the piece. Chunking = is a term referring to the process of taking individual pieces of information (chunks) and grouping them into larger units. By grouping each piece into a large whole, you can improve the amount of information you can remember. It is especially used to enhance the STM. Combination = combination of motifs Cue = A Retrieval Cue is a prompt that help us remember. When we make a new memory, we include certain information about the situation that act as triggers t...

Yesterday I listened to a video of Dan Heisman about vision. He discriminates between three types of vision. Board vision Tactical vision Visualization Board vision. This encompasses the roles and tasks of the pieces, and the squares they are covering. For simplicity I will call the latter the "aura" of the pieces. Investigating this at CT lead to the conclusion that I'm explicit weak at visualizing the aura of the pieces and I tend to overlook overworked pieces. Tactical vision. My tactical vision is well developed after a zillion+1 exercises. The problem is that somehow the cues that should trigger the recognition do not fire immediately, but only after some period of trial and error. When triggered, the "aha" feeling is immanent. The habit of  uncontrolled trial and error should be erased. Visualization. Heisman uses this term for seeing how the position looks like in the future, when pieces have moved. The main problem here is that information...

I'm well aware that my babble about vision might not be very clear immediately to everybody. The following diagram gives a simple example of what I try to accomplish. Black to move I tried to solve this first in my usual trial and error mode, but with that I didn't came very far. But when I focussed on the covered squares, the invisible cage the king is in becomes slowly visible. And then the moves are easy to find. I take my time to develop a better square vision. Renko's ICT 2 provides exactly the right kind of exercises that can be used to develop square vision.

It just gets the job done. A housewife asked her husband to do some shoppings with the list she made. She wasn't amused when he came back. She couldn't belief her eyes. For those who can't read Dutch, a translation of the list: 1 Milk 2 Cucumber 3 Butter 4 Greek yoghurt 5 Tomatoes 6 Eggs I'm busy with visualizing Renko's advanced forced move sequences. I'm definitely not in my comfort zone. So I guess I get additional karma points for that.

In the previous post I came to the conclusion that my errors at CT are common and trivial oversights. Like missing a knight fork, overlooking a defender, missing a simple take back etcetera. And I asked the question: "Why do these simple things pop up so difficult?" As an answer, AoxomoxoA sent me a video a few times. Which I didn't notice of course, since I was busy with other things ;) If the video doesn't start The answer is: you don't see things you are not looking for. In the video above, you are asked to focus on the amount of passes of the white team. Hence you miss the moondancing bear. What's the remedy? There seem to be two directions of thought here. Focussing out.  If I want to see the bear, I have to focus out, and forget about the instruction "count the passes". The problem with that, is that there are a zillion things to see. The details of the clothes, the gender of the participants, if they are wearing glasses, how t...

Today I analysed my mistakes in a somewhat different way than usual. In stead of looking for more understanding of the position, I looked at the things that I missed. That turned out to be a very embarrassing experience. From the exercises I did at CT today, I failed 28%. Without exception , all errors were caused by the fact that I missed something very, very trivial. I missed: knight forks, overworked pieces, simple takes, the presence of a defender, a counter check, the right square to flea too for my king, a few different mates, an unprotected queen behind a pin etcetera etcetera. All of these patterns are all too familiar. I have seen them literally thousands or maybe even ten thousands of times over and over. Why do these simple things pop up so difficult? If you are lucky, it takes 50 seconds. If you have bad luck, it doesn't pop up at all. In 28% of the cases, for me. Of course you can't perform a decent calculation, with these numbers. It either takes too long or...

When I started my visualization training with problems at CT in blitz mode, I initially was mainly interested in the "yellow and red" problems. The one I failed or which took me a terrible long time. Although these problems are clear indicators of what is wrong with my tactical ability, they might not provide the fastest road to improvement. Because I fail to solve them quick and correct, there are some problems connected to these positions for me. These problems are highly personal, of course. But since they are somehow problematic to me, they take a lot of time to master.  After experimenting a little, I noticed that the "green" problems might provide a faster way to improve my vision. The green problems are solved correctly in time. Those problems take me usually somewhere between 40 - 80 seconds. Yet if I look closer at them, it should be possible to solve them way faster. This is exactly the kind of exercise I'm looking for. I look around for 40 - 80 second...

We have acknowledged that it is a good idea to train your vision. But how do you do that? I have done an enormous load of tactical exercises and chess play, according to hundreds of different regimens, but almost none of this contributed to my vision in a measurable way. Extreme fast, extreme slow, extreme many, extreme many repetitions, without repetition, blindfold, cc, blitz, rapid, OTB, Stoyko exercise, extreme difficult, extreme easy, all kind of scanning techniques, all kinds of thought processes, all kinds of board vision exercises, exercises for specific pieces, themed exercises, random exercises, and I exaggerated each exercise into absurdum in order to be able to draw a definite conclusion. None of these exercises enhanced my vision. With three exceptions. Polgars first brick (5333+1) learned me to look at the covered squares in stead of the pieces. The first time that I did the Steps Method (basic exercises with explanation). With none of these exercises I worked with r...

If we look at what grandmasters can do when it comes to blitz, blindfold chess, simuls or smacking your average Joe from the board, it seems that they can work miracles. They must have superior brain resources, shouldn't they? That is what I though before I started to think about chess improvement. But when I saw our club champion having his ass handed over by a 14 yo boy, I knew for sure: it's a trick! The boy couldn't focus very well on the board, since his mind was way too fickle to look at the board. Most of the time he looked around, inpatient waiting for a move from my red headed club fellow. I've been devoting twelve years to get my head wrapped around this trick. The main problem always seems to be that our brain resources were way too limited to play a complicated game like chess. Every time we discussed this, I always ended with the conclusion that we should reduce the load of our brain resources somehow. I never believed for long that we should speed u...

 [Disclaimer] We have somewhat of a terminology problem here. I'm hesitant to use the terminology of others, like Lasker's. I once used the term "function" for a piece whose task it was to be captured, and Robert rapped me on the knuckles for that ;) I'm using terms in my usual sloppy way and don't bother too much about the definition of other people. So please bear with me. A typical solution of a problem by me goes this way: Trial and error Think POP 1 the popping up of motif 1 Trial and error Think POP 2 the popping up of motif2 Trial and error Think POP 3 the popping up of motif3 Thought process about stitching the motifs together to a combination What it should be, though: POP 1 the popping up of motif 1 POP 2 the popping up of motif2 POP 3 the popping up of motif3 Thought process about stitching the motifs together to a combination  The trial and error/think stage before every POP isn't necessary, and cost an incredible amo...