Expectations

 So far the proof of my method only exists in my head. Based on my experiences during the past tournaments. I hacked two 2000 players off the board tactically, and both hadn't seen it coming. I never have been able to do so before. My success was based on the preparation for the tournaments. If I can cultivate this, a rating of at least 1950 must be possible.

I keep repeating that this is all very subjective. That is good enough to convince me, but you my dear reader must not accept that. So the next step must be to prove it in an objective way with the aid of Mr. Elo. Before the tournaments my rating was 1691, after a steady decline for years, despite a lot of training effort. In september it will become clear what the tournaments will have done for my rating.

I have trained with my new method for 240 hours before the tournaments. I expected by extrapolation to need another 740 hours to make my tactical training complete. But I found a few answers to the system 2 => system 1 transfer conundrum, So I expect that a mere 200 hours should be enough to complete my training of the ABC of tactics. Roughly two months of serious training should do the job. This means that in november the full impact of my training should become noticeable. I planned 14 rated games before the end of the year, so in januari there must be some objective evidence.

Riddles of the past

Now we solved the big problem, we are able to derive some answers to other questions as well. Why did MDLM improve while the Knights Errant who worked according his instructions did not? What did he not tell us? The answer to that is two fold. First of all he was young while the Knights Errant were not. But probably more important, he must have taken quite some time for the first circles, while his book focuses more on the speed of the later circles. So he absorbed matter in system 1 during the first circles, while we didn't since we weren't aware of the necessity of the slow approach for the first circles. I belief he mentioned it somewhere, but we didn't grasp the importance. Nor did he, since there is absolutely no justification for the speed in the later circles. It is just counter productive.

Chess is X % tactics

If we define tactics as gaining wood in a forced way, chess is not tactics where there is no such forced way. Yet in most moves, tactics play a role in the back ground. Moves are not played because they cost wood if they were. Play totally free of wood considerations is rare. It is difficult to predict how much a full mastership of tactics will bring you. I mean, not only the ABC, but a full vocabulary of words, and the capability to build sentences with tactics. Or even a complete story, as Kasparov sometimes did.

Once I talked to GM Sipke Ernst, and he told me that below 2000 games are decided by tactics. On the other hand there is the story of GM John Nunn who played 100 blitz games against a master and scored 88%. The master said, I hoped to learn some deep chess concepts, but the only things I learned was LPDO. So it is totally unclear how far a full mastership of tactics will bring you, but it should at least bring you at 2000.