Temposchlucker

 It took me 18 years to discover how to train the how . Now that is just a matter of putting it into practice on a daily basis. Which is what I do. But since I no longer have to hunt for how to train the how , my mind is free to think about the what . In the previous post, you can read about my revelation in this realm. The what is dictated by the pawns. All plans must be based on the pawns. Since those are the slow movers and can only move in one direction. The PoPLoAFun system describes the relations between the movement of the pieces. But the pawns restrict and facilitate the LoA landscape. This indicates where we can find the what . I already postulated that the method for training the how should be equally usable for training the what . And that is true. Luckily it didn't took me another 18 years to find out about the what . The past week I found out that my revelation of the previous post is indeed correct. Now it is time to define the what  into detail and to gathe...

Some brainstorming to get the juices flowing.  There seems to be some kind of trinity: What must you do How can you do it Frequency of occurrence Tactics are about gaining wood. There are three types: Material gain Promotion Mate There is a whole lot of what going on in the game. A few examples: Favourable exchanges Favourable pawn structure Claiming space Create a passer Dominance of an open file Fight for an outpost Et cetera It seems to be that every what has its own set of techniques. A sort of specified tactics which are not geared around gaining wood but around fulfilling a specific  what . We must focus on a high frequency of occurrence. Techniques around the poisoned pawn variation in the Najdorf may win you a game, but how often can you get it on the board? Or even worse, someone finds a novelty some day and a whole variation is suddenly busted. We must be careful about where we spend our time on. Exchanges have a high frequency of occurrence. They occur in every ga...

Now the mechanism is clear, it is possible to find some answers on pressing questions.  What is the best way to make progress? Analyzing master games must logically be the best. I don't think you need to invent the wheel everytime yourself, so I advocate to follow grandmasters when they analyze master games. Personally I like videos of grandmasters who analyze openings into the middlegames very much. What is the reason to analyze your own games? That has a totally different purpose. You do that to reveal your weaknesses. It is easy to develop unrealistic expectations. Ideas like "chess is 99% tactics" can easily put you on the wrong foot. First you must know what to do. Only then it make sense to figure out how to do it. What to do is for instance to saddle your opponent with an IQP and then to trade all pieces. In order to force exchanges, you need to use tactics. Fairly specific tactics. Openings are about conquering the pivot points on your lines of attack. How to bat...

 Now we know how the mechanism works, it is easier to predict what is needed in practice. If you have perfect understanding (system 2), you probably need no or little repetition. I know little stories of grandmasters who made progress by use of massive repetitions. Nobody has learned an encyclopedia by heart by starting with the letter A. Since they became demotivated everytime they needed to know something that started with the letter S or the letter T. That has to do with the frequency of occurrence. Not only should you start with the most frequent words that start with the letter A, you probably shouldn't start with the letter A at all, since it is not the most frequently used letter. So don't start with " apodictic " while you need to know what " symbiosis " is. This mechanism translates to learning openings as follows. You don't want to start with the less frequently used variations. Even more, when you need to know 60 variations, you don't want...

Robert sent me a text that he tried to post as comment. Somehow Blogger had trouble to digest it. My comment is in blue. PART I: Perhaps it would be more cogent to reference a chess-related example given by Dr. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Peak - Secrets from the New Science of Expertise , Principles of Deliberate Practice in Everyday Life , IF YOU DON'T HAVE A TEACHER. In his autobiography, Franklin himself described his training process in some detail. The following excerpt is from the Ericsson and Pool book. Please bear with me: it’s rather long. “The last time we encountered Benjamin Franklin in this book, he was playing chess for hours and hours but never really getting any better. This provided us with an excellent example of how NOT to practice— just doing the same thing over and over again without any focused step-by-step plan for improvement . [That certainly should sound familiar!] But Franklin was far more than a chess player, of course. He was a scientist, inve...

 The method I use since May 1st, works. There is no doubt about that. I feel my tactical muscle grow. Which is something I haven't felt since about 2006. When I had a grow spurt of 250 points in a period of two years. The fact that the method works seems to answer the most important questions from the past 18 years. Like: Why did MDLM's method work for him but not for the Knights Errant? What did he forget to tell us? Why did Stoyko's method work for him but not for the rest of us? What did he forget to tell us? What do the methods of MDLM and Stoyko have in common? Is chess 99% tactics? What is the role of pattern recognition in chess improvement? Can the trick of Papa Polgar be replicated or transformed for use with adults? It took me 18 years to find the answers. Inspired by the above questions I invented my own method. I use the method since May 1st. And as said, it works. But I never claimed that the method is efficient. Since I feel I haven't reached that point ye...