Rehabilitating the eye of the vulture

 It took me 23 year to discriminate between the sense and nonsense in all the good advice which is so generously disseminated over the poor chess player who wants to improve. There is no such thing as bad advice, but there are certainly issues with a lack of context which renders the advice as worse than useless. 

Now the cloak of confusion was finally lifted last year, immediately logic emerged as the nec plus ultra method to educate our hungry system 1. And I started to apply logic to every phase of the game, especially the phase between the opening and the killing of the hostile king who rests in his mean castle. It convinced me that logic was indeed profusely lacking in my approach to chess.

However this will undoubtedly improve my chess, there remained some nagging questions in my head. Consistently fed by Robert. I'm always grateful when people are willing to disagree with me and don't refrain because of my lack of response.

Was this the trick that child prodigies use to become grandmaster at 14? Was this the trick that Susan Polgar used to score 96% against 1700 players in a chess simul with 2.6 seconds per move at average? I wasn't convinced.

So I intensified my observations. Why did I lose my games? What were better players than me looking at? Which aspects weren't addressed? What was the function of logic when it proved to play no role in recognizing the differences between men and women?

The function of logic is to prevent that you run around like a chicken with his head cut off. It replaces chance by a controlled approach. Logic formulated the tempo battle as an area of interest. But it didn't educate system 1 to see the tempo's.

And so besides logic another area of interest emerged: perception!

Currently I'm working my way through the book of Betty Edwards.

Luckily my system 2 is easy to convince to give up sabotage.