Temposchlucker

 What have I learned from the past few posts and their comments? There is little competition on the way to chess improvement. If guys even in 60 years don't absorb the patterns that belong to the removal of the guard, this means that everybody who is plateauing will not overtake you anytime soon. And even the slightest progress will set you free from the crowd. Only youngsters will be making progress faster than you. But as soon as they hit the wall, you will be catching up, no matter how slow. Nobody so far has found the holy grail of making progress after plateauing. When the competitors are plateauing too, there is no man overboard. How many subjects like removal of the guard are there to be mastered in the area of tactics? Not so much. Somewhere between 30 and 100, I suppose. Since even grandmasters make errors in this area, I think it is save to say that nobody masters them all perfectly. The fact that 100 blitz games by GM John Nunn against a 2300 player resulted in a 88-12 s...

How does the transformation of knowledge into skill work? A clear picture starts to emerge. When you look at a position there are visible salient cues and hidden salient cues. The visible cues are already absorbed by system 1. It is about the hidden salient cues where the knowledge hides which isn't transformed into skill yet. You can use every tool at your disposal to reveal the hidden salient cues. Logic, analysis trees, standard scenarios, mnemonics, books, chess engines et cetera. You are ready when the cues are no longer hidden, but are clearly visible. All those tools are only useful in the study room. Behind the board these tools are often worse than useless. OTB games give you the necessary feedback to pinpoint your weak areas which need more attention. Sounds like a healthy base for a study plan to me.

 The problem set I use is based on a few simple conditions: two movers not mate rating about 1700 Despite these straightforward choices, the set is quite diverse. Often it is questionable why it are two movers, since a lot of interesting follow up moves are left out for no apparent reason. Besides that, the end isn't always about gaining wood, as I was inclined to think. Sometimes it is about promotion, or a winning endgame, or an invasion. I gave these problems their own tag, so I can have a deeper look at them later on. I have seen most problems about 30 times, which gave me the possibility to write a narrative for each of them. I have been surprised how rich these simple looking problems turned out to be. Of the 111 problems, 11 got an extra tag "invasion" by me. I'm especially interested in that, because the study of the Art of Attack in Chess by Vukovic showed the importance of that idea. Vukovic made a starting point with his book. It is a pity that nobody has p...

 In the comments of the previous post, I mentioned the PoPLoAFun system to be a single branch idea. It is a line from attacker to target. The mnemonics describe the different elements you can encounter along the way. The study of Vukovic had learned me that the PoPLoAFun system is especially suited for a description of the kingside attack. Where the end of the line of attack is the king, and an invasion square is a point of pressure. But I'm not sure whether it is the most adequate way to describe all other tactics. Let's have another look at this diagram. White to move 2rr1bk1/p1nq1p1p/1p1N2p1/3QP3/8/6B1/PP3PPP/2R2RK1 w - - 1 1 [ solution ] What is the chain of logic here? First of all, The white Queen is under attack. So it seems logical to save the Queen with an additional punch. The white Knight attacks the rook on c8, which is the defender of the Knight on c7 So it is logical to place the white Queen somewhere where it attacks the black knight too Hence Qc4 and Qb7 spring ...

 Jim said: "I am interested in how pieces are lured off the back rank to capture . Then forced to block a rook check. on the 8th rank .the attack now has a tempo to play with." Black to move r3r1k1/5ppp/2pR1q2/2P5/1p2B3/1Q4Pb/1P3P1P/4R1K1 b - - 1 1 [ solution ] In the comments of the previous post I was somewhat worried about whether my dataset of just 111 problems was rich enough to guarantee a sufficient frequency of occurrence of the tactical elements. With that in mind I had another look at the dataset I work with. I soon  realized that there is no reason to worry for two reasons. The first reason is that I hang everything onto the PoPLoAFun framework. That framework appears in every game, so I have to work on the details anyway. As long as that condition is met, I'm making progress. The second reason is that I fiddle around with the pieces a lot. Always with the question in mind " what if ... ? ". Thus milking all details out of the position. Have a look at...

 I start to get a pretty good idea where my boat is leaking. I use my own games to have a good look at the leaks at both sides. There are different areas that need attention. The first division in type of categories is skill and knowledge. I postulated that Result = Skill x Knowledge = How x What Furthermore, I postulated that skill is the fundamental "trick" that makes child prodigies to become grandmaster at the age of 14. Whereas the knowledge is provided by their coaches. Both Skill and Knowledge have their own problems. Recently, I'm studying Birds and Latin vocabulary with the aid of Anki. I noticed that in both studies I suffer from the same problem, which I will call the "priest problem" from now on. It is the problem that you need to add more energy during the learning process. To begin with Latin, there are words that are hard to learn because they seem unmeaningful, and no associations are coupled to them: nam etiam tum quot num Etcetera. As you see, ...