Friday, July 27, 2007

Intermezzo

In the lower rated section of the tournament there is often a big discrepancy between the position on the board and the final outcome of the game. It is instructive to watch. Sometimes the winning move is quite obvious to me, while after a few minutes someone makes a move that gives the game away. More often than not, a move is made that I haven't even considered. If I extrapolate this, this means that the difference between a good player and a bad player is twofold: a bad player considers worse moves, and his evaluation is worse. The first is subconscious, the second is conscious, making use of the available knowledge.

I have been thinking alot about how to improve my study.
In order to get information to a subconscious level, the information must be processed in a conscious way first. Since the conscious processing of information is sequential and very time consuming, it is paramount to optimize this processing. I will give an example.

I have taken alot of time in the past to build on opening repertoire. The result is that I remember most lines pretty well. Margriet has adopted the same repertoire, but forgets the lines time and again. The reason for this is that she didn't process the information in a conscious and active manner like I did.

So this is the dilemma: when you think for yourself active and conscious, you will remember what you have found, in a subconscious way. You cannot find everything by yourself, though. In fact, you can find very, very little. And I mean very. Little.
So this is a plea to make use of what others have found. But that invites to a passive approach. If I watch a chessvideo about a new opening, the same happens to me as it did to Margriet. While watching the video I think, aha, that are interesting idea's! But within a few days I have forgotten all the lines.
Hence it is necessary to make use of the best of both worlds. Think for yourself active and conscious, but think about information from outside, supplied by the masters. I haven't thought about the way to optimize this. Yet.

1 comment:

  1. I enjoy hearing of your tournament stories. Is the phenom there?

    I hope you get in a brilliant endgame or killer combination!

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