Tactics
During the last OTB tournament I was especially keen on the holes in my bucket. It turned out that tactics is still one of them.
We found out lately that there are are three stages in the transformation of knowledge into skil:
- describe the tactic as a logical narrative without branches in the variation
- conceptualize the narrative to a higher level of abstraction, so you can see the forest for the trees
- dive into the details again, to find out about the context that is necessary to make it work
When I discovered point one in March 2023, I adopted a daily training regimen. My approach was a little desultory, to be honest, since I was happy to finally shift my attention from tactics to strategy after 23 years. Yet I did my daily tactical exercises faithfully.
I surely have improved the past 1.5 years. But the tournament showed me that I did not win at least 3 games where I was clearly winning, due to tactical mistakes or unawareness.
I have seen quite a lot of matches lately, where grandmasters provided the comment. That gave me a pretty good idea of where I stand and how much work there is to do to become a reasonable tactician.
I worked only along the lines of stage one, writing logical narratives for the solution. But with the discovery of stage two and three, the question arises how I can implement these stages too.
The effect of writing logical narratives for the solution of tactical problems, already is eradicating my bad habit of haphazard trial and error. I found a good problem set which I have adopted lately. But how am I going to conceptualize the narratives? I will have to look into that.
My renewed enthusiasm for tactics seems to bear fruit. The second stage of skill acquirement is maybe already clear. The description of a tactical motif is an abstractification of the elements of a combination. Hence the logical narrative must describe the tactical motifs that are in use. I noticed that my narratives tend to go in that direction. Let me ha have a closer look at the third stage.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the third stage is about the context in which the tactical combination occurred. I used to look at these position as a compositions. Meaning that I didn't consider it as a factor at all. But the positions stem from a game, and questions like "why does this combination actually work?", "From which opening did this arise?", and "Where do the lines of attack come from?" are very relevant.
DeleteAnother excellent video which shows how positional thinking at grandmaster level works
ReplyDelete