Tempo battle intricacies
According to mr. Caveman there are 180 categories of logical patterns, while there are 60 categories of one-movers.
That doesn't sound too bad. But the one-movers live in the arena of the tempo battle. So while the categories are simple enough, the subtleties of the tempi adds a layer of complexity over the one-movers.
The general approach of CCT is way too coarse grained to be of much use here. On the one hand there is too much redundancy in the method (too many false flags), while on the other hand the intricacies threaten to drown in the noise.
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| White to move |
r1b4r/1p2kp1p/pqnppbpB/8/2BPP3/4Q3/PP2NPPP/R4RK1 w - - 0 17
Aabling T., J. vs. Hreinsson, H., Iceland 2013/14
I consider chapter 2 In-Between moves as the most important chapter of 1001 Chess Exercises for Advanced Club Players by Ehrwich.
Notice how after the move 17.e5 a whole plethora of potential one-movers springs into life. All not good enough, yet you have to check them all. It reveals that Bf6 has no escape room.
The infamous calculation supersedes rules means apparently master your one-movers.
On a related but tangential topic:
ReplyDeleteKlein had some suggestions for training better decision making.
One final application involves training. The ideas set forth in this chapter [The Recognition-Primed Decision Model] imply that we do NOT make someone an expert through training in formal methods of analysis. Quite the contrary is true, in fact: we run the risk of slowing the development of SKILLS. If the purpose is to train people in time-pressured decision making, we might require that the trainee make rapid responses rather than ponder all the implications. If we can present many situations an hour, several hours a day, for days or weeks, we should be able to improve the trainee’s ability to detect familiar patterns. The design of the scenarios is critical, since the goal is to show many common cases to facilitate a recognition of typicality along with different types of rare cases so trainees will be prepared for these as well.
One serious problem with our present training methods (usually, working through large numbers of problems) is the difficulty in gathering applicable training problems from a large game database, as well as the lack of software to present those training problems targeted toward specific weaknesses in OUR skills (which, in turn, means that we need an objective way to identify our specific weaknesses).
It is necessary to collect a sufficient number of training examples to cover at least the majority of common patterns and associated actions that will often be encountered during games. For example, your most recent example of a logical pattern (a defender that has a restricted range of motion along the line of defense, perhaps coupled with an in-between move) is an unnamed pattern that will only be found accidentally in any tactics book. It would greatly facilitate training to have software that can find additional examples of a given pattern whether named or not), but we have no useful process for identifying an unnamed pattern as a set of conditions that can be used to search a game database for that pattern.
Presuming we can figure out a way to describe/identify a specific pattern, then we need a way to rank the examples of that pattern in terms of difficulty. That information can be used to develop software that will present training problems, beginning with the easiest ones, then increasing the difficulty level of that same pattern as more skill is demonstrated. In essence, this is an application of spaced repetition with a slight twist, allowing the software to increase or decrease the level of difficulty using different examples rather than by simply changing the frequency of repetition of the same examples over and over.
The problems we face are temporarily. They don't need a systematic fix for ourselves.
ReplyDeleteWhat we need is to work systematically on the holes in our bucket. This means that we need some sort of administration of these holes. Chessable recently added possibilities to write your own books. I haven't investigated it yet.
We need a stopwatch to discover new holes. Since using excessive time is a certain way to discover new holes.
We need a counter, to count the frequency of occurrence. Since it doesn't make sense to plug holes that occur once in a lifetime.
And we need an administration tool so we can apply spaced repetition to our problem set.
Once we have absorbed a skill, it usually stays with us the rest of our life. Like riding a bike.
When we want to teach others, we need tools like you describe. I'm not there yet. I even don't know yet whether I want that. At the moment I deem it more important to get rid of the confusion that surrounds adult chess improvement.