Temposchlucker

The fact that my five step thought process covers all possibilities to gain wood in a forced way, makes that I sometimes can make progress by exclusion. If four of the five steps are excluded, the gain of wood must come from the remaining step. Since 3 of the 5 steps have geometrical characteristics which usually are easy to spot, a lot of time can be saved. Sometimes the solution is obscured by preliminary moves. There are two main types: moves that put the targets into place and moves that put the attackers into place. The moves have in common that the initiative must be preserved, so it are CCT moves. Example 2 Black to move and win 8/5k2/3Rn3/1p3r2/1P5P/2N2RK1/8/4r3 b - - 1 1 solution The winning motif is not visible yet. The targets are not in place. 1. ... Rg1+ preliminary move 1 forces the white king into a skewer 2.Kf2 Rf1+ preliminary move 2 attracts the white king in a double attack 3.Kxf1 Rxf3+ executes the winning double attack. The double attack is not ...

I  use a simple counting system to see if I dominate an attacking square: #attackers - # defenders. That simple system "as is", is in fact useless. The moment I look at an attacking square, I must look immediately to its defenders and see if I can annihilate them. Only the numbers after annihilation of the defenders are useful. Take a look at the following diagram: Black to move and win r5k1/5p1p/3p2pQ/1ppP2rP/4P3/5Pq1/1P3R2/1BR4K b - - 1 1 Solution  Attacking squares: f4 +1 h4 +1 h5 +1 g2 0 g1 0  h3 +1 f3 0  As you can see, the numbers give no clue where to start. What you really want to know, is if you can dominate a square after you god rid of the defenders. There are three main ways to get rid of a defender: Capture Deflect (defender is overworked) Attack There are other ways to get rid of a defender, like blocking it, but since you need to preserve the initiative, the frequency of these solutions is low. And I want to use a thought proc...

Since a few days I'm working on my thought process again. If I look at it, I waste most of my time due to a bad thought process. If I only could get rid of that spill, I would already be as fast as a master at tactics. From that point of view, improving my board vision is a form of luxury. The usefulness of board vision is limited to the visualization of current and future positions. When I started with the salt mines, I was very well aware of that. The reason that I nevertheless spent a few months with the salt mines, which are supposed to work on board vision, is twofold. First I just want to know how things work, and second Aox has a plausible hypothesis about the improvement of board vision which I like to be proven or invalidated. We narrowed the bandwidth within which subtasks can be improvable. Only the very chess "atoms" are possibly subject to improvement. Beyond them, subtasks become soon too complex to train salt mine style. Work on this will continue, most...