Temposchlucker

. . The past few weeks Mr Z and I have been discussing visualization in chess. We arrived at the following conclusions: No concepts, no visualization. If you have not available the concept of a crocplevier you cannot recognize it, even if it bites you from behind. If you doesn't have a concept of a car, you cannot imagine it. You can't visualize it before the minds eye. If you DO have a concept though, you can't stop the mind from being able to visualize it. That clarifies why blindfold players declare to see concepts and idea's. Not pieces and board. That's why you can play blindfold chess against a much lower rated opponent so easy. Due to his mistakes it is easy to have a conceptual idea of the course of the game. That gives your mind grip. No difference between high level and low level concepts. By the mind, concepts are treated equally. No matter if it is a subtle concept how to keep h7, g7 and f7 under control by g4 when a transition to the endgame is near or...

Some time ago mr. Z came up with this position: . . Black has just played Qxe7 so it is white to move. We both struggled to calculate this position towards quiescence. Somewhere along the road I always lost focus and got into repeat mode. At a certain moment, mr.Z sent me the following narrative : Rxe7 (to take back the queen) and pins a pawn to the black king. Rd3 pins the white knight to the king on g3 Rc7 prepares to double the rooks on the 7th Nb3, to double attack the knight pinned to the white king Kg4 steps out Rf8 to defend the f pawn that is pinned to the king Ree7 to double rooks on the 7th. Black resigns because the knight can add another attacker to the pawn. The knight will win a tempo on the d3 rook if it doesnt move away. The rook can't defend against the knight because a pawn supports it. All of a sudden, without looking at the board again, I could see the whole line in front of me within about 30 seconds...

. . . Allthough the chess season hasn't started yet, it is allready itching. The Tata tournament is lurking beyond the horizon. Time to make a study plan for the next half year. First let me distill a final conclusion from my previous posts: Conclusion. In essence there is no difference between analysing a current position and a future position. Since a position is a position. The only difference is the base from which you start. With a current position you can interrogate the physical board for the exact position of the pieces. For a future position you have to interrogate the mentalization in your mind. Question. This leads to the following question. How do you form a mentalization of a future position? There are a few options. Stepping stones. Chess memory. Mentalization. Stepping stones. Jon Tisdall advocates a technique with stepping stones in combination with blindfold chess in his book "Improve your chess n...

. . . A few years ago my midlife crisis developed itself by falling in love with stone. Since then the years showed more and more a tendency to divide themselves: the winter for chess and the summer for geology. So don't worry, in september/octobre I will be back blogging regularly, when the club competition starts. Usually a summerbreak from chess serves me well.

. . . Little recognition. So far there has been little recognition of the supertrick idea. I have this idea for about 10 years now. I can be wrong of course. I'm not bound to any opinion. But as long as I have nothing better I stick with it. When I look back at those pesky 8-13 yo kids I used to encounter during summertournaments, I simply cannot imagine that their deliberate practice is decisive. Be it in quantity or quality. I always interviewed them afterwards to find out how they were working. I cannot discover any flaw or leak in my reasoning either. Guinea pig. The area of investigation has narrowed down vastly. I'm looking for the skills that maintain a stable representation of a future chessposition from where I can start analyzing. A stable platform or "stepping stone" (Tisdall) from which I can manipulate pieces without interference or a fading memory. Little is known about these skills and information is contradicting. I have to rely on the method of ex...

. . . If you look at my previous post , I divide the subjects that are presented there in two: The subjects where anyone will get an improvement by natural law as long as he is willing and able to put in deliberate practice , given enough time and effort. The supertrick . Where you can't make any progress no matter how much deliberate practice you put in it. It is the supertrick that I'm interested in. It's what makes us say, "gee, the boy is natural gifted". It gives the false impression of some kind of innate talent. Without mastering the supertrick, you simply cannot hope to ever reach a serious level of chess, no matter how much deliberate practice you put into it. Let's focus in on point 3 of my previous post: 3. The future position. All the skills you need in a current position are needed in a future position too. But there are a few additional problems to overcome too. You have to "see" the future position without using STM for it. You must...

. . . Board vision and tactical vision is being dealt with. That leaves one topic to be investigated: "Visualization – The ability to keep track of where all the pieces are (and “see” them as a position) as you move the pieces in your head, analyzing future possibilities" (NM Dan Heisman). I isolate the following 3 topics: The current position. The transition to a future position The future position 1 The current position. The current position has features that are manifest and that are not manifest. The first thing to do is to identify the manifest features. Board vision is meant to see what the pieces are currently doing. Tactical vision is an aid to see which tactical elements are present. Time by geometry. See an old post of mine how time manifests itself as geometry on the chessboard. Geometry as a method to look in the future All these techniques reveal a bit of the forseeable future. After these 3 points have revealed a few features we start to probe the ...