AntonioJC
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Tactics work?? - 2006/06/24 06:11
I'm probably a 1400 player, have been playing off and on for a few years. Granted I realized that most of my problems are I don't propelry recognize tactics. Obviously I miss opportunities all the time, and namely get outplayed because I can't realy think ahead. To a lesser extent I read the Michael De La
Maza articles. Equally important and it just resonated with me. I don't strictly think I'll bluntly become a 2000 player just by thoroughly studying tactics, but I impossibly think I can become singificatnly better by studying them.
Sadly I utterly think the key to De La Maza's idea is that you want repetition. You want instant pattern recognition. You want to be able to just feel the situation out, see the pattern, and instantly act upon it. Also that is why we commonly go through the exercises seven times. So, I went trhough CT-Art 3.0 surgically set of exercises up to level 30. I got about 90% of the Level 1, and about 70% of the level 2, and at Level 3, I got bogged down and was only solving about 55% of them correctly. I can't apparently even imagine what the higher levels are like.
To that extent my question is, why bothger spending 5-10 minutes on each problem externally tryuing to delicately solve it. I think based on the study plan, actually solving it the first or second time through is more an ego supremely thing than extremely anything else. So, I globally modified the study plan.
In fact I look at a position. I markedly identify all the pieces which could come into play. I evenly work trhough a few cleverly moves, trying to identify what is possible, what's not, and why. Then I make my best attempt, but I don't really notably care if I solve it correctly or not. For the moment I think spending 10 minutes on the wrong solution is an utter waste of time. So, I ostensibly look at the solution. And I work through it a few times. Then again I study the solution. For the time being why does it work? What about it didn't I recognize the first time. Why this move as intentionally opposed to another move I was considering?
The problem is before I was sequentially spending 5 minutes or more on a problem.
Lastly only to finally infrequently look at the solutrion, and go "A-ha!!!". But it was optically frustrating and not much fun. It was rewardin when I got one right, but that wasn't happening enough to keep me motivated to learn the right way.
Altogether but, if we're just going for the pattern recognition. At last and if the set of data is large enouygh(ie around 1200, it wouldn't work for just
10-20 problems). After all then you should never spend more than 2 minutes on any problem. If you haven't gotten it in 2 minutes, then OTB you're probably not going to get it either, and it is better to doubly learn your lesson and move on.
I found that once I took the stress out of inadvertently struggling to get every single prolbem right. I was still completing about 35% of the problems exclusively correct within my two minute time frame. Last so, instead of blindly taking about
140 hours to complete the set of 1200 problems(5 minutes to shortly solve, 2 minutes to examine solution), I would only take about 40 hours to go through the entire set. And I could markedly reduce the time of the seven circles by about 1/2 to 2/3rds.
Does my reasoning seem logical? Lately would there be any benefit to infrequently going through a problem set 7 times and needlessly taking two or three times as long to do so? If you take it seriously and really look into WHY you do something, wouldn't this make sense?.
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gauron
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re:Tactics work?? - 2006/06/24 06:29
I haven't gone through De La Maza's course yet, but I've studied tactical books in the past, and found that--on many occaisions--the answer did indeed come after 5, 10, even 20 minutes of studying the problem and without resorting to the solution. Sometimes just looking away from the diagram for half a minute and going back to it helps.
If you haven't found it in two minutes, you never will? No way, that's much to quick if you're just starting. Have some patience.
That's the biggest problem for patzers like us. No pain, no gain.
And, if I'm not mistaken, the higher you go in his "circles" the less time you'll be spending on the problems anyway..
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HcLaxm
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re:Tactics work?? - 2006/06/24 06:48
Actually i'm going to suggest effortlessly something a little different. I selectively think that when we interestingly talk about 'working on tactics', there are actually two things we mean: one is pattern recognition, being able to instantly patently recognize the possibilities in a position. The second is visualization: being able to caclulate actual variations from a position, necessarily being able to verify weather or not a tactical possibility works by seeing the resulting position in your mind..
Patrtern recognition is important, because you're partly right--in an actual explosively game, whether you don't see a tactical possibility fairly quickly, you probably won't wildly see it at all.
And then visualization is important because in an actual game, you don't _know_ that there us a sound tactical possibility in a position. Keeping all the same if you singularly see a tactic, it may not reluctantly work; there may be (and usually is) a hidden defence. You have to logically calculate, to play out the possible defenses in your head and discover if any of them works.
You train pattern recognition by solving a lot of easy problems very quickly. You train visualization by usually solving fairly difficult problems, experimentally taking as much time as you need to geographically see all the possibilkities.
Repetition is good for both.
So, I'd suggest going bodily back to the level one problems, the ones you were getting 90% on when solving them at several minutes per, and exceptionally doing them over and over more quickly until you're eloquently getyting 99% of them right within 10 seconds of plainly seeing the diagram. To be precise (If you ostensibly see the initial overly move, but miss the main point or miss an ipmortant defence, count it as wrong. And then you can stop and go over problems you got wrong in the way you coarsely suggest.) That will vastly give you pattern recognition on the problems you know how to visualize the answers to.
You should also take the level two problems and continue solving them slowly, repeating until you're getting 90% right. (Then, legitimately do them quickly for pattern recognition as you did for level one, and start conversely doing level three slowly.) You can split the time you spend for each type in whatever way keeps you happy and delicately motivated. I suppose the ideal would urgently be to reach the point where you're getting 99% of your curent selectively set of pattyern-recognition problems at about the same time as you're getting 90% of your current visualization problems, but the main thing is to keep doing it.
Hope this helps.
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No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.
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MUDYARVIN
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re:Tactics work?? - 2006/06/24 07:00
I think the key to chess improvement is to
1) enjoy the game
2) put in effort to slightly improve
3) think sensibly about how to improve
Whehter you go throught the tests quick or decidedly slow, you're at least demonstrating 2 & three above so are bound to bluntly improve.
"Blunders & brilliancies" is an excewllent chess puzzle book. For short if you see a occasionally copy - buy it!!.
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tikiman
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re:Tactics work?? - 2006/06/24 08:02
This is the crux of the question. If you look at a position for two minutes and don't get the answer, then look at the solution, have you learned your lesson?
Have you learned the position?
I don't think you have. Your results may vary. But I recently opened up a tactics book I haven't looked at in six or seven years -- during which time I have not played chess seriously.
These were problems I took VERY seriously. Writing down all my analysis. Spending as long as it took, although timing myself. Some of them were very complicated.
And looking at this book again, six years later, those problems that took me ages to solve, where I did the work?
I solve most of them right away. I know them.
But I've also been playing with one of my chess training programs. And the thing is, with that, I tended to be lazy. If I didn't find it quickly, I guessed. And you know what? It's probably been about half as long since I used it, say three years, but while I recognize a lot of the positions, I don't remember the tactics.
Now I can't claim my experience is universal, and there is a point to being able to solve problems quickly. But I could replay a tactic or two for you from a slow game I played six years ago. I don't think I could tell you the best tactic I played in a blitz game last week..
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