Temposchlucker

Precision

2012-02-05T17:09:00.000+01:00

.
.
.
Munich found this crushing attack by white at CT. See diagram.
It is a 1830 rated blitz problem which is a beautiful illustration of pattern recognition guided by context.
White to move.

.
.
.
You can find the solution here.

As you see a lot of people miss this tactic due to the wrong context. At CT you expect problems of a certain difficulty. You don't expect a simple capture. The 1830 blitz rating and my description of the crushing attack might have put even you on the wrong foot. But then again, if attacking a queen isn't crushing, I don't know what is:)

The message is that we see what we are looking for and that we don't see what we are not looking for. Even when it stares you in the face. Allthough that is very economical for the brain, it means that we have immense blind spots. Both in chess and in life.

If you think this doesn't apply to you since you saw the queen capture immediately, you are wrong.

Precision.
At the Tata tournament I asked myself during the games what the potential reach could be of the training of complex tactics which I'm doing. I realized soon that there are, besides the opening, no tactic-less moves in my games. The amount of moves you can do is always restricted by the moves that cost you wood. You always have to look for tactics yourself. This always checking for tactics for both you and your opponent is time consuming, errorprone and draining your energy. Of course not every move is a tactic, but you have to watch out for them anytime. They always play a role in the background. Being able to do this automatically and flawless would have an immense effect on my games.

The training I'm doing I consider not to be about tactics, by the way. It teaches precision in reasoning. You usually recognize the patterns that are involved soon enough. But then you must make the combination work. And when you think it works, you must attempt to falsify your move. From the 37 topics on the list which constituted my thoughtprocess there are only a few left. I left out those topics which I already check for automatically. So it became a highly personalized list:

1. What is this position about?:

Mate
Gaining wood
Promotion
Counterattack.

2. What if I could do 2 moves in a row?

3. Can I falsify my move?

The first question helps for orientation in the position.
The second question helps me to identify threats. CCT prunes a lot of garbage moves, but it introduces new ones. Since I'm always looking at checks and captures automatically, there is no need to guide my mind towards that. But question 2 brings above all the relevant threats in the position.
The third question is designed to test the correctness of my combination.

You have seen me change from exercise to exercise the past 3 years. The reason for that was simply that I was never quite convinced that it was the right method.That's different now. I have at least found the right subject to train. Precision in reasoning is imo the subject to be trained to the max. What can change is the exact method. For now the current method seems to be working fine, so I will stick to it. In fact I already do for 2 months now.

100,000 unique visitors

2012-01-31T22:05:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
.
Yesterday this blog welcomed its 100,000th visitor!

.
.
.
According to Extreme Tracking, that is. I started with Extreme Tracking on april 10, 2005. But the actual kick off of my blog was on february 9, 2005.

I managed to track down the 100,000th visitor as being Paco Vela, a bartender from Las Vegas. Please say hi to Paco.

The main goal of this blog always has been to keep track of my thoughts and to generate inspirational comments. I have never tried to generate traffic since I value quality above quantity. And about that I have not to complain! I've got lots and lots inspirational commands over the years and I want to thank you, my dear reader, for that.

I know I haven't made this blog an easy read. I could have written it funnier and clearer, but I choose not to. I used it as a way to think out loud and to catch the most volatile of thoughts before they escaped into the oblivion I use to call my brain. The fact that this blog still has readers is a compliment for you, my dear reader. You must be of an exceptional resilient breed!

Tata

2012-01-29T22:17:00.001+01:00

I scored +3 =5 -1 in group 5 at the Tata Steel chess tournament 2012 and became shared 1st. With SB points taken into account I was the best. So I will play in group 4 next year.

The downside of pattern recognition

2012-01-08T16:59:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
.
In the comments of the previous posts we discovered already one big downside of pattern recognition. Patterns fight for their life in our unconscious mind. Their very existence obeys the laws of Darwin. The fittest will survive. When we see a chess position the patterns shout to us "use me! use me!". Every time a pattern is retrieved it becomes stronger while every time it is not used it becomes weaker. Until their shouting fades away into oblivion.

When we encounter a new position, the patterns with the loudest voice manage to make it into consciousness. While the more modest patterns are overshouted by their cheeky brothers.

When a pattern that is not the best fit overshouts a pattern that is the best fit, it takes time and energy from us away. Just like in real life where the biggest mouth with an unfitted brain has the biggest wish to rule the nations. We start to spend time to make the wrong pattern work. While the clock ticks away the seconds. If we are lucky we take another look and change the context somewhat, and a more fitting soft-voiced pattern will enter our conscious mind. If we are not lucky, we miss the right pattern altogether. So one downside of pattern recognition is that it costs us time or it makes us even miss the solution alltogether. There is yet another downside though.

I have done a set of difficult problems at CT. As Munich pointed out, it probably makes no difference what range of problems you choose, as long as you fail them.
I have added intelligence to the solutions, by defining the reasons why a move in a certain position works while others do not. I formulated a little narrative with a logical reasoning in it.

In an attempt to automate this added intelligence, I did the problemset a second time. Which revealed a second downside of pattern recognition. The patterns shout so hard that the narratives can't be heard. This means, I remember the moves straight away, or the relevant patterns, but not the logical reasoning behind them. I can solve the problem without the need to remember the logic behind it. Since I want to automate the logical reasoning, this simply doesn't work. I have to invent another method.

Tagging

2011-12-29T21:50:00.000+01:00

Tagging = Adding Intelligence

Transfer

2011-12-28T01:28:00.000+01:00

.
.
.
.
AoxomoxoA said it beautifully well:

I did start at CT with standard tactics training = "focus on high rated problems. Just to minimize the effect of learning new patterns.". My standard rating did get up higher and higher... but my Fide estimate based on standard did go down and my Blitz rating did not change. The CT-Blitz-Rating is better correlated to the OTB-Elo then CT-Standard-Rating. My problem was: I was just getting slower and slower.

This is exactly the problem we have to solve. We know how to solve complex puzzles in the studyroom when we are given enough time. But it doesn't transfer to OTB play. It is exactly the problem of cc players who play well in cc but not OTB. This must be a problem of automation, of ability, of skill.

I have done lots and lots of difficult puzzles in the past with the same result as Aox. And I followed the same route to overcome it. But by focussing on patterns you are slaughtered by the law of diminishing returns, sooner or later. No, we have to dive deep in the problem as described above.

I'm taking my time not so much for finding the solution of a puzzle but for interpreting it. Asking myself: how can I find this easier in the future, how must I interrogate a position to find the solution. In an attempt to find a better way than just probing randomly generated moves. And the method has showed itself: logical reasoning. The mind only needs a pair of crutches to help. That pair of crutches is the thoughtprocess I'm building. In the hope of course to be able to throw them away one day.

The thoughtprocess is build around purposes, goals, targets.

What must be the goal of this position?
What is the problem to reach this goal?
How can I overcome this problem?
Can I falsify the remedy?

These kind of questions should help you to overcome the habit of random probing. The habit of random probing is fuelled by pattern recognition. The questions of the thoughtprocess though are gearing the mind towards a goal. Thus pruning the tree of analysis from branches of moves that don't lead towards a goal. Until the tree becomes so bald that it becomes managable for the mind.

Statistical relevance

2011-12-26T13:24:00.002+01:00

.
.
.
.
I don't know how exactly CT has extracted their tactical problemset from a database of real games. Hence I don't know if their problems represent the statistical occurence in real OTB games.
But let us assume that it is true, for the sake of reasoning.

Rating distribution of tactical problems

.
.
.
Why is this actually a bell curve? Wouldn't it be logical that the simplest combinations occur the most? This looks like it is the result of filtering by CT.

There are only about 25 different tactical elements (pin, skewer, etc.) which combine to combinations. There are 25 x 25 = 625 combinations of 2 tactical elements. 15,625 of 3 tactical elements and 390,625 of 4 elements, 9,765,625 combinations of 5 elements .

There are two strategies to handle this increasing amount of possibilities:

Learn those 9,765,625 positions by heart.
Learn to reason logically with only the 25 elements.

In the beginning the easiest progress is made by the first method. I assume when both Munich and I had our haydays with improving 200 points in under 3 months, we were working according this method. But if you have more than 100K problems under the belt, like me, you start to fall victim of the law of diminishing returns. Hence I am trying to apply the second method now.

For the second method it is best to focus on high rated problems. Just to minimize the effect of learning new patterns. Since if I learn pattern 317,516 on top of the 317,515 I already have, how will that improve my rating? By 1741/317,515 ratingpoint? I must learn to reason instead!

Definition of "something new"

2011-12-24T12:23:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
.

You might have read over it in the comments of the previous post, so I will summarize it here.
Munich had a period of 2-3 months in which he improved 200 points.
In 2001 I had a period of 6 weeks in wich I gained 170 points.

I always felt that this should be the standaard and not the exception when you train something. Oddly enough I couldn't replicate that trainingseffect allthough I tried it for 10 years.

It seems logical to look after what the training of Munich and me have in common:

We learned something that was new to us.
We both were aware that we were improving.
The automation of the knowledge happened somehow automatically, without specialized training.
No repetition exercises.
No speed exercises.

The essence of the training seems to be that we learned something new.

Of course you can't expect to improve 200 points every 3 months. But it sets a new standaard. Just like the 620 points in 2 years of DLM did.

Why can't we improve 200 points every 3 months? It's not the speed of learning that is limiting us since it is hard to believe that this speed changes all that much within a few months. If the reason for diminishing returns doesn't come from the inside, it must come from the outside.
This means that it becomes more difficult to find something new to learn that matters. That has a direct influence on the outcome of the game.

So:

It has to be new.
It has to have an impact on the outcome of the game.

Since I'm focussing on tactics solely again, everything I learn directly changes the outcome of the game. While that is the very nature of tactics. This means that I only have to worry about how to create something new. How does something new looks like in the realm of tactics?

Have a look at the following diagram. I suggest kindly you have a serious look at it before reading further.

.
.
.
.
White to move.

It is always difficult to find a catchy example since what is difficult for me is easy for others with the same rating and vice versa. What you have collected as familiar patterns is highly personal.

What happened to me here while I tried to solve this position for the first time I got lost in some sort of "concours hippique" of knight moves. There were just way too many possibilities. With no direction in my thoughts I had to throw in the towel.

Let's see what happens if we add some guidance to our thoughts:

What is this position about? The main feature is the passer on d6. This position is mainly about promothing the d6 pawn.
Besides that, the black king has to be aware that he can be mated at the backrank or the h-file. But it is unlikely that mate can be forced by white.
The pawn on d6 is hanging. It is not so easy to see how to save it and how to guide it towards the promotion square.
This adds some serious restrictions on the moves to consider. The moves have to happen with tempo and are geared around the pawn.

See the solution of the problem here.

Try to map the moves of the solution on the guidance above. Ok, at a certain moment CT reacts a bit strange, but that is irrelevant. What you see is that the moves are no longer random probes but that they follow a distinctive goal. The moves make use of accidental mating threats and accidental threats of knight forks, but they are goal-driven. Save the pawn and queen it. Of course black has to make consessions to prevent it, but you can worry about that when it happens.

In stead of relying on recognition of geometrical patterns I have learned something new. I learned a new pattern of logical reasoning. Which can be used in all sorts of similar positions.

Of course a logical pattern will be, in the end, just another pattern. And patterns you have to consolidate by some sort of repetition, while speed always can come in handy. But you have to realize, without something new, you have nothing. So keep your priorities straight.

During the first circle of 200 puzzles of 2200-2300 rating at CT I scored a measly 2% correct.
I'm now busy with the second circle and I score about 80% right. Since I can reconstruct the moves from the reasoning. Now that is what I call learning something new!

What De La Maza forgot to tell us.

2011-12-18T23:59:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
.
I always had the feeling that there was something missing in what DLM told us about his method of chess improvement. Something he forgot to tell us. Not on purpose, but for the reason that he didn't realize that it was important. All the knights who aped his method over the years failed to get the same results as DLM did. Because of this little omission.

It took me 7 years of research to find out what that little something could be. Now I have found a reasoning that might explain everything. The pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

This should be the order of training:

Add intelligence.
Automate it.

With adding intelligence I mean that you must take your time to really grasp the concept behind a tactical puzzle. You must ask yourself: what is so special about this position that it works. You must ask yourself: how must I guide my mind so that I will see the solution the next time. This is by its very nature a slow process of conscious thinking.

With automation I mean you must make this concept so familiar that you can retrieve it without thinking. The recognition must become automatic. This is done by speeding up. There can be only one way to speed up, and that is by repetition. Since if something is new, you can't speed it up.

What most Knights Errant didn't do was taking the time to really grasp a puzzle. The focus was on patterns and speed, not on concepts and understanding. What we did was that we automated stupidity. (At which we became very fast, btw)

People are usually inclined to use only one of those two methods. CC players are focussing on understanding but forget to automate it, while others are focussed on speed but forget to add intelligence. I have tried both methods, but not at the same time and with the same material.

Enjoying tactics again.

2011-12-18T16:15:00.000+01:00

.
.
.
.
Now I work out the why behind every tactic I'm enjoying tactics again.
But two questions come to mind:

What is the difference between a Stoyko exercise and correspondence chess?
Why do cc players usually not improve their OTB play?

Addendum

2011-12-15T22:04:00.002+01:00

.
.
.
.
I'm able to build a logical reasoning. I only don't do it when it comes to chess. Why not? Automatic thinking has taken over. Since automatic thinking is only semi-intelligent, it doesn't adapt to the details in the position. So I fail in the details. You can play chess only with a great deal of automatic thinking. For the reason there is no time to think consciously. Conscious thinking ist just way too slow during a game. So you can't use real intelligence in a game. I exaggerate to make it more clear.

This means that we depend on the quality of our semi-intelligence. That's why we plateau in chess at a certain level. No matter how much conscious intelligence we possess. In life this means that when we grow older we start to rely more and more on automatic intelligence. Even if it isn't very well suited for reality.

The task at hand is to improve the quality of our semi-intelligence. With the checklist I have introduced an intelligent search-strategy. I have added conscious intelligence. Now I must automate it. So that it becomes semi-intelligent. But now at a higher level. As long as it is not automated, the task at hand is just too daunting to do it consciously. But during the process of automation you simply have to bear it.

Still another problem to solve.

2011-12-14T23:02:00.001+01:00

I have been working my way through another 50 2300-rated problems at CT.
Of those I consider 2 to be difficult to find. The rest is simple once you know it.
I refined my checklist to 37 tactical elements. I could describe all 50 problems with only those 37 elements.

I scored 0% which is both amazing and fantastic.
The amazing part is that the users that have done these exercises scored about 30%. Of course it are usually the higher rated players that encounter such high rated problems.
Yet I assume that I don't score in accordance to my rating. That might have to do with the fact that I maybe have trained too much patterns. The recognition of patterns is so strong that it is difficult to come up with something different. But maybe I deceive myself here.

The fantastic part is that it exactly pinpoints why I such at chess. I can't build a consistent logical reasoning which guides my pattern recognition. I falsify moves that are good and I don't falsify moves that are not good. I'm biased towards certain patterns.

Now the problem. The checklist is formulated a bit too general. It doesn't guide my thoughts with enough precision. Besides that it is too difficult to follow the whole checklist once I got distracted by promising looking patterns.

The diagnose of my sucking at chess is perfect.
The remedy still sucks, though.

Another chance to avoid sloppy thinking

2011-12-13T05:02:00.003+01:00

.
.
.
.
Black to move.
2288 rated. Solution.

Positional chess

2011-12-10T23:35:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
.
The checklist for tactics has now 37 points. Today I did 30 difficult problems at CT and I was able to describe them all with those 37 points. Which is of course the other way around. But applying the chechecklist to problems seems to work too, though.

I'm trying to do the same with positional chess. Does anyone have an idea where I can find a database with high level and computer checked positional problems?

Context and guidance

2011-12-04T21:33:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
.
I don't have the feeling that my idea about guidance comes across very well. Let me try another angle of attack.

First I want to make one point very clear. I don't have anything against speedtraining. As a matter of fact, at this very moment I do speedtraining of the overworked piece tactic with a low rated problemset at Chess Tempo at moments when I'm too lazy to think for myself. It works and it should be trained.

But don't let the results of this interfere with the results of guidance, since that is quite a different animal. First you should read this little story.

What did I learn from this? The mind is protected against cognitive overload by context restraints. You will only find those patterns which match the actual context. I looked for two hours at the position for a positional clue (I had not invented "No DIY" yet) without noticing the mate in 3. After the context was changed, I recognised the mate within 20 seconds. So the patterns for the mate were familiar enough.

The 2200-2300 rated problems with 1-4 moves are only difficult for us due to a limited context. The context limits the patterns we can recognize. No matter how well the patterns are automated.

Remember the words of Munich:

Still, in the very fist puzzle (with the distraction theme) I only considered the check ...Rf8+, but not the check ...Bg3+. Nevertheless it is good to be able to find 35 checks/ minute instead of 6 or 7 checks per minute (the value I started with when I did the check-training).

This is an example of context-restraint pattern recognition.

Now what am I trying to accomplish with that guidance stuff? A checklist with logical questions guides you through the right context. It protects you from cognitive overload by restraining the patterns to be recognized by their relevance to the context. The mind is beautyfully organized!

Did you notice that whenever the context is changed by a hint that you slap your head and recognize the relevant patterns at once? Not only are you able to recognize the patterns, but you are able to visualize them too.

Take for instance this position from a video of GM Rowson (see diagram).

.
.
.
.
White to move and win (that's a context!)
Rowson couldn't solve this problem within 20 minutes. He complained that he suffered from a cognitive overload. There are just way too many possibilities, even with only 4 pieces!

You can formulate a few concepts that will limit the amount of possibilities. For instance:

A check is always safe.
Pinning the pawn is always safe.
Covering the promotion square is safe when the king doesn't protect that square too.
If you can put your queen on c1 there is time to approach with your king
The same is true when you can force the black king towards c1
Beware of stalemate with the king on a1 and the queen taking c2
Mate enters the equation when you can win tempo's for advancing the white king towards the 3rd file.
Some mates allow promotion.
Beware of minor promotion to knight.

All these concepts narrow down the amount of moves to consider. Hence they diminish the cognitive overload. Yet that is not enough in this position. You must be aware that there is another concept hidden that plays a role in this endgame: Sometimes it is possible to play a skewer. For instance:
1.Qd5 Ke3 2.Qg2 c1=Q 3.Qg5 wins the queen.

This gives you a bit of an idea how guidance by concepts works. How it diminishes the cognitive overload. How it enhances the visualization. And that even grandmasters are lost in a position with only 4 pieces due to cognitive overload if they lack a concept.

You might argue "yeah, but I remembered the problem xyz so I could solve problem abc. So there is no difference between a concept and a pattern in the sense that they both provide the cues for remembering how to solve the problem." Well, that's true. But don't nihilize the importance of context and its restraining effects on pattern recognition. You need these restraints to prevent you from cognitive overload but at the same time they must not exclude relevant patterns. You can't steer that by pattern recognition alone. You need logical reasoning for that.

My checklist has now 136 questions of which about the half are about tactics and half about positional play. I'm going to test the tactical questions against a high rated problemset.

From man to man

2011-12-01T22:13:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
.
Munich said:

Still, in the very fist puzzle (with the distraction theme) I only considered the check ...Rf8+, but not the check ...Bg3+. Nevertheless it is good to be able to find 35 checks/ minute instead of 6 or 7 checks per minute (the value I started with when I did the check-training).

Actually, you (Temposchlucker) found out what is the hypothesis of aoxomoxoa: difficult puzzles are made of several easy patterns. While an easy-easy puzzle contain often just 1 simple tactic, an "easy"-difficult puzzle often contain 2 or more easy-easy puzzle tactic ideas (remember my 2+2 = 4 equation?). Here the hypothesis of aox again, see point 5 & 9

Of course being able to recognize 728 knightforks in 1 minute is better than 7 per minute. And if you want to do repetitions until mortgage foreclosure, be my guest.

I don't deny the importance of that. Everything what is said about that still stands today. But I suggest kindly to don't let that make you to miss the points I'm trying to make.

First of all you must realize that the patterns that make you miss problems are not tactical patterns at all. It are the patterns that live in the shadow of their famous brothers. It are the patterns with no name. It are the invisible patterns during normal play.

Only by deduction I was able to prove their very existence. Don't be blinded by their famous brothers! You can see them but you must make an effort to do so!

Where do you find those patterns? You can find them by what they instigate. Everytime you miss a problem you can deduct their existence. But they are not limited to tactical problems. Oh no! You can find them during your whole game where you make suboptimal moves.

Let's talk about the problem where you could win the queen. 413 people found the win of the queen but missed Ng6. Gotcha!! Be quick! Put the spotlights on before it escapes!

The move Ng6 attacking a loose piece can hardly be called a tactical pattern. It's just a move. Nothing new. One tempo used to attack the bishop, one tempo used to save the bishop. Happens all the time. You can hardly find a more modest move.

These almost invisible modest patterns make us loose game after game. That raises the all important question: how can we make that we don't miss those volatile patterns? The answer is: THROUGH GUIDANCE BY COMMON SENSE!

Now what is more natural than to say by yourself "okay, I have found an interesting tactic, is there some counterattack that can knock my socks off while starting the tactic?" If you ask yourself that I bet you will find Rxe7. And if you have found that, how long would it take to find the antidote when you ask yourself "Ah, is there a way to safe my knight without loosing a tempo?"

This is what I mean by its not rocket science. It is just plain common sense. Our problem is that we don't use our plain common sense. And if our moves are not even guided by plain common sense, what on earth can we expect?

Now what's the receipe?
We must train to use our plain common sense to guide our pattern recognition.
How do we do that?
By finding the places where our plain common sense fails.
How do we recognize those places?
We recognize those places by where we fail the most.
Where do we fail the most?
At high rated tactics at Chess Tempo.
Tactics, has this anything to do with tactics?
No.
Why not easy tactics?
Since you don't fail them.
Anything special about those high rated tactics?
Yes, take those who don't go deeper than 4 moves.
Why?
To prevent you from failing by lack of visualization or STM overload.
What about speed?
You can't speed up your common sense as long as you don't use it.
What about repetition?
Eat your heart out.

Lousy logical reasoning and familiar patterns

2011-11-28T19:39:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
Munich said:

An idea:
There are two sorts of difficult puzzles:
First, the ones with lots of calculation, and deep variations.
Second, the ones which could have been easy if you simply had spoted it.
The 2708 CT Blitz rated (your example) is a puzzle of the second category: the relativelz easy ones that for some strange reason almost nobody gets correct.

I would love to have some puzzles sorted into these two categories.
I could imagine it is worth to study the character of the "easy" puzzles, that are very difficult.

90% of the 2200 - 2300 rated puzzles at CT fall in the category "easy" imo.
This weekend I worked out about 30 of them while looking what is going on in my mind. I noticed that the patterns are well known enough usually, but I fail to concoct a flawless logical reasoning. That is strange, since I usually score very high in tests of logical reasoning.
This means that the ability is there in principle, but something is lacking.

Look at the following diagram of a 2299 rated problem
You can find it here.

.
.
.
.
White to move.

The patterns are simple enough, the problem isn't very deep, yet it is easy to go astray due to lousy reasoning. What I found is that there are basic elements of logical reasoning too. But to concoct them yourself on the fly is an error prone business. If you write those elements of logical reasoning down though, you recognize after a few problems that the same kind of reasoning happens over and over again. What I'm trying to say is that it should be possible to automate the uprise of the basic elements of reasoning so that they come to mind without effort. Just like patterns do. In that way you can add intelligence to the solution of a problem and yet make maximum use of the automated semi intelligent elements of reasoning. (Still somebody there?)

The dog above performs a semi intelligent action.

Scenario's

2011-11-26T08:29:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
I organized my list with questions. The result is: tactical scenario's.
For instance for the position of the previous post:

Hunt the King.
Prevent him to flee.
Win a piece that he has to sacrifice to prevent mate.
Add pieces with tempo to the equation.

Mr. Z gave me an article with citations of 49 grandmasters who gave advice on how to improve in chess. I counted their advice for you.

Study annotated games 19
Study openings 11
Don't study openings 6
Study endgames 10
Don't study endgames, it's a hoax 1
Work hard 8
Play games 8
Play stronger players 7
Mental preparation 6
Tactics 6
Study theory books 6
Analyse your own games 5
It's hopeless if you are not good by now 4
Get a coach 3
Be patient during play 3
Continuously beware 2
Drink beer 2
Visualization 2
Base your plans on pawns 1
Physical preparation 1
Don't underestimate your opponent 1
Love the game 1
No sex during tournaments 1

The grandmasters were totally divided about the importance of memory.

It's not rocket science

2011-11-20T19:33:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
.
After a long journey of reasoning everything seems to fall in the right place. Guess what, it is much simpler than I thought. Why didn't I see it before? It is the only logical way. Patterns, concepts, visualization, speed, it is all irrelevant.

I have been analysing about 100 problems rated 2000 - 2300 at Chess Tempo. For 90% of the problems I found that my pattern recognition, my knowledge of tactical concepts and my visualization were more than sufficient to solve the problems. By far.
Yet I made mistakes often. What is the nature of those mistakes?

Take the following problem from Chess Tempo (diagram below, rated 2216).
I suggest you first try to solve it at Chess Tempo here so that my ideas will come across better. Before reading further.

.
.
.
Black to move.
There are only 4 moves in a row which you must make correctly. None of these are hard to find. None of them is illogical. None of them requires more than a mediocre ability to visualize. Yet it is easy to go astray. Since every move has reasonable looking alternatives. People at CT found 14 different suboptimal moves. Moves that change the outcome of the game to the worse.

So the real problem is to learn to choose between two or more reasonable looking moves. I apply the following trainingmethod now:

I work on a subset of problems at CT with a rating between 2000 and 2300.
I don't use a clock.
I try to find the solution for some time. For no other reason then to find the problems I can't solve.
I use a checklist with questions I ask myself about the position.
I look up the solution.
I formulate why I didn't find the correct solution myself.
I formulate a question I should ask myself in order to guide my thoughtprocess the next time.
I put the question on the list.

What I expect is that at first my list will grow. At a certain moment that should stabilize. Then I expect the process to become automated and I will no longer need a list.

Going in circles, so I'm making progress

2011-11-13T09:07:00.001+01:00

After lengthy discussions with mr. Z I decided to see if I could bring some organization in the list of concepts I created while describing the solution of hundred very complex tactical problems. These are the sections which emerged after sorting:

Mate in 1
Checks
Captures
Threats
Duplo attack
Clearance
Overworked piece

I didn't see that one coming!
Much to my surprise I'm back at CCT again.

.
.
.
I often said that this blog is going around in circles and talks about the same topics everytime.
I prefer to look at it as spirals, though. Everytime I reach the same point, but with additional knowledge. The facts that the same topics keep reoccuring time and again after carefull reasoning, means that the solution must lie within those topics. It is like a chess combination. You know the moves, but you have to find out the order. All this is thus very much unlike this picture above which is NOT A SPIRAL but consists of circles instead.

Memory lane.
The last time we talked about CCT was here. Why did I leave the concept in the first place? I made a dissection of CCT in CCT and visualization here and I went on looking for visualization. I found that visualization is greatly helped by guidance by means of concepts. And now those concepts show that they are organized according to CCT!
Remember that we are speaking here in the realm of tactics, which is the ultimate place where visualization will give you an edge.

Odds and ends

2011-11-06T17:40:00.000+01:00

.
.
.

Visualisation.
Why do I think there is a relation between visualization and concepts? You can find the position that caused the revelation here.

No DIY.
Why do I think that you should start with the solution and not with the problem? The main reason is that you can find no new things in your own mind within a reasonable time. Since there are only old things in your mind by definition. New things have to come from outside.

Remember that I'm talking here about people who have quite some tactical exercises under the belt. Who have gained 250 points by tactical exercises and stall. Myself for instance.

Of course you try to find the solution yourself first in order to create some emotional bond with the solution which helps to make more impression on your brains. But you should not ransack your mind for new knowledge which isn't there. That's simply a waste of time.

Of course it is just an invitation to not spill your time by an "experience expert of wasting time". Feel free to decline.

Low level concepts.
The concepts I formulated in the example position in my post about concept-guided-visualization are of little use. They are not general enough. In order to be useful the concepts you are looking after should be usable in a whole bunch of positions. You can find an example position here.
I cite the concepts:

When I move the king it must attack something if possible
I must not interfere with the communications of the rooks
I must not put my king on an open file that my rooks may need later
I must not give a chance for a skewer.

These concepts are both low level and they apply to a whole heap of positions.

High level concepts.
Once I investigated bishop sacrifices at f7 in an uncastled king position. I formulated a scheme of concepts for this sacrifice.

.
.
.
White plays Bxf7+.
There are a few concepts:

Most of the time there are 3 pieces which play in tandem. The bishop, the knight on f3 and the queen. So the question is: can they follow up.
Without the queen you can't mate, usually.
Square e6 is only covered by f7, so after the sacrifice it is an unprotected invasion square for the knight.
There are the following ways for this sacrifice to be succesful:

The king gets mated on the backrank,
the king is driven out of his shelter towards g6 and mated out in the open. (Or black has to give material back to prevent it)
The black Queen and King are forked with a white knight at e6
The black queen gets lost due to lack of an escape route (via c7 to a5, for instance)
The black queen can escape, but must give up the protection of c7, so the rook on a8 is lost (Bxf7+, Ng5+, Ne6, Nxc7, Nxa8)

if the black queen escapes via the a5-d8 diagonal can it be trapped there?
if the black queen escapes via a5 has it counterplay there?
if the black queen escapes via e8, g6 has it counterplay against the white king via Qxg2?
if you can win the rook at a8, can you free the knight?

What you see here is that a whole bunch of low level concepts form one high level concept. In order to judge the sacrifice you have to check the methods of winning as described. Will the concepts work in this specific position? Little changes to the position make huge differences. For instance: what if there is a pawn on c2? What if there is a black pawn on d6? Etc.. Btw, in this position the sac doesn't work since the king can escape to g6 where it can't be mated.

So John Watson is right, there are no rules in chess. We call them concepts and you have to check if they actually work in the position at hand indeed.

Every opening has its grand schemes. Usually they are more positionally than tactically decisive, but specific tactics play a role, of course. I imagine a dragonplayer to be a person who studies 6 exchange sacrifices on c3 before breakfast.

The preconditions of Vukovic for a kingside attack are another example of a useful grand scheme.

Low level concepts versus grand schemes of concepts.
There is no real conflict here. We summarize facts in generic low level concepts and we summarize low level concepts into generic grand schemes.
Can we say something about the frequency of occurence?
The low level concept "put your pieces not in each others way" is applicable many times per game while the high level bishop sacrifice I described has to be considered only a few times per year, depending on the opening you play. The preconditions of Vukovic you have to consider once per game, at most. Low level concepts do happen more often than a specific combination of low level concepts (= a high level concept). So I think we have to focus on low level concepts.

Tactics.
I think we should try to make use of the fact that concepts have the property that they can guide visualisation. The power of visualization is that it is necessary for calculation. Since calculation is only necessary when there are tactics and forcing moves around, it is logical to focus on the formulation of concepts in tactical positions. I even think this is the fundament under the supertrick I'm always talking about.
Which is not the same as saying that we should neglect positional concepts.

Transfer.
When we talk about chess knowledge and transfer we are usually talking about high level concepts. Since high level concepts have a low frequency of occurence, there is the problem that they do not pop up when we need them. I have no ready method to fix this problem, but I think that we avoid it when focussing on low level concepts with a high frequency of occurrence. (Pfeww, that was an easy way out!)

Distractions.
In the past time I have been busy with installing a new computer and some geological stuff, so I haven't exercised all that much. To make it up with you I will devote a few posts to tactical positions and conceptbuilding, so you and I will know what I'm talking about. Let's see if my figments can withstand publicity.

BTW, since short there is an annoying underlining under text I write in blogger or gmail.

Probably due to a dutch spellingchecker checking english texts. Has anyone an idea how to stop unvoluntary invoked spellingcheckers?

Especially for the Bright Knight:

Difference between patterns and concepts

2011-10-29T09:06:00.000+02:00

.
.
A concept is something that is totally different from a pattern. And I mean totally. A concept is created by the mind in a conscious way while a pattern is assimilated unconsciously.

In a chessgame there are way too many facts to handle for the mind. By summarizing facts into concepts, you are able to summarize thousands or even millions of similar positions into one single concept.

The weakness of pattern recognition is that it is too vulnerable for details. One pawn on a3 in stead of a2 can change the whole character of a position. That is true for every pattern. That makes it difficult to find the truth about a position by means of patterns.

Concepts are a means to simplify complex positions. It is our way to cope with a complex world. Inevitably you will loose details when simplifying matters. But that outweights the fact that it makes the game more managable. By far.

Now what are the consequences of this statement? That is easy to miss.

First of all it means that the method I was working with can't be the right one. I made an attempt to free up the strain on my STM by transferring tasks from STM to LTM. And allthough I found a method that indeed accomplishes this, this is not the final solution to the problem. After a hard and long journey I reached the end of the rainbow, but it was the wrong end again.

With concepts you summarize facts. In stead of shuffling around multiple facts in your head at lightning speed, you shuffle around a few concepts at an easy pace. Thus simulating speed for the spectators who think you are still shuffling around a vast amount of facts. The strain on the STM is lowered by summarization.

This all might seem very arbritrary but it has a huge impact on the way to study. When solving problems the emphasis is on finding the solution. With conceptbuilding you start with the solution and build from there. From this point of view, solving the problem yourself is in fact a waste of time. Especially when you solve problems under time constraints, when there is no time for evaluating the solution.

As a novice to chess, we started with very high level concepts and general rules. The longer we played, the more low level the concepts became and the more specific the rules. But somewhere in that process we became hypnotized by moves and variations. And look at us now. We are so addicted to moves and variations that we can't walk along a chesspositon without looking at the board and working out moves and variations. When that happens, we are no longer adding concepts to our repertoire.

When you evaluate a solution, you try to generalize it. When you manage to do that, you have build a concept of a generic solution. The concept is no longer applicable to the problem at hand alone, but it can be used to solve thousands of similar problems. The task of writing down a set of concepts has a lot of simularities with the Stoyko exercise. It is pretty daunting and out of your confort zone, so it is no wonder we have fallen for the easy path of contriving moves and variations instead

You can test easily if you have done your job well when building a concept. You can only visualize something of which you have a concept. So when you are able to visualize the whole solution with all its thickets you are ready to move on.

Since visualization and tactics have such a close relation, we can postulate the hypothesis that conceptbuilding will have a huge impact on tactics.

@Munich: The B-method has nothing to do with this.

Chess weather

2011-10-04T22:10:00.003+02:00

.
.
.
Finally the bad weather season seems to arrive, so it is time to start with the preparation for Tata.

Given the comments and emails on my previous post I have to conclude that it was totally incomprehensible again. That surprised me a bit, since I thought it was crystal clear. But the repetition afficionados want to read about repetitions so they create a need for repetitions where there isn't one while the fans of pattern recognition read pattern recognition in stead of concepts and miss the point totally in doing so. But don't worry, I can explain things quite well if I set myself to it. Yet that will have to wait a bit.

Ok, this is my training plan for the Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2012: I will do the first CD of the Bangiev method. The first CD is full with tactics. Besides applying the B-method I intent to write down the narratives needed to solve the exercises. Thus catching two birds with one stone.

Why Bangiev? Well, the best answer is probably that we seem to share the same mental aberation. I understand what he is up to in a subconscious way. It simply feels more fitting than for instance Silmans thinking method or Heismans method or Seirawans Target Awareness or Nimzowitch' System. I don't forget to apply it over the board.

The B-method is closely related to my theory of invasion sqaures and Vukovic' focal points. It helps me to follow a consistent plan during a few moves. Which is a tremendous leap forward for my usual rather wandering approach.

Besides that I have gathered for about 40 hours of chess middlegame DVD's which I am going to see. I look forward to it.

So the overall approach is: building a database with tactical and middlegame concepts. Tally ho!!

No concepts, no visualization

2011-09-17T09:17:00.007+02:00

.
.
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 a more straightforward idea as to put your rooks on an open file or a pawnfork.

No complexity.
The human mind isn't capable to handle complexity. Complexity usually consists of a vast amount of simple concepts. If a grandmaster tells you what he thinks it usually doesn't sound like rocketscience. You just slap your head and say "of course!". If you try it yourself behind the board you find that you lack the concepts.

No DIY.
You have to obtain a vast database with concepts. Who should be the creator of those concepts? Not you! It simple takes way too much time to invent everything on your own. Belief me, after 10 years of studying chess improvement I consider myself to be an expert on wasting of time! No DIY!!
This means that your concepts must be obtained from an outer source. Be it a coach or an author or a chess DVD. For tactical concepts with finite solutions you can use a chess engine. This means: don't waste time by looking for the answer to a problem! After solving 100K+ problems at every regimen you can think of I can state with entire certainty and with no doubt: don't waste time with inventing the wheel on your own. This blog is meant to be a landmark to prevent others from wasting their time. Let Houdini or Rybka do the work. The only thing you have to do is to pour the information into nice little reusable concepts.

Chunks are concepts.
A concept always has some kind of generalization in it. It binds together a whole host of positions and moves into a chunk.

Concepts in chess.
What are they? Concepts describe the relationship between pieces and squares by means of little naratives. Let me give an example.

.
.
Black to move.
It is a pretty high rated problem (2046), due to the many possible moves of the king.
Yet it is very easy once you start formulating concepts like:

When I move the king it must attack something if possible
I must not interfere with the communications of the rooks
I must not put my king on an open file that my rooks may need later
I must not give a chance for a skewer.

What you see here is the power of concepts. They are not only useful for the position at hand, but they will be useful for a lot of similar positions in the future too.
You see how simple these concepts are. When you have acquired these concepts, it is easy to visualize them. Without them, it is impossible. The concepts guide your visualization. If you put too much time and energy in finding the solution yourself, you will lack the time and energy for summarizing the solution in a narrative. Which is my greatest fail the past 10 years.

Difference between tactical and positional concepts.
Tactics take a very special place in the realm of concepts. Chess is a game of practically infinite posibilities. Concepts are a means to handle such infinite amount by binding groups of positions together. The glue is generalization. Positional considerations are used when there is no finite solution to the current position. When there is a forced continuation, the infinite amount of possibilities is restricted by force. The amount has become finite. Tactical concepts handle forced continuations.

It is evident that the ability to visualize long and complex tactics into quiescence can give you an edge. In fact it is the only ability I consider to be a possible supertrick.
Since concepts are the only means of visualization, a database with tactical concepts is necessary. There is another kind of concepts that plays a role. These are the limiting concepts. For instance: when you consider yourself worse and you have a sacrifice which leads to eternal check: play it without any further calculation about what might happen after that position. In fact there are a lot of these limithing concepts which are very useful in practical play.

Tata.
In preparation for the Tata Steel chess tournament 2012 I will build my concept-database.
Positionally by looking at chess DVD's about the middlegame for hours on end.
Tactically by looking at the answer of high rated problems at Chess Tempo (what's in a name?) and formulate tactical concepts like the ones above.

mentalization

2011-09-03T10:08:00.006+02:00

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.

What does this mean?
My visualization skills are maybe not so bad as I think but without guidance it simply wanders around. I realize that I already have found this before.

I read the first two chapters of "Improve your chess now" of Jonathan Tisdall again. He advocates to concoct a verbal, abstract synthesis of a position. The position must be conceptualized. Tisdall insists using the word visualization. But since the role of conceptualization is so great and visualization is actually used for actions involving the retina, I'm inclined to follow Francis Mechner and use the term mentalization in stead.

So I'm going to experiment with Tisdall's steppingstone method with the aid of narratives and see what it brings.

Aox suggested another method from Rolf Wetzell:

I wonder if your "mentalization of a future position" is the same as Rolf Wetzels APROP= Ability to PROject Positions? In his Book Chess master at any age he suggest some drills for APROP:
Look at any game at, say 10 moves, close the book and rapidly construct the position an a diagram/board. As you improve try 12 moves.

Since I don't own the book of Wetzell I find it difficult to answer this. Maybe Aox can elaborate a bit more on this system?

Btw I'm experimenting with Bangiev's method. It's a rather defiant method, so it seems suitable for me. I recognize a lot in it from Vukovic and my writings about invasion squares. Has anyone experience with this?

Stepping stones

2011-08-27T09:39:00.005+02:00

.
.
.
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 now". This technique sounds convincing enough, allthough I couldn't find proof that it actually works on the web. The reason I like it is that Tisdall's solution seems to fit my description of the problem so well.

Chess memory.
Before the summer break I had started with a nifty little program called "chess memory". It shows a chess position for 10 seconds which you have to reconstruct from memory. At first I could only remember positions of 6 pieces (=what fits in my short term memory). But after two weeks this developed to positions of 10 pieces. What I like about this program is that you see chunkbuilding at work. In order to remember more pieces, you must group them in a chunk en store the chunk as a whole in your memory. Susan Polgar showed in a documentary of the BBC ("My brilliant brain") that she can reproduce an entire position of 32 pieces after seeing it for only 3 seconds. Being able to do so seems to be a good way to solve the question I defined. The chess-memory program I mentioned seems to train this isolated aspect.

There are a few facts that cast some doubt on this solution though:

The quality of the chunks I build doesn't feel all that well. I start binding together pieces with "a knight's distance", "a long knight's distance" (1 square diagonal, 2 straght), "a very long knight's distance" etc..
There is scientific evidence that intermediate players could learn to memorize entire chess positions this way in about 50 hours of training without any significant difference in their playing ability.
chess memory seems to be a side effect of other skills.

Mentalization.
This is about translating a chess position into previously acquired concepts. See the scientific base here. I discussed this with mr. Z and we did some experiments. This idea seems to be the most promising. It means that we get round visualization. This theory covers the most facts and there is scientific backup. The downside is that we have to invent a trainingsmethod based on this theory yet.

What now?
Before the summer break I was busy with method 2, training chess memory. During the vacation I inclined to method 1, stepping stones. Hence the title of this article. But now I'm thinking about it while writing, I see that method 3, mentalization is the most in line with my previous thoughts. So method 3 it will be.

Preparation before training.
In september I will have another geology excursion.
I will start in octobre with serious training for the Tata Steel chess tournament.
This means that I will have about a month to invent a training method based on mentalization.

It comes in waves

2011-06-12T07:47:00.003+02:00

.
.
.
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.

Method of exclusion redux.

2011-05-14T12:32:00.008+02:00

.
.
.
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 exclusion again and will have to act as a guinea pig myself.

Visualisation.
The method of visualization is already eliminated by both my own experience as by the arguments of scientific papers I have read lately. There is no need to visualise a physical board and pieces. In stead you have to encode the position by concepts, relationships and such. "Mentalization". You know where the pieces are and what they are doing without actually seeing them.

Blindfoldchess.
Blindfold chess is excluded too as method to adress the needed skills, as I already mentioned in a previous post.

Chess memory.
Admittedly chess memory hasn't the best papers to be the skill we are looking for. It seems to by a side effect of the skill we are looking for and not the skill itself. Yet I can't dismiss it solely based on theoretical arguments. So I started a program to improve my chess memory in the way prof. Adriaan de Groot suggested it. I use positions with few pieces abstracted from real chessgames and look at it for 10 seconds. Then I try to set up the position by memory. The average amount of pieces I can remember is about 6. Which is the amount I can store in my STM, I guess. Thus there is no or little use of chunking obviously. Maybe that has to do with the fact that with only a few pieces there are few recognizable chunks possible since the pieces appear somewhat scattered over the board. I don't know, but I'm going to find out. When my memory improves, I will use more pieces.

Ideas for other skills that might be relevant for future experiments in this context, anyone?

Honing in

2011-05-10T04:42:00.013+02:00

.
.
.
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 not only see the pieces, but the squares they are covering too. The "radiation" of the pieces.

The question is: how far should this visualization go. Must you litterally "see" the future position?

I already dismissed point 1 and 2 of my previous post as being sensitive to deliberate practice. If there is any supertrick around, it must be within this point 3 above. It starts with:

"All the skills you need in a current position are needed in a future position too."

This means that point 3 can be devided in two separate parts:

Seeing the future position as a present position.
The skills to be able to do so.

Seeing the future position as a present position.
Exactly the same skills you need for a current position you need for analysing a future position. For the very reason that a position is a position, no matter if it is a future or a present position.
So if you are improving your skills to analyze the present position, you are improving your skills to analyze a future position. The skills to analyze a position will improve with deliberate practice. No supertrick needed here.

The skills to be able to do so.
Now we are talking about quite a different animal here. In order to see a future position in the same way as you see a present position, your mind must be able to create an inner representation of the position which is as stable as a physical board. When you are manipulating the pieces before your mind's eye, your inner representation of the position is not allowed to fade away. Your inner representation must be unsensitive to interference caused by manipilating the pieces. This is something I'm terribly weak at. This is something that doesn't improve by deliberate practice, no matter how much you play or train. May I introduce to you, ladies and gentlemen, the one and only supertrick!!

.
.
.
The following definition seems fully applicable to exactly these skills where we are talking about:

"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).

Let's see what we can say about these skills.

General knowledge.
What general knowledge do we have about these skills?

It is not innate. Proven by papa Polgar.
It is educatable. Proven by papa Polgar.
It only develops while young. Proven by Ton Sybrands who holds the worldrecord blind simultaneous play checkers (28 games, score 77%). He learned to play checkers very young. He learned to play chess rather late. He is a mediocre chessplayer and a mediocre blind chess player.
It's chess specific. There is no radiation to other area's of mastership.
It is not sensitive to deliberate practice. No matter the time and effort.
It is method dependant. Only some youngsters use the right method by accident.
It is unconscious.
It doesn't need much maintainance. If maintainance works at all after becoming an adult.
It is waining when growing aged.

It has the following additional symptoms:

Ability to remember chess positions well
Ability to play blindfold chess

The 64,000 dollar question.
The key question is of course, can this be learned as an adult?
As a matter of fact, MDLM has proven that it is possible.
This blog is the very proof that the method used is not a trivial question at all. But after 10 years of investigation this problem at least I have found this method for adults to transfer skills into LTM.
The only question remains: to what skills must this method be applied?

Mentalization.
The first question to be answered was: do we need a picture of the chess position in our head?
After a lengthy and inspirational discussion by e-mail with mr. Z (better known as Anonymous) we found that the answer is a resounding NO! In stead you have to encode the position into your LTM in some sort of conceptual way. Read here the scientific details.

Chess memory.
The theory of chunks by prof. Adriaan de Groot has had great influence on the theory of chess skill development. The main question is: is chess memory a side effect of the skill we are looking for or is it the skill itself. The dissertation of Roring (hattip to AoxomoxoA) seems to indicate that it is only a side effect. On the other hand, it seems plausible that being able to remember a position after looking only 10 seconds to it is a skill that could be able to maintain a stable mental future chess position while analyzing it. On yet another hand, novices proved to be able to learn the skill of chess memory in about 50 hours with little effect on their chess performance. So I'm afraid I have to volunteer myself as guinee pig again.

Blindfold chess.
I experienced myself that training blindfold chess has a big hiatus: you still have the problem that you must investigate a future position from a current position. That continues to cause a STM memory overload.

I believe we narrowed down the area of investigation quite a bit. Yet there are still a lot of details to be discovered. At least now I know what I'm looking for.

(to be continued . . .)

The last frontier

2011-04-30T21:31:00.006+02:00

.
.
.
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 position by making moves in the mind. Some call that forward chaining, I believe.
This probing process reveals what I have called triggers somewhere.The triggers trigger a cue to a chunk. A feature that you didn't see before. Often this leads to backwards thinking. You see a tactical pattern but it doesn't work. Can you find a forcing route to make it work? See a post about backwards thinking.
All this is about manifest features. There are unmanifest features too. Those you can't see in the current position. These features are unmanifest in the diagram.

.
.
.
Black to move.

In the diagram above you can't decide on 1. ... Rxg3 above 1. ... fxg3 based on the manifested features. There is no justification for that. The justification for Rxg3 lies in the features of the position that aren't manifest yet. You have to look in the future.

2. Transition to a future position.
At some moment you must decide on one or more moves to create a future position. What are the elements here?

A candidate list. A list with the most promising moves. Some sort of CCT seems to fit here. The point is, the branch from one position to another must be forcing. If there is no CCT, there is no force. If there is no forcing possible, the position is quiescent. In quiescent positions there are, by definition, no tactics. If there are no tactics, there is no reason to calculate. So essentially it is about a method of pruning lines. Which is a relief for STM.
Hierarchy. Somehow you must decide on which branch is the most promising.
Evaluation?
Recognition of quiescense.

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 not only see the pieces, but the squares they are covering too. The "radiation" of the pieces.

The question is: how far should this visualization go. Must you litterally "see" the future position?

The supertrick

2011-04-25T09:29:00.003+02:00

.
.
.
To give everybody a chance to participate I copied a few comments of Anonymous from 2 posts back (maybe you can nickname yourself?).

I did read all the heisman nooks (about a year ago), I saved 29 of them from cca 100. Just before I have written this I revisited "the seeds of tactical destruction" which looks suspiciously similar to idea I tried to convey in my 2nd post. (btw, what if we want to prearrange with a plan/opening to reach them as a piece configuration and obstruct the opponent to achieve as many as possible before we launch the attack?) I remembered I read something similar from him. So, I should make myself clearer here too, because I came down as if I think Heisman is an idiot, but he isn't of course. Still CCT isn't my cake.
I agree with your conclusion about visualization. It is a strong must.
To be a bit funny, it is so important you concluded it more than once throughout the years.
Actually I was very excited because we came to prod this calc/vis problem seriously about the same time, (February 16, 2011 Scandrills -which is a brilliant post) I started to think about it, how to dissect it (I call that decompression in my own lingo), how to practice it etc. I recognized that even if I can visualize the position in my head, I miss crucial features: "takes, takes, takes, not good it won't win anything." Then the engine says: there was a pin there after the exchanges.Ups. You described the same thing when you played that game recently where you DID recognize the future factor in visualization/calculation.

Tempo said: About the kids ..They use a trick. And I'm busy to find out what that trick is and how I can learn my brains to do the same. And that, my friend, is pretty 2D.

You will kill yourself with this idea. Now I will provide factors for your careful consideration.
You are smarter than these kids.
You are smarter than some of them will ever be. (ok, I can't be this confident but you are smarter than most adults, and we concluded rightly that chess != intelligence)
You are after this "supertrick" for years. (see I remember the lingo)

I did some research on the polgar sisters (they are hungarian just like me) and now some on Karjakin, and I read the Waitzkin book in 2010. They are probably good examples. Polgars learned chess every day for 6-8 hours according to a predeveloped program, Karjakin played chess from 5, then at 6 he joined a club, Waitzkin also had an IM coach renowned Bruce Pandolfini,and parental support, as his childhood rival, who's father forced the kid to play chess 8-10 hrs daily. This supertrick looks like play and study positions til nosebleed with expert guidance. Children are very single minded if they like something they put enormous time and mental effort into it without the distractions of the adult life.

To think about the supertrick further let's go back to the topic of my 2nd post, recognizing critical factors. It is a thin ice theorising here and there but maybe you will give it a thought.
We train children's mind to recognize and identify things. We show them cars, birds, dogs and they look at these things with awe. Most of them develop the unnerving custom to tell the adult about their discoveries with loud voice: DOG ! Yea. CAR ! Yea. ...
Because all the things are new, their emotional feedback constantly helps their memory by nudging them to think about their subject of awe frequently. They woke up, and their first thought is x and before sleep, they wanna talk about x. They wanna discuss x in the afternoon also at lunch.
See where this is going?

As a side question, do you know how much time was wasted with things you tried but they did not work? If you could go back, you'd tell yourself: don't bother with that, and bumm you saved months with one sentence. That isn't supertrick, just the fact that being own's coach and player and theoretican is a very time consuming business. Kids skip all this. They aren't explorers, they are a simple copy machine with unlimited paper and tint.

So, why there are super talents? I think now that super talent's brain works differently in the subject area and most often only in the subject area. You can't copy that and most of the time the ST don't know how and why he/she is different. But I don't think it is an issue for us, even with super talent they don't show more than a few percent edge over the rest.

Maybe they have a constant verbal connection or something, an instant "narrative" they employ.
Maybe they are very intent to find details. What we have to do with effort they do it customarily. Somewhere in their childhood they locked in on that type of reasoning.

Look at my brother again with the problem of recognizing critical factors and their consequences to make necessary decisions.
Should i tell him about the million little thing he misses? Yes.
Will he be dramatically better because of this? I doubt that. It is so intricate but it is so simple in the same time. We can talk it over but there are too many situations and quirky details. I chunk the position, he isn't.
He must practice the same critical situations with my help, (and I know which are the critical situations because of my experience) talk it over, and practice it again and again until he can hold all the details in his mind compressed into a single unit and manipulate the elements of it fast enough with the learned algorithm. In fact, he will decide under a second. His ability will grow according to the time he puts into it because I can dissect and identify the elements, and I am familiar with necessary practice for the ability they require.
Clearly, his supertrick is me.

Ok, let's see if we can put this conversation at work.

The moment you wrote that letter in februari you could actually summarize my blog of the past 6 years with one sentence:

"Get a coach!"

And if it wasn't for my discoveries the past few months that would be it.
I will try to explain why I say that there is a trick involved.
There are quite a few things that everybody can do:

Getting a coach
Read chessbooks
Study openings
Study endgames
Play long games
Etc.

If two intelligent persons decide to do this and they put the same amount of time and effort in it, I expect them to improve in about the same way. All these you can summarize under the noumer "hard work". The only difference that can be made in this area is by working harder, longer, more different books etc..

Compare this to the following:
A 13 year old girl which hasn't have a coach, who is dislectic and can't spell "Nimzowitch", who is out of book at move 3, who's IQ is 30 points lower hacks me off the board in 23 moves.
Now that is what I call a trick. This is something that NOT everybody could do, no matter the time invested or the intelligence or discrimination involved.

My moves can be positional subtle as Karpov's, as long as I don't see the pin after ply 8 it is not going to bring me anywhere.

I notice that I have just debunked the theory of deliberate practice as being the sole cause of expertship. Besides an enormous amount of practice a mental trick (a very specific skill) is needed.

In the chess world it are the children who master this trick that are invited to have a coach and to get involved in deliberate practice. From their point of view deliberate practice is the only thing that matters. In the mean time they haven't the slightest idea why these old guys like you and me play so badly.

Throwing science a bone

2011-04-23T10:32:00.013+02:00

.
.
.
AoxomoxoA pointed to a few scientific papers about chess development here and here. I read them with great interest. It is a pity to see that science is still lagging miles behind this blog. At the other hand it is reassuring that at least their claims aren't in contradiction with my writings. Science has of course quite a few disadvantages when it comes to speedy conquering new area's of knowledge.

The scientific language.
First of all there is of course the scientific language that hampers communication. Scientific language is born in the time of the inquisition, where there was a necessity to write in a cryptic secret language in order to outsmart the bishops and the cardinals. As long as the clerics couldn't quite follow what you said they weren't sure if breaking your bones was what the Supreme Being demanded from them. So cryptic language was a matter of survival in those days.

Later on, when the life of scientists was no longer on the line, saying simple things in an incomprehendsible way became in quite handy for fundraising. No selfrespecting senator or government official would deny you money if you are explaining that you are going to save the world with it as long as they hasn't the courage to admit that they hadn't the slightest idea what you are talking about [Moron et al, 2002]. Later on, writing unreadable became the admitting requirement pur sang to enter the ranks of those who didn't want to work for a living but who wanted to create explosions in labatories in stead. In the mean time, scientific development is severely hampered by slowing down communication.[Holy and Moly, 1994]

Statistics.
Mathematics is the language nec plus ultra to keep outsiders out. Unfortunately, there are quite a lot of scientific area's where mathematics isn't applicable. Or simply stands in the way. Take for instance cognitive science. To be taken seriously by the scientific elite, you can't do without mathematics though. So in stead of talking directly about how matters relate to each other, on was obliged to obscure matters by introducing statistics. Posing another setback on the speed of scientific development once more.

Blogging.
As an independant blogger I don't have these problems. Allthough I stand on the shoulders of nobody, I can make rapid progress in stead. The loyal readers of this blog already know that chunking is debunked as the major asset of chess development. We already know that there is no relation between IQ and rating (or we all had become grandmasters long ago). We already know that talent is not innate but based on deliberate practice. That there is no relation between chess skills and skills that are usefull in society (unless we are raising funds for a chess project, of course). That visuo-spatial or whatever does not win us games. I can base proof on statistics with N=1. I can steer peer review in the right direction with the moderation button. No wonder science can't keep up with our findings.

Helping science out.
To prevent science from prolapsing and loosing the connection with this blog, I will explain a few consequences of my findings and training method for intelligence and IQ. Which is the heart of cognitive science, after all.

In order to prevent talking semantics I must make a decision on how I'm going to use the word intelligence in the future. I always used intelligent as the opposite of stupid. But it has become clear lately that IQ is based on skills and that skills are only semi-intelligent. Since intelligence is closely interlocked with IQ, intelligent has become synonimous with semi-intelligent. Hence with stupid. I can no longer use the word intelligent as the opposite of stupid. So I have to abondon the word intelligent for that purpose and I need another word as opposite. Maybe having discrimination will do.

What is measured in an IQ-test are skills. That implies that my method of training skills can be used to improve your performance at an IQ-test. Don't forget that with these new definitions you don't become less stupid, though. You don't get more discrimination. You might get a higher salary though, since our society embraces the combination of cleverness and stupidity. Don't expect discrimination to be awarded or you might become disappointed.

Dissecting CCT

2011-04-19T21:41:00.005+02:00

.
.
.
3 area's.
There are 3 area's of improvement to investigate:

Board vision
Tactical vision
Visualisation of the tree of analysis (ToA).

For the first two area's I have developed a method and I have proven that the method works. Based on the statistics of one game:)
High time to investigate the third area of improvement.

Visualization of the ToA.
When it comes to managing the ToA the kind of tasks involved are split in two separate area's of investigation:

Branches - Visualisation
Nodes - List of candidate moves

Due to the make up of the mind these are processed in different ways. The conscious brain is only suitable for a sequential or serial processing of topics. A branch without nodes is an example of a sequentially organized object.

The conscious mind isn't able of multitasking or parallel processing. Only the unconscious mind can do that. When it comes to handling the nodes, our conscious mind runs into trouble. When there is no unconscious recognition of the solution triggered by board vison or tactical vision, conscious guidance is needed, though. So we must emulate a parallel process by serial means.

List of candidate moves.
When you arrive at a node, there are mutiple possibilities to go forward by definition. At a node you have to make a list of candidate moves. Take for instance the following diagram:

.
.
.
Black to move.

What we know for sure is that the move we are looking for is a CCT.
Checks:

1. ... Nf2+
1. ... Qg1+
1. ... Re1+

Captures:

1. ... Nxb2
1. ... Qxb2
1. ... Qxc4
1. ... Qxd5
1. ... fxg3
1. ... Rxg3

Threats:

1. ... Ne1
1. ... Nb4
1. ... Ne5
1. ... Qf2
1. ... Qc3
1. ... Re2

On the one hand CCT got rid of quite a few lines that must be going nowhere since, well, they start with a move that is not a CCT. Like 1. ... Re3 for instance.
On the other hand, CCT has introduced a lot of garbage moves on the candidate list too.

Adding logical reasoning.
It is hard to believe that Heisman insist on investigating garbage moves, so I think that it is allowed to weed out the list a bit further by adding some logical reasoning.

In a position like this, I must do either one of the following:

Mate the white king OR
Capture the bishop OR
Save the knight

Which shortens the list to:
Checks:

1. ... Nf2+
1. ... Qg1+
1. ... Re1+

Captures:

1. ... Nxb2
1. ... fxg3
1. ... Rxg3

Threats:

1. ... Ne1
1. ... Nb4
1. ... Ne5

At this point, CCT cannot help me to choose between these moves. It only gives me a hierarchy so I know in which order to investigate the moves.

The only tool I have to decide between the candidate moves is to visualize the branches. Once I have found a promising branch, I must try to falsify it by looking at all the CCT moves of my opponent as an answer.

Summary:

CCT eliminates non promising lines.
CCT adds garbage lines.
Logical reasoning removes a few garbage lines.
Visualise the branches.
Once a promising line is found, try to falsify by looking at CCT moves of your opponent.

So CCT must become the core of the thoughtprocess, but visualisation will still separate the boys from the men.

It works

2011-04-09T09:20:00.005+02:00

.
.
.
Yesterday I won my first game solely due to the new acquired skills to see knightforks and pins fast and easy. I played against an opponent who is tactically quite strong. It worked exactly as Dan Heisman said it would work: There was a series of captures with a knightfork involved. At the end I had the possibility to pin a knight and win a piece due to the pin. Nothing complicated, everything pretty straightforward. But I had seen the pin at the end of the series of captures which my opponent had not.

I expected my method to work, but my expectations proved mostly to be wrong the past 10 years. So it is a relief that this one is confirmed. Finally.

As Heisman put it:

"I had a USCF 1900 rating after two years of play and was easily defeating 1600- 1700 players who were much older than I and had been playing (and reading chess material) for 10-20+ years. In the post-mortems we would review lines and my opponent would say, “I thought you would do that, but I didn’t see that at the end you had another check…” And that’s how they often lost!"

5 down, 25 to go

2011-04-05T23:23:00.004+02:00

Papablanca asked:

"Hi Tempo,

I am interested in your vision on how CCT relates to seeing moves by drilled skills and/or pattern recognition. In my opinion CCT and recognition are complementary but do not function at the same time. CCT demands concious effort while recognition demands (drilled) skills. In my practice I do not rely on CCT immediately, since i have the feeling that this would dehance the benefit of pattern recognition. So first I look to a position trying to spot patterns and only then I do a CCT. Also I think when you do tactical problems using CCT (from the start of looking at the position), your pattern recognition skills are hardly trained. I am very interested in your opinion on these matters."

Pattern recognition is a skill we can't help we possess. It is limited by the database of patterns we have. Just as the amount of animals we can recognize in a cloud is limited by the amount of animals in our database and not by the amount of cloudsshapes we remember. There is no need to develope the skill of pattern recognition, but we can upgrade our database with animals.

Different skills work parallel at the same time. Even during conscious thinking. Conscious thinking can only be done in a sequential or serial way. But during thinking little men are running through your brain, busy with gathering and combining all sort of information automatically.

Compare it with driving a car. Your legs are working the pedals while you are not aware of them. During thinking words are retrieved from memory, associations are made etc., all unconsciously and parallel in time.

Conscious thinking is where the light of conscience falls. But the little men that assist you are working in the dark. They are only semi-intelligent, they have no discrimination though. So you must always keep an eye on the result they come up with.

CCT is indeed a conscious thoughtprocess. But there are lot of skills that can assist it. In order to lighten up the burden on the short term memory. Pattern recognition is only one of those skills.

The 3 board vision exercises of Fritz all develop skills that assist CCT. But CCT has to be dissected carefully and as much different useful skills as possible have to be identified and exercised. My scalpels lay ready. . .:)

In the end there will always be some conscious work that is left to be done. But if you realize that Susan Polgar used 2.6 seconds per move at average against 1170 persons in a simul and scored 96%, then you understand that no conscious effort is needed to beat anyone below 2000 rating. Since you can't think of anything usefull in 2.6 seconds this means that everything was done automatically.

Done:

3 board exercises Fritz
Knightfork
Double attack
Discovered attack

Busy:

Pin
Doublecheck
Hanging piece

Blown away by the idea of Checks, Captures and Threats

2011-04-02T23:12:00.004+02:00

.
.
.
I used to think that CCT of Dan Heisman was some kind of blundercheck. Since I don't drop pieces very often, I didn't consider it to be very usefull. But in search for tasks to automate during calculation I stumbled upon it. In fact looking for CCT is a method for pruning the tree of analysis. In stead of learning to calculate branches very fast, it is much better to know when there is no reason to calculate a branch at all!
The idea behind it is fairly simple. If there is no CCT, there can't be no tactic. If there is no tactic, there is no need to calculate.

I have a tendency to end up in time trouble. I tried to manage that by avoiding complex openings like the King's gambit. The first tests with CCT during serious long games show that I calculate way too much!

Using CCT is not as straightforward as it sounds. So I'm first going to apply it to the >2000-rated tactical problems of Chess Tempo to get the hang of it. Once the thoughtprocess is clear, I will try to automate it. That should kill two birds with one stone: speeding up a sound thought process and pruning branches from the tree of analysis!

And of course continuing with automating tactical vision.

Stuck again in the tree of analysis

2011-03-29T22:47:00.006+02:00

.
.
.
The inspiration of NM Dan Heisman has brought me alot further.

A few definitions from his article bootstrapping analysis skills:

Thought Process – The entire progression of thinking that takes place from the time a player sees a position until a move is made. The two main components are analysis and evaluation.
Analysis – The process of creating a move tree; this includes identifying candidate moves for both sides at all depths of the tree.
Calculation – The ability to analyze forcing sequences, e.g. “I take, he takes, then he has to move the knight…”
Evaluation – Determining in a given position which side stands better, by how much, and why. Evaluation is usually performed at quiescent nodes of the analysis tree.
Quiescent – (“Quiet”) A position that contains no forcing moves (checks, captures, and threats) of any consequence for the player to move.

And the three types of “visions”:
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.
Board Vision – The ability to quickly and accurately recognize where all the pieces are and assess what they are doing in the present chess position.
Tactical Vision – The ability to quickly and accurately recognize known tactical patterns and their likely consequences.

Board vision and tactical vision exercises are taken care of. Within a year we should see results from that. Time to have a closer look at visualization in accordance with the definition.

Managing a whole tree of analysis from the beginning is way too much. I'm looking to break down the tree in simple skills that can be automated with the speedmethod that works so well for the other two visions.

I never used CCT (checks, captures and threats) as a guide for my calculations. I'm going to experiment with that.

A tree is too complex to begin with, so it seems logical to start with a long branch without nodes to visualize. But how can I add speed in a sensible way to such an exercise? I'm stuck again.

Self organizing skills

2011-03-26T19:35:00.006+01:00

.
.
.
The past 10 years I often complained that 1 + 1 <= 2. That's to say, I always got what I trained for, or less. There was never a bonus, never a self accumulating effect, no rent, no unexpected fruitfull side effects, no magical brain changes overnight. So if you would have asked me if chess training is good for anything but chess then I was inclined to answer it in a negative way. It is of course a nice idea that if you want to raise funds for your chess hobby to claim that it improves your school results too or so. But I didn't found any proof of such beneficial side effects.

Recently matters have changed. If you train a skill, your brain all of a sudden shows a self organizing effect which I haven't seen when I trained in a conscious way. If you give your subconsciousness no other instruction than to improve the speed at which you can see a knightfork then the brain reorganizes itself and assimilates a strategy to do so.

Take for instant Troyis. I never took the effort to formulate a strategy to play it well. Yet, by mere playing it as fast as I could, I was getting better at it. I don't think that the strategy you unconsciously develop is necessarily the best strategy, but it is a strategy that works well enough. The best fit, so to speak. And what's more, I didn't need to invest additional effort to formulate a strategy consciously. There are other side effects too. After two hours chess training I stood up, bought a new washmachine tap and replaced the old one. In one flow, without hesitation, without thinking and doing different other tasks at high speed along the way. Quite a difference with my usual rather contemplative pace in live. Rebuilding half the universe in my mind along the way

.

.
.
.
Did I already mention the importance of speed? The speed of training must be faster than your conscious thinking can follow. But why is it then that blitz chess doesn't work? Because it isn't simple. Simple tasks can be automated. Complex can't since the ratio of repetition isn't high enough. 15.000 repetitions in 22 hours total is the goal. You can't make that in complex positions. They differ too much.

3 down, 27 to go

2011-03-22T22:57:00.002+01:00

.
.
.
27? Yes, I did not count the amount of tactical tags well at Chess Tempo.
But all 3 Fritz exercises are done in 3 seconds at average. Wich is 2 - 3 times faster than before.

Two down, 24 to go

2011-03-16T20:55:00.001+01:00

Some numbers

2011-03-09T22:07:00.005+01:00

.
.
.
3 seconds limit.
For the moment I stop with the board vision exercise of Fritz where you have to point out the pieces which are under attack. I'm now able to do it 2,5 times as fast as I used to. I can now do a single instance of the task in 3 seconds at average. I consider 3 seconds the limit of automation. Slower than 3 seconds per instance and you are thinking in stead of doing. Of course it should be possible to do it even faster, since there is still often hesitation, yet it is good enough for now.

How much work is it?
I needed about 23 hours for 17.000 repetitions. Those figures are close to my findings with Troyis. That leads to the following hypothesis:
To automate any simple task you need 22 hours of practice and do 15.000 repetitions.

Hence for 3 board vision tasks and 23 tactical tags of Chess Tempo you need 26 x 22 = 572 hours or about one year at a pace of 2 hours per day. One down, 25 to go.

Back to the salt mines!

Analysis

2011-03-06T14:48:00.005+01:00

.
.
.
At a pace of 2 hours a day it will take me about a year to do all exercises that form board vision and tactical vision. Besides that, I wil have to work on my analysis. As NM Dan Heisman put it:

Analysis is the process of creating a move tree; this includes identifying
candidate moves for both sides at all depths of the tree.

I will stick to this definition.
For two months I have played 20 minutes blindfold chess per day. Somehow it doesn't feel that it quite satifies the needs to learn to analyze. It sounds reasonable enough, "with blindfoldchess you will learn to keep track of the pieces without actually seeing them". I'm sure there are elements in blindfoldchess that are quite usefull for analysis. Yet there are other elements that aren't covered. Even in blindfold chess you have the problem that you have to analyze a position.

It is important to know more about this process of analysis. I haven't reached any definite conclusions yet, so let me first sum up a few things that come to mind.

Tactical vision and board vision.
Automating the scans that identify CCT and tactical opportunities will diminish the workload of STM during analysis and will thus be helpful.

Pattern recognition.
Pattern recognition is an ability we can't help we have. It simply works. In order to work you need a database with recorded patterns. When you have a pattern in your database, you will be able to recognize it everywhere. No matter how distorted the picture is. But no pattern in your database means no recognition. If you don't know what a giraffe is you can't recognize it in a cloud. No matter how clear the picture is. If you do have a record of a giraffe it is amazing how little you need to recognize it. Databases of patterns typically contain a few hundred records at maximum. In chess these patterns are common knowledge above a certain rating.

Chunks.
Chunks are LTM structures. You find them typically at the end of a branch of the tree of analysis. Heisman gives a quite good example of a chunk here (page 4). Exactly at the same time we both recognized the same chunk (a mating sequence). That gives you a precise idea how chunks are going to help you. There are about 50.000 to 100.000 chunks to be learned, if I'm not mistaken. Chunks can only help you sofar, though. Most of the tree of analysis consist not of chunks. Only the end of a branch might.

CCT.
Most of the calculation effort goes into the branches which don't consist of chunks. Your list of candidate moves should be guided by CCT. And well in the order of Checks, Captures and Threats. I have long underestimated this, but it is kind of logical, so I will give it a try. The board vision exercises hopefully adress this too.

Sequential and parallel thinking.
Automated tasks of different nature seem to be possible to be processed in a parallel way. Just as you can sing a song and ride a bike at the same time. It seems logical that automated tasks of the same nature can be processed only one by one though. Since equal type tasks are probably processed by the same brain area. Despite being logical I don't know if this is true. What I do know is that automated tasks enlighten the brain resources necessary for conscious thinking. So you have to automate every task you can.
Conscience tasks can only be processed in a sequential manner.

The problem with the tree of analysis is that it consists of branches and knots. Branches are suitable for sequential processing while knots are not. One way or another we have to find a trick to handle knots. Since our conscious brain can't handle parallel branches. I will have a look at pruning techniques in computer chess.

Calculation training.
At this moment I'm experimenting with the calculation training of Fritz. Somehow that feels more promising than blindfold chess. I download a tactical position with a rating of 2000+ from Chess Tempo into Fritz and start the calculation training. A tree of analysis typically is about 50 - 150 ply wide.

The need for speed

2011-03-01T22:02:00.003+01:00

.
.
.
The brain seems to have a preference to do tasks with the slow conscious part of the brain. In order to automate a task you need to speed up your exercises. Only when you try to do the task faster than your conscious brain can follow the brain is forced to transfer the task to the automatic part of the brain.

Last saturday morning I was training with Fritz board vision exercises. My brain wasn't quite awake and I could not go faster than 15 targets per minute, what was my average the days before. 4 seconds is about the highest speed the conscious brain can go for low level tasks like deciding if a piece is under attack. After trying to speed up for one and a half hour, all of a sudden something changed. Suddenly I became aware of where the essential pieces were and what they were doing. There was no focus or interest of a particular piece, but I just was aware where they were without actually seeing them. There was really overview of the board. I was in the zone like that French master describes. Immediately I speeded up to 20 - 26 targets per minute, only restricted by my rather slow mousehand.

Those simple tasks of which the tables of multiplication exist (chesswise) must be done in <4 seconds. Otherwise you are thinking.
That must be the way to do it!

I was 50% right

2011-02-25T18:56:00.003+01:00

.
.
.
On the post Dissection of a microdrill Bright Knight commented:

I believe that conscious feedback is important. If you get the solution to a problem wrong, it helps to work out why you got it wrong, and what you could have done to get it right. (Being too slow can be “getting it wrong” in this context.) Finding simple chess tactics is mostly an automatic unconscious process (unless you are a beginner). If you get it right very quickly, so quickly that you did not have time to work it out, that proves that you are doing it on autopilot. If you do not solve a simple problem quickly, you have not demonstrated even temporary success at the skill. You need to find the solution quickly, and have as much time as you need to reflect if you do not. If you fail to get the solution, a fast time limit is bad, because finding the solution for yourself is much more instructive than being told the answer - but spending too long on a problem is bad time management. The number of repetitions is critical. If you do not constantly repeat a complex skill it will disappear. If you want to retain the skill to spot a tactical pattern, you have to practice that skill for the rest of your chess playing life (ideally every time you are just about to lose it). (Being too slow constitutes “losing the skill” here.) If you do not repeat a skill, you do not know whether you still have it. The spacing between repetitions is critical. If you space them too widely you will remember very little, and if you space them too closely you will forget most of what you have learned very quickly.

I can't stress enough that we are talking about two quite different processes here:

Acquisition of knowledge.
Acquisition of skill.

The methods that apply for one process do not apply for the other. Spaced repetition belongs to knowledge acquisition. It isn't suitable for skill acquisition.
Knowledge tend to fade away overtime. So it has to be repeated every now and then. Once acquired, skill doesn't dissappear overtime. Exactly as you never forget how to ride a bike or how to swim.

I told you that there are two critical factors for scandrills:

Conscious feedback.
Speed.

After doing the board vision drills of Fritz for over more than a week I now know that conscious feedback belongs to the area of knowledge acquisition and not to the area of skill acquisition. On the other hand it has become perfectly clear that there is a second critical factor for skill indeed: simplicity. If the task isn't simple, it can't be transferred to skill. So:

Speed
Simplicity

Besides the vision drills of Fritz I have looked carefully into the article of NM Dan Heisman about the seeds of tactical destruction. The next skills I want to develop a training for must have a relation to the seeds he mentions.

Scandrills

2011-02-16T23:13:00.005+01:00

.
.
.
What are the kind of tasks that are suitable for microdrills? What are the tables of multiplication, chesswise?

The task must be related to calculation.
The task must be simple. Ideal is that they are as complex as 1 fact. That square overthere is e4 is an example of a fact. That piece is under attack is another.

After some experiments is seems to me that vision-related scans are the most suitable. That are simple tasks like scanning the board for pieces under attack, pieces that are undefended etc.. As Uwe pointed out, if there is tactical vision there must be other visions too like strategical vison, positional vision etc.. Of course he is right. Every vision is related to simple facts. Every simple fact can be scanned for. Every scan can be turned into a scandrill. For instance:
Point out in random given positions:

Which pieces are under attack.
Which pieces are undefended.
Which pieces can deliver check.
Which squares are suitable for an outpost.
Which squares are suitable for invasion.
Which pawns are weak.
Etcetera.

Fritz 12 has implemented the first 3 of these trainings. Matching the "board vision" as pointed out by NM Dan Heisman. At first these drills seem trivial. But when I started with one of them, I could only point to 8 attacked pieces per minute at average! Imagine that!
If I have only 3 minutes at average in a slow game and I can only point out 8 pieces under attack per minute, it becomes clear why I am so lousy at calculation. Being so slow means that the task is done by the wrong part of the brain. If I am so slow with all these kinds of scans (I am) I must suck at chess (I do). In some positions it took me two minutes to find out what I missed. See diagram for one of the many examples. Here I thought that pinned pieces could attack something. What they can't of course.

Dissection of a microdrill

2011-02-12T11:14:00.008+01:00

.
.
.
Uwe asked:
You did 100+k tactical exercises. Why is your tactics-rating still "so low" ( meaning not at GM-Level )?

Indeed my exercises only gained me a measly 300 OTB points. And if my main goal wasn't to find out how stuff works I would have been a bit disappointed for sure. Luckily that isn't the case and most of the time I was happily aware of "spilling my time" for the sake of exclusion. On the road of exclusion chess improvement nonsense falls from the bandwagon every mile. The reason of wee improvement sofar: bad methods. The methods worked at first exposure but overtime the returns diminished gradually.

When one ages precision in exercise methods becomes paramount. High time to dissect the latest microdrills in order to find out what the decisive elements are. What is critical and what are frills.

I'm speaking of the drill of naming the squares. A little silly maybe, but we are looking after principles here and this is a nice and clearcut example.

First let's talk about what worked not.
I estimate that I have recorded games in a state of timetrouble for about 50 hours over the past twelve years. Especially when I played gambits timetrouble was the norm since you have to make the game. The past two years my time trouble has become a rare animal.
This 50 hours of "training" wasn't enough to convince my brain to transfer the task of naming the squares to the automatic part of my brain.

.
.
.
What are the adding elements of the drill?
The past 16 days I trained about 10 minutes a day pointing at squares at random and naming them. That is about 2.6 hours total. When I have spend 3 hours I expect to have mastered it to name the squares a tempo with no noticeable delay and without hesitation. If I call the name of 1 square a fact then I need 3 minutes per fact.
So for transferring a task from knowledge to automatic the following is needed:

total traning time 3 minutes per fact.
120 repetitions per fact.
speed 1.5 seconds per fact
conscious feedback.

Compare that with the old "training method" of being in time trouble:

total training time 47 minutes per fact.
100 repetitions per fact.
speed 30 seconds per fact.
No conscious feedback.

If you compare these two then there seem to be two critical factors: speed and conscious feedback. Conscious feedback I have found before. But speed has never been a serious consideration to me.

Critical factor 1: Conscious feedback.
That one can't learn or train anything on autopilot I have found often and I have written a lot about conscious feedback before. Simply seek for conscious effort, autopilot, feedback etc.. In this post I try to explain why when you are young everything goes but when you become older you have to add intensity to your consciousness in order to make progress. I assume that interference of knowledge plays a role too when aging.

Critical factor 2: Speed.
There are several reason why I always have dismissed speed as being critical. To name a few:

Blitz play seems to have no significant effect on improving slow games.
The saying: First you have to learn to do it slow. Speed comes with experience.
CTS training was all about speed. But it didn't work out.

When I reconstruct the name of a square it typically costs 2 sconds or more.
When I recall the name automatically it feels like "immediate".
The average speed of training is 1.5 seconds which lies somewhere in between these two. If you train too fast there is no time for feedback, if you train too slow then there is no need for the brain to transfer the task to a fster part of the brain.

Factors that are not critical.

Amount of repetitions. To make any fact an element of your knowledge 7-10 repetitions at a regimen adviced by the theory spaced repetition will suffice. But to transfer a task from knowledge to skill 100 repetitions can be insufficent when it is not done with speed and conscious feedback. As you can see above.
Spacing between repetitions. I don't know yet if there is any reason to spread the training of a fact overtime or that you can do it right away the full monty. I'll have to try.

Facts.
I losely introduced the word fact as a means to compare different training methods. But when the skills become more complex it is easy to see that the word fact becomes rather meaningless. I mean, how many facts do you train when playing blindfold chess is an unanswerable question. Yet the term has served it's purpose.

Mutually exclusive tendency.
The two critical factors speed and conscious feedback have a tendency to be mutually exclusive. That's why it is so hard to improve at chess. Blitz and CTS don't work since there is no time for feedback. While Standard Chess Tempo is too slow to trigger the transfer. So the tasks and the speed must be chosen carefully. Speed is the trigger for transfer but conscious feedback is slow by nature.

Inspiration from NM Dan Heisman

2011-02-08T19:04:00.006+01:00

.
.
.
Uwe commented on my previous post:

I am still astonished, that you can play blindfold and have problems to name the squares.

Be carefull or you will miss the point! From a normal point of view, I have no problems at all to name the squares. Just like anyone else. But for naming a square, I have to think a second or two. Just like anyone else. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't notice that there is something about it. Only under the extreme condition of squealing time trouble I can't make brain capacity free for it. Just see for yourself how fast you can name the squares. Do you need a second or two and do you hesitate now and then or do they popup immediatialy without noticable time delay, without hesitation or stuttering and with no conscious effort at all? In the first case you have to think, in the second case you use a skill. I suspect alot of chessplayers to fall in the first category without realizing it.

You know "Training in Chess" from Dr. Fernand Gobet? He dont "like" blindfold chess: " (2) We believe that playing blindfold chess is at best useless, and at worst harmful to one’s development. The ability of playing blindfold comes more as a side effect of having acquired a well organized and easily accessible knowledge base (Ericsson & Staszewski, 1989; Saariluoma, 1995). Practicing blindfold as such may be harmful when it interferes with other types of training. "

Mr. Gobet talks about aquiring chess knowledge in his article. In that case he is right. But we talk about a quite different animal here. We talk about transferring a task from one brain area to another. My experiment proofs that that is what I have just done with my training during two weeks. I transferred thinking into a skill.

Of course this new skill is not going to win me games. Neither does it look impressive. But that is not the point. The point is that I have found a method and proved that it works.

Blindfold chess helps to transfer another task from thinking to skill. It helps to keep track of your pieces without physically seeing them. One of the results is that I'm faster in calculating already. I can calculate deeper and with less effort than before. So if mr. Gobet means that blindfoldchess doesn't help my chess at all I already proved that he is wrong.

Now which other tasks lend themselves to be transferred from slow conscious thinking to fast automatic skill? Not every task is suitable. Some tasks are performed better by thinking.
This are some criteria:

The circumstances and outcome of the task are always the same. For instance a certain square on the board is always named e4. But it is useless to do zillion tactical exercises as I have done since one pawn difference can change the position totally. So there are just too many (infinite more than zillion) possibilities so the circumstances and the outcome differ too much. Here slow thinking is the best way to interpret the result of the difference.
No consciousness is needed. It works best when done automatic. Of course you always keep an eye on the final result. I mean, if you go on vacation and drive automatically while not keeping an eye on the result you might end up at your office.
The transfer must result in speeding up the task.
The transfer must result in freeing your STM memory.
The transfer must result in using less effort.
The transfer must result in less errors. Although different errors might be introduced. I often mix up c6 and f6 or f2 and f7. Actually that tells us something about how skills are organizing information.
The task must have relevance to the outcome of the game. There are lots of exercises that help you to acquire useless skills. So be carefull in the selection of what you are going to train (look who's talking;)

For this moment I added an additional criterium. I want that the task helps my calculation.

As Uwe's question pointed out, great care is needed since we perform a lot of tasks seemingly well consciously without realizing that it can be done much better automatically. A speedtest should reveal which part of the brain we use.

If you think this all is trivial than you are wrong. Thinking lights up in brainscans the part of the brain that is typically for amateurs. Complex motorskills light up the parts of the brain typically for masters and grandmasters. Ok, this is not exactly evidence, but it looks alot like a smoking gun to me:)

In my previous post I asked for inspiration to find the tasks that matches the criteria above. NM Dan Heisman was so friendly to point out a few articles of him with plenty of inspiration. Here, here and here Let's see where this leads me.

First I found an example in an article of him which exactly describes what we are talking about.

Suppose you are an experienced player with good board vision, but
have not extensively studied basic tactical patterns. Then you can see
what is happening on the board, but instead of quickly and accurately
recognizing basic tactical possibilities for both sides, you have to figure
them out. This would be equivalent to knowing how to add, but not being
able to recognize the answer to basic multiplication problems. For
example, when presented with the problem 8x7, you would have to add
up seven eights or eight sevens, instead of just answering 56. Therefore,
you are not only slower, but less accurate, because knowing the solution
reduces error in trying to figure it out.

Sometimes I use the same words as Dan Heisman but we mean something different by it. I will try to avoid ambuigities but apologize beforehand for any obscurity.
Dan recognizes 3 kinds of vision:

Board Vision – The ability to quickly and accurately recognize where all
the pieces are and assess what they are doing in the present chess position.

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.

Tactical Vision – The ability to quickly and accurately recognize known
tactical patterns and their likely consequences. Tactics include more than
just winning material and checkmate, but also the defensive side:
preventing material loss and checkmate.

I redub my own use of the term "board vision" with "chessboard vision" which is the skill to see an empty chessboard before the minds eye in 3D and Technicolor. Something that is not of any help probably for improving your chess. Let's see if there are candidates for skilltraining.

Board vision.
Normally I would dismiss this as too trivial to pay much attention to. But since naming squares is trivial too I must do a speedtest in order to find out if I use the right braincenter here. I will let you know when I have results.
One of the resaons that I started this investigation in the first place is that I'm experimenting with blindfoldchess. Somehow I felt that blindfold chess wasn't enough to improve my calculation. One reasoning I had was the following: even when I see a position blindfolded I must still calculate lines. That is something different than just seeing the position with the pieces and what they do. So maybe blindfold chess just helps with board vision but not with seeing future lines. I don't know if this idea will stand the time but somehow it explains the discontent with blindfold chess as being not quite sufficient.
On the page with exercises of Dan Heisman I found the idea of Fritz Board Vision exercises. I will dive into that soon.

Visualisation.
I discovered that Fritz 12 has a possibility for calculation training from allmost any position. I am going to try that with positions from Chess Tempo.

Tactical Vision.
After 100K+ tactical exercises that should be no point. Yet I will do a speedtest to find out if I'm indeed using the right braincenter now.

Enough inspiration for the moment thanks to NM Dan Heisman! To be continued. . .

Searching for inspiration

2011-02-06T23:13:00.004+01:00

.
.
.
Now my positional approach is on track, I need to work on that other area that I promised myself to look at more than a year ago: skills.

Where am I standing:

For a skill you use a different part of the brain than for (re)construction.
With my latest experiment of naming the squares I consider it to be proven that microdrills are the right way to train skills. I transferred an action from one part of the brain to another. At first I named the squares of the board slow and with conscious thinking, now I can name them fast and without conscious thinking.
I limit the skills that I want to develop to "calculation" (drilling into the mouth of the croc).
Blindfold chess adresses one skill that is needed for calculation. Since both in blindfold chess and in calculation you need to keep track of the pieces without seeing them physically.
There are other skills involved in calculation and I want to find out which.

I need inspiration to find out the other skills that are involved in calculation. Only then I can develop a drill for it.

I've got rythm

2011-02-03T22:27:00.002+01:00

.
.
.
On my quest to find the right way to train skills I'm still working on the microdrill to learn the name of the squares by heart. After about one and a half hour of drilling in total (90 seconds per square), the skill starts to become fluent. It is not perfect, but already much and much better than it was. Another hour of training should make it perfect. Today I started to turn around the board. Allthough that goes somewhat better than when I started with the board straight, it is far from good.

You can't say that the training of the skill with the board straight didn't influence the training with the boardcolors reversed, but the effect is not great.

If microdrills proof to be the way to go, you must learn to love them. As MDLM did. What helps is to add rythm. In a week or two I should be ready to proof or falsify my case.

Still continuing to play a blindfold game or two each day.

Integrating strategy and tactics.

2011-01-31T17:01:00.003+01:00

.
.
.
In search for microdrills that could enlighten my thinkprocessess I started to write down the time I needed to make a move during a game (hattip to Uwe). In one game I used 34 minutes for 1 move. Finally I made a positional move that changed the computerevaluation from plus 0.88 to minus 0.87. What happened?

In search for a macho-move I continued to search for a forced tactical continuation which wasn't there. In stead I should have simply looked to the CCT's of my opponent and make a move that adressed his threats and that was positional good. In the end I played a move that was positionally good but that didn't adress his threats.

This story revealed that I'm used to make such forceful moves that I can neglect the threats of my opponent. But if such forceful move isn't there, I continue to neglect my opponents threats. Or I continue to search for a forced combination untill I'm in time trouble.

So my thoughtprocess must be adjusted. If the situation is too complex tactically that a forced continuation can't be found, I must look for the threats of my opponent first. Only then I can look for a positional move. That is what Nimzowitch meant by prophylaxis. Make a move that neutralises the threat of your opponent while being positionally usefull to you.

So I didn't find new microdrills but I did found common sense. I lost the game, btw.

On microdills

2011-01-27T23:19:00.007+01:00

.
.
.
To learn more about the training of skills I need a clearcut example. Writing down the moves seems to fit this bill perfectly. It is not difficult to come up with a microdrill that adresses this. I take an empty board, I make knight moves on it and call out loud the names of the squares I'm visiting.

In the first minute it already became clear that it takes me a few seconds to come up with the name of a square. As I have often declared, the brains seem to hate it to store information in memory when it can be reconstructed. But reconstruction needs time, takes away resources from the short term memory and needs conscience. During normal circumstances those 3 resources are available in abundance during a game. I never even noticed that it took me a few seconds extra to write down my moves. But in time trouble those resources are scarce. Hence my annotation disintegrates.

So the questions are:

Does this microdrill convince my brains that it is better to absorb a skill than to hang on to reconstruction?
How does the brain decide when to use which method? What is the trigger?
How much training time is needed?
Does the difference in brain activity of a skill and a reconstruction meet the findings of FMRI-brainscans of amateurs and grandmasters?
What are other skills that need to be trained and that have an effect on the outcome of the game?

I'm going to find out.

On skill

2011-01-18T22:03:00.006+01:00

.
.
.
Knowledge and skill.

Let's talk a bit about skill now. I never get rid of the feeling that training skills has a huge potential. Despite the fact that I have found 101 ways to train the wrong way. When you exactly know which skill to train and how to train it would be a breakthrough.

Skill is a strange phenomenon.
On the one hand an adult can learn the complex motorskills necessary to drive a car within about 50 hours.
On the other hand, when I'm in time trouble, I have very much problems to annotate my gamescore well. No matter the fact that I have written all my life and I have been in time trouble for way over 50 hours. It even litterally hurts to shift from thinking about the game towards coming up with the names of the pieces and the squares. At the end of the game my writings become unreadable and incomplete. Until the last 5 minutes come as a great relief. When I put my pencil down all of a sudden my chess performance boost when I can just crank out the moves.

Somewhere in the two stories above must be a hidden clue. Why is it that in the case of learning how to drive a car the training of the motorskills seems to be adressed so naturally and effortless while in the case of annotation the motorskills don't take over no matter how often I have been in a learning situation?

Is there an exact training method necessary to learn to annotate fast in time trouble? But why doesn't this exactness of training method seem to play a role in learning how to drive? Is it a matter of interference between thinking about the game and writing down the moves? After all when I talk during driving my driving performance degrades too. But if it is a matter of interference then why doesn't everybody have the same problem with annotating games in time trouble?

What kind of motorskill is adressed by playing blindfold chess? You learn to keep track of your pieces without seeing them. You know globally where they are. When you focus on a certain part of the board you are able to reconstruct the exact positions of the relevant pieces. Reconstruction is nature's way of economic resource management.

Is keeping track of your pieces without seeing them of help with calculating a move? After all, even when you play blindfold chess you have to calculate future positions too. I tend to say that it helps.

Questions, questions. . .

Overprotection

2011-01-12T17:42:00.009+01:00

.
.
.
Silman seems to be a somewhat chaotic character. In itself there is nothing wrong with that since I need to reange the stuff he writes anyhow in order to make it my own, no matter how it is written. What is important is that all the stuff that is needed is there. And it is.
I took al the summaries he has written at the end of every chapter together with the nuggets of chess wisdom he has scattered over the pages and put it into a hat. After some shuffling I started to sort it out in a way that is logical to me. The contours of a coat hanger rack emerged out of the mist. I only have to fill it with coats now.

There is one somewhat strange chapter about chesspsychological disorders one could suffer from and how to deal with them. In my opinion a little arrogance is the best remedy against a troublesome mind so it should not come as a surprise that I didn't recognize any of the symptoms he describes. But I don't want to write anything bad about the book since it is well worth the money and I would recommand it to anybody. Silman has done an outstanding job.

Now I have a total framework to hang my chess experiences/coats on I try to fit in the musings of another chess author: Nimzowitsch. Let me explain a few findings about overprotection.

diagram 1

.
.
.
In diagram 1 the pawn is protected by two pieces. Both pieces are bound to the defence of the pawn. They can't move. They are static. Now let us see what the effect is of an extra protecting piece.

diagram 2

.
.
.
The overprotection of the pawn has the following results:

All of a sudden all 3 pieces are free to move. Not together, but one by one. So from very static they have become much more flexible.
e4 has become a pivot point since it is the square that is overprotected, not the pawn. If you push the pawn forward (lust zum wander) then e4 becomes a point through which white can approach the enemy. The same e5 push in diagram 1 hasn't the same effect since white doesn't outnumber black on e4. So e4 remains forbidden for white in diagram 1.

Now it becomes clear why blockading plays such an important role in the writings of Nimzowitch. If black can blockade the pawn on e4 then he deprives the protecting white pieces from a road towards him. That is the cramp that is spreading towards the hinterland he is talking about.

Well, it is a bit of a random example I am presenting you but this happens to be what keeps me busy lately. And isn't that what blogging is about?

Skill assisted thinking.

2011-01-08T19:48:00.006+01:00

.
.
.
Can I?

After 6 years of blogging the gist of chess improvement seems to boil down to two area's of improvement: knowledge and skill. Both have to be taken care of.

Knowledge.
In my case, at this moment, positional knowledge is the area where I can gain the most. I'm busy to make a summary of Silman's HTRYC 4th edition, so I consider positional knowledge to be taken care of.

Skill.
I did write a lot about skill-assisted thinking in the past, without ever finding an appropriate method to train it though. Today I was thinking about a certain section of De La Maza's articles:

"You can refine this experiment further by creating two computerpersonalities, one that can
see three moves ahead but has no positional knowledge and the other that can see
two moves ahead and has complete positional knowledge. The tactical
personality, which can see three moves ahead, will win the vast majority of the
games.
This is a key lesson: all of the positional knowledge in the world is worth less
than the ability to see one move ahead. In other words, given the choice between
being able to see five moves ahead in every position and having no positional
knowledge and being able to see four moves ahead in every position and having a
GM's positional knowledge, you should choose the former."

This is a very intriguing text. I haven't tried it myself, but I can imagine that it is true. If so, it sheds a certain light on positional knowledge. What are the means by which positional knowledge affects your chess? In fact it is an attempt to see ahead by means of probability. I cannot calculate enough ahead to known where the best position of my bisshop is, but I can put in on a square where it is active. The probability dictates that there it has the greatest chance to attribute succesfully to the game.

The words of DLM suggest that the nett effect of moving by means of probability is less worth than the ability to really see ahead. DLM narrowed that down to tactics, but I don't think that is necessary.

Do we find confirmation for this point of view? What was the amount of moves that a computer could see ahead by brute force when they begun to outplay even the positional grandmasters? What was the amount of moves that a computer could see ahead by brute force when they begun to outplay us? It should be possible to create a graph with rating on the one side and the playing depth on the other side.

If this is true then the decisive feature in chess is the ability to see ahead. Positional knowledge is a helpful means to emulate this.

(Sorry Chesstiger, again I sacrified clarity for speed)

Macho chess

2011-01-01T21:24:00.004+01:00

.
.
.
Happy new year!

Margriet and I are preparing for the oncoming Tata/Corus tournament by solving the exercises in Reassess your chess. I'm scoring terribly bad in all area's except for one: Macho Chess.
Silman describes that as "pushing your own agenda". Neglecting my opponents moves always has been a strong point of mine:)

So the bad news is that I'm still a one trick pony and a positional nitwit. The good news is that there is still very much room for improvement though.

Continuing with blindfold chess and visualisation of the diagonals.

Time continued

2010-12-29T23:04:00.007+01:00

.
.
.
There seem to be two different types of time in chess. First we have the time that we count in tempo's. That is a sort of countdown towards a static ideal situation. In the opening for instance, the ideal state is a position with developed pieces. On the way towards the ideal situation you can spill tempo's. But once you have reached the ideal situation, you can't lose tempo's anymore and to continue counting them is useless.

On the other hand we have the time that is related to the initiative. When there is such threat we simply cannot afford to not react to it. If the target is the king, the preconditions of Vukovic are a good guide. The problem is that concrete threats can make all other advantages like material, outposts etcetera irrelevant. Although tactics use to flow naturally from a good position, sometimes they flow against all odds from a bad position where the player has released all positional considerations and material attachment. Sometimes threats are ignored, for instance positions with opposite castled kings, where both players push their own agenda, usually untill one of them is obliged to react to a threat. Sometimes the pieces of the defender seem to be frozen in time.

Reading "Reassess your chess" 4th edition and still playing blindfold games every day in preparation for Tata.

When is time on my side?

2010-12-28T22:36:00.004+01:00

.
.
.
A lot of positional knowledge is related to static structures in chess. Take for instance piece activity. Only when pawns are fixed to a certain degree you can say "that bishop is bad". When the pawns are still mobile, it is useless to speak about a bad bishop, even when all your pawns are on the same color as your bishop. Just move your pawns, and the bishop becomes active.
Open files are open due to fixed elements in the pawnstructure. Hence is the activity of the rook related to the pawnstructure too. The same is true for an outpost.
Pawns are weak only when the structure is fixed.
So from a static point of view, pawnstructure is paramount. Understanding the effects of fixed pawns adds greatly to your static positional understanding. Long lasting advantages are only found in this static area.

A lot of my games have a point where the position of me or my opponent all of a sudden collapses. I'm always intrigued when this happens. How can you see it coming? How can you steer towards it? What are the critical elements? A few moments earlier, the sky still looked blue, as far as I know.

Tomorrow I will talk about dynamics, initiative and time. Time is up now.

Mentalization

2010-12-25T04:31:00.007+01:00

.
.
.
.
In preparation for Tata (former Corus) I play about two games or so blindfold chess each day (typically about 1 hour total). It seems to improve my calculation a lot. Let's see if it gives measurable results.

This week I read an article about the difference of mentalization and visualisation in blindfold chess. Quote:
"blindfold chess masters consistently report that what they visualize are not images of pieces or chessboards, but abstractions of these with minimal or no physical features. A typical report is, “I do not visualize real pieces but I know where they are.”

This remembers me of a description in Kasparovs book which I cited in an old post.

Nature seems to be very thrifty with mental resources. Visualisation is very resource consuming. Nature replaces exact copies by abstractions and prefers reconstruction over storage in memory.

100% exact visualization is possible though, as I know from my own experience. It takes months to obtain and it lasts only a few minutes or less under very favourable conditions. Glad to see it confirmed that that is not the way to go. I already suspected it to be unnessecary. For chess you have to learn to mentalize, not to visualize.

Merry Christmas.

Reduxxxxx blindfold chess.

2010-12-19T09:29:00.006+01:00

.
.
.
As you can see in the ratinggraph, my tactical performance didn't drop after 2,5 years doing no tactical training at all. The spike in the graph is where I reentered Chess Tempo with a high RD. Hence the big swings.
Maybe this is somewhat misleading, since I felt very rusty, but after only one week of training I already felt much sharper. Since I do typically 3-5 problems a day, I might have recovered faster than the ratinggraph could follow.
Anyway, my summerdip is over and I started to win again.

While doing the problems it became very evident that my visualisation has dropped a lot. Those who have followed my blog for some time know that I go round and round in circles. Which only means that those elements that keep returning must be essential for chess improvement. So I started with blindfoldchess again.

A few of the ever returning subjects in my blog:

Visualisation
Piece activity
Dynamism vs static positional ideas
Backwards thinking
A coach is best
A book is the next best (I ordered Reassess 4th edition)
Pawn structure
Database with patterns
Learning on automatic pilot doesn't work
Preconditions for attack of Vukovic
coathangers and their racks
Transfer
Skill
Tempo's and geometry
Dual purpose moves
Outnumbering
Analysis of games
Chaostheory. Identifying the move where the game goes haywire
Narratives
Avoiding complexity to relieve the short term memory
Flexible moves
Steerability

Hence you know what to expect in the future :)

Tata steel chess tournament. 2011

2010-11-30T02:30:00.008+01:00

'
.
America shows its resourceful diplomacy to the world.

There is still little time to seriously analyze games so I probably do best by talking about matters I do find time for. I noticed a degradation of tactical performance and of visualizing long lines in my head during my games. Last week I started to do tactical exercises again at Chess Tempo for half an hour a day. Already my performance starts to improve. I almost feel sharp again.

My play is still lousy. As a tactician my adage was piece activity. For some reason my application of positional knowledge in my games tends towards passivity. That has a lot to do with the will to keep the complexity of a game below a managable threshold. It is an old trap to approach positional play with static concepts while dynamism always bites you from behind. I always fall for that one.

I'm preparing for Tata.

Backward analize this!

2010-10-09T08:53:00.008+02:00

.
.
.
Let me try to analyse backwards in order to find the seeds of my positional demise in a recent game. I belief that retrograde analysis is a term with a well specified meaning in chess, so in order to not annoy the few esoteric souls that are occupied with that I will use the term backward analysis in stead.

In the graph above you see the appreciation of Rybka of a game of me as white. Somewhere around move 19 I was pretty lost, allthough it took me a long time to say goodbye to the point.
What is so bad in the position of move 19 and how did it came about?

Let's have a look at the diagram.

.
.
.
I just moved Rad1.
What are the elements that make my position bad? That I feel obliged to give up the exchange?

My knight is pinned.
The diagonal d6 h2 is weak.
The diagonal c5 g1 is weak.
My knight has no place to go (besides that it is pinned).
My knight is bound to the defense of pawn e4.
The square e5 is firmly in the hands of the enemy.
The f-file is in the hands of the enemy.
My queen is bound to the defense of the knight.
My queen has very little space.
The d-file is of no use to me.

How is it possible to give so much away in 19 moves while not even being aware of it?

.
.
.

1. e4 weakens the c5 - g1 diagonal. No big deal at this moment :)
7. Bxc6 gives black a mobile pawn which he can use as a battering ram later on.
10. Ne2 heading for the weak postion on g3.
12. d4 weakening my e-pawn, give diagonal d6-h2 away, freeing blacks bishop and giving black a possible outpost on e5.
14. Nxe6 opening the f-line for black, exchange the defender of the c5-g1 diagonal, allowing Qh4
15. h3 weakening my knight
18. c3 taking away space of my Queen.
19. Rd1 giving up the exchange.

News from the backseat

2010-09-20T23:23:00.002+02:00

.
.
.
There is still little time for chess analysis. Yet I hope to post some retrograde analysis in due time.

Retrograde analysis

2010-07-21T20:40:00.004+02:00

.
.
.
The approach I advocated in my previous post has proven to be very valuable for assessing pawn moves. For other moves it is not very suitable.

At the moment I'm analysing my lost games by identifying the point where I'm lost.
Then I try to identify what the seperate elements of my demise are.
After that I follow the footsteps of these elements backwards and try to find the moves that are the cause. This way my defeats don't come out of the blue anymore.

It is obvious that this is the right way to analyse a game. Why become obvious matters only obvious after a daunting process of reasoning? After all they must have been obvious all the time!

Stretching positional knowledge towards the opening

2010-06-17T21:43:00.003+02:00

While thinking about the opening I return to an old idea of mine. It should be possible to base my positional thinking not on the characterististics of the position but on what a single move actually accomplishes. Since one single move has a vast amount of consequences, that is a challenging approach. Yet it might be the only one that is actually doable.

To chart the consequences of a single move can easily take hours, as I found out. Since you have only 3 minutes to think at average during a game that doesn't sound very promising. There is more to it, though.

First of all, it is the only way to notice all changes of the position immediately. Compare that with my normal way of moving. If I play 1.f4 I'm totally unaware that I weaken the diagonal where my future king will be after castling short. Twelve moves later, out of the blue as it seems, I am bitten from behind by it since my opponent has a terrible threat due to that weak diagonal. So theoretically, thinking of the effects per move might be the only way to not constantly fall victim to your own sown seeds of positional destruction.

A second point is, that you don't have to calculate every position as if it were new over and over again. Our usual way of thinking isn't very productive, to put it mildly. Theoretically you have to find every consequence of a move only once. You only have to think about single moves. (And remember the consequences which simply accumulate over time).

Thirdly, the effects of a single move are vast, yet finite. Both finite in the amount of effects as in the sort of effects.

Let me give an example.
A straight forward move of a pawn has always the same 3 sets of effects:

It closes a set of diagonals
It opens a set of diagonals
It uncovers two squares
It covers two new squares
It frees a square
It occupies a square

Look here where I elaborate on this.

The only thing we have to look at is how these 3 sets of effects influence the 3 positional elements of attackers, targets and the roadmap. There can't be no more to it.

I expect a huge amount of overlap once you become familiar with these finite effects of a single move. Thus saving time after a lot of exercise.

So is it doable?
I have no idea but I'm going to find out.

Too much uncharted territory

2010-06-13T20:41:00.002+02:00

.
.
Yesterday I read my blog posts of the past half year. There is really a wealth of knowledge in them. If I look at my recent games, I simply forget to apply that knowledge though.

How come? A few reasons:

Old habits are strong.
The area covered by the knowledge is too broad. There isn't simply enough time to evaluate everything. What you don't do automatically you can't do at all during a game. Due to lack of time and short term memory overload.
On the other hand there are area's in the game that aren't covered at all. Examples are openings and dynamic positions.

Let's talk about the opening. There is quite a bulk of so called openingtheory. For some reason I always have difficulty with the word theory here. I can't see a tree of variations with an assesment at the end as theory. To me it is not connected to the knowledge I mentioned above. It remain variations.

I play the Polar Bear. That sometimes means that I play 10 or 12 bookmoves in a row and then all of a sudden a weak diagonal (c5-g1) has befallen upon me. Where did that come from?

Actually it is the first move (1.f4) that already weakens that diagonal. Since most theory puts the black bishop on g7, the weak diagonal is usually no problem. But when black doesn't know the theory he often puts his bishop on c5. "Theory" of the Polar Bear doesn't take this into account. So I'm on my own. Maybe a Stonewall renders this bishop useless, but I'm not very familiar with that type of positions.

What I don't like in this scenario is that I make openingmoves that lay the seeds for future characteristics of the position while not knowing the moment I do this. It simply can't be good to start to play chess at move ten. It should start at move one!

Today I started to think about the first move. If the knowledge I have formulated the past half year is any good it should be applicable to the opening too. Indeed it is, but it took me about 6 hours to formulate the answer to 1.e4 f5. To find a narrative in concord with my theory that gives the best reply.

If it takes 6 hours to formulate a move, the theory isn't ready for application yet. So it isn't very strange I don't apply the new knowledge in my games.

Dutch politicians obviously are no chessplayers.

2010-06-10T20:12:00.006+02:00

.
.
.
When Osama Bin Laden managed to trick some people to fly airplanes into the WTC for him, he had a certain goal in mind, of course. To accomplish his goal he has set out a cheap trap for the western society.

Yesterday we had elections in the Netherlands. Dutch politicians are obviously no chessplayers. They weren't able to avoid the trap.

Just a few thoughts

2010-05-23T22:54:00.004+02:00

.
.
.
When I want to judge if a bishop is good or bad, I look at the pawn structure. But not every pawnstructure is suited for such verdict, I realized today. Only when the pawns are fixed such judgement has a long term value.

If there is a fixed state of pawns, there must be a pre-fixed stage. Usually that is a state where the pawns are under tension. Solution of the tension can go in two directions. Either the pawns become fixed or the position becomes open. When the position becomes open, the habitual look for good and bad pieces is often useless because all pieces have become active to a certain degree. In those positions it is more important if there are targets and who has the initiative. Tempo's start to count again, so it is in essence a second round of development which has started.

If there is a state of tension. there must be a pre-tension stage for the pawns. This is what we usually call development. In order to design development, one must know which tension-states are benificial and which are not.

And I have no idea about that.

Perhaps a lack of midichlorians

2010-05-01T09:04:00.004+02:00

I have tried to put positional knowledge into practice during my games. Allthough I feel a lot of potential in it it still doesn't boost my performance. The problem is that if you have to do 65 things well in a game and you do only 6o well, you are not going to win the game.

It feels a bit the same as when I started with tactics years ago. Then you could hear me whining "I'm the only one who worked this game, I have to do everything myself. Even loosing. . .!!"

I have to study for my work so there's not too much time left for blogging. But I expect that to change after the summer.

Margriet on the other hand is doing extremely well with the new knowledge. I expect her to cross the 1600 line soon. Every seasoned tournement player knows that it is extremely rare for women at age 50 to increase from 1150 to 1600. Usually 1400 is an unbreakable barrier. So I'm very proud.

Space

2010-03-14T23:08:00.002+01:00

.
.
Margriet and I just finished the book of Michael Stean "Simple Chess". We played through all the games. Margriet's play immediately made a huge progress by incorporating the idea's and she started to beat 1700 players one after another. I need more time to digest the matter since I always want to test ideas by stretching them to the extreme and beyond. But once I get the hang of it I'm sure the same will happen.

The most difficult was the last chapter, about space. It takes time to get a feeling for that, while it certainly plays a big role in my games.

The book didn't mention initiative as a factor. By applying the ideas I noticed time and again that the initiative crops up slowly as a result. Quite mysterious.

Chesstiger asked me about colorcomplexes. As soon I have found the game I want to show him I will post about that.

We will reread the book again soon.

The pieces of the puzzle fall in place

2010-02-28T09:55:00.006+01:00

.
.
IS the largest.

Learning.
My understanding of positional chess is boosting lately. My adage used to be that piece activity is the nec plus ultra of positional play. I had discovered this by gathering a lot of positional elements (from positional exercises like PCT) like open lines, outposts etc. and formulating what these elements had in common. Now what have I learned lately?

Piece activity as the foundation of all positional elements.
There were some positional elements that I had neglected almost entirely. Like the center, centralization of pieces, overprotection, prophylaxe, color complexes, pawnstructure, exchanges, exchange sacrifices etc.. The question was if these elements had the same base (piece activity) as the other positional elements I mentioned or that they were founded on an entire different entity, unknown to me. I found that these elements too derive their importance from what they contribute to the activity of the pieces.

Targets.
Piece activity pur sang is rather vague. I discovered that it is necessary to be more specific. More concrete. Piece activity must be aiming at targets. The targets must become sitting ducks.

Outpost.
My definition of a square suitable for an outpost was way too ridgid. I thought it had to be precisely the very next square in front of a pawn. But it can be on every other square in front of a pawn. In fact there is no pawn needed at all. It can be any square where you can maintain a piece without being harrassed.

Road to the outpost.
It isn't necessary to immediately occupy an outpost with a piece. It is important though to keep the access road to the outpost open.

Being harrassed isn't always bad.
The natural piece to occupy an outpost is a knight. If the knight is being harrassed by a pawn, the harrassing pawn quits its duty to protect the blockaded pawn. Hence the blockaded pawn becomes bad.

Attacking the base of a chain.
I now know why you have to attack a chain at its base and not at its front.

Colorcomplex.
It finally became clear what a colorcomplex is and how to make use of it. That concept used to remain vague.

Overprotection.
It became much clearer what to overprotect and why.

Flexibility.
I now know what an elastic move is.

It costed me quite a few games to experiment with positional elements. But now everything starts to fall in place. I'm confident that I will get my lost points back soon. And much more.

Papablanca said that you have to have an elephantskin to publish about your own attempts to improve. He is right, of course. But what helps is the following attitude. I don't want to change or educate my reader. I only listen to what is helpful, and I forget what is not.
This attempt to ape the attitude of a saint pays off.
First of all because I know I have a blind spot and I can only indirectly conclude what is in it by carefully listening by what people have to say to me.
Secondly I get a gem throwned to me every now and then. For instance the book of Michael Stean "Simple Chess''. Hattip to Anonymous.
So I keep inviting everybody to comment freely on my posts. I don't will feel offended, no matter the arrogance you are showing or if you didn't understand my post at all or have read it badly. Some will argue that my skin has proven to be thick enough anyway. I prefer to not agree with them. But if they are right my excuse is that it's all happening in my blind spot:)

Changing the roadmap.

2010-02-21T11:07:00.005+01:00

According my latest approach to the game, there are 3 main elements to consider:

The targets.
The attacking pieces.
The roadmap with the roads across which the attacking pieces get access to the targets.

A road can be an open line (for rooks), diagonal (for bishops) or an uncovered square (for knights). A road is neutral in itself. This means that both parties can make use of the same road. Only if you are sure that you can dominate a new road it is adventageous to open up one.

This sheds new light on an old question about steerability of a game. The roadmap is determined by the pawns. If there are no pawns, no road is blocked and you can move your pieces freely across the board. The amount of open roads has a great influence on the amount of possible moves (of the pieces, we are talking about here) hence at the complexity of the game. Have a look at the following position of a game of Margriet.

Diagram 1

.
.
.
White to play exd5 or e5.

Of course there are other and better moves than exd5 or e5 here. But that is not what I am investigating at this moment.

1. exd5 opens up the game and adds complexity. If black is a better calculator than white then his chances increase, allthough he is still worse, of course. It makes the game more of a gamble.

With 1. e5 more roads are, or continue to be, blocked. But is has another advantage in stead, it gains space. And hence manoeuvrability. The manoeuvrability of black is diminished while that of white has improved. This means that your chances have increased.

Mr Nimzowitsch, meet mr Vukovic

2010-02-14T14:11:00.002+01:00

.
.
.
Black to move.

In my belief to follow mr Nimzowitsch, I tried to stop whites attack by bolstering the center by playing 13. ... Bb7 here. Since the preconditions of a kingside attack are met here according to Vukovic, I was immediately lost. Whites pieces are outnumbering the black pieces by 3 on the kingside while the center is stable. (Standard recipe: trade the defenders, sacrifice then 1 of the 3 extra pieces to open the kingposition while the 2 other extra pieces deliver mate).

You can clearly see that I'm experimenting with the idea's of My System:

I traded dxe4 since a center square can be occupied by a piece just as well as by a pawn.
I opened up the d-file in order to get an outpost on d5 and to get pressure on d4.
I aimed my pieces at the center.
I attacked the base of whites pawnchain with my b-pawn. In dorder to undermine d4.

The advantage of moving according a system is that the system acts like a coathangerrack which helps you to hang your lessons on. Of course I will suffer an ugly loss every now and then while taking rules too literally. But that is no big deal since it all is about the why behind the rules. Without a system these lessons would disappear in the chessblur of many, many games.

In fact this is a very important position to analyze. It can happen in all sorts of openings where black plays d5 and e6. Basically you hand over the keys of your kingside to white and wish him good luck. Most of your pieces are cut off from the defence so you must have a plan B when whites starts to murder your king. For years my plan B consisted of avoiding systems with e6 and d5 all together at all costs. The reason I got into this position is that for some openings I'm sitting between two chairs. I renounced all gambits but against 1.f4 I haven't an alternative yet. So I based my moves on logic in stead of rote memorization of variations. Since my logic is based on insufficient knowledge disasters can happen, occasionally.

The past years my adagium was "piece activity". That helped me to avoid such disasters. But now I want to understand the center and its relation to piece activity.

Overprotection

2010-02-01T20:11:00.003+01:00

Nimzowitsch said:

"Weak points, and even more so strong points, (in short every point which could be described as strategically important) must be overprotected! The pieces which fulfil this duty are rewarded for helping to overprotect the said strategically important points by the fact that they are wellplaced when it comes to undertaking other duties; so to express it somewhat dramatically, the importance of the strategic point envelops them in its halo."

This is beautifully and poetically said, but it remains pretty vague. The book is full of this kind of poetic vagueness. The result is that every author who writes about My System will give his own explanation. Depriving the reader from the subtleties behind it. You really have to read the book yourself!

When I started to dive in the examples that accompanied the text, I found the following nugget:

Overprotection of an important central pawn leads to the following advantages:

It is impossible for the opponent to attack you succesful at a flank when you have the center firmly in your hands. So it is a prophylactic measure. I already noticed this when playing the kings gambit.
The higher goal of a central pawn (any pawn, for that matter) is to hit the road and go mobile. As is often said, a well protected pawn stands probably in the way. The square that the pawn leaves behind becomes a pivot point for the (ex-) protecting pieces which become now free.
And my most important discovery: if a pawn is attacked twice and defended twice, the pawn is not overprotected. The defending pieces are fully committed to the defense. If you overprotect the pawn, you will find that all the pieces become free for other duties. Not at the same time, but you are free which piece to pick for a little temporary tour to do another job. It makes all the defending pieces elastic.

Nimzowitsch was an emotional man. He often describes what he feels in a position. Laying it down in some poetic rule. It isn't enough to read Nimzowitsch. You must translate his rules into concrete ideas too. But it is more than worth the effort.

Making His System My System

2010-02-01T12:35:00.004+01:00

.
.
.
This week I finished My System for the second time. I have gotten a fairly good idea what Nimzowitsch is talking about. It is time now to really dig in and go into the details. The book in its current form is of course not usable for me. I must translate it into my own words before I can apply what he says. I must make His System My System. Otherwise it are only rules that can be applied dogmatically and everybody knows that that is bound to fail in chess. All in order to create the ultimate coathanger.

This means that I will add a lot of my own findings, so if you want to learn what Nimzowitsch really said you have to read the book yourself.

If I sort everything out then I find the following topics to be paramount:

The targets.
The attacking pieces.
The roadmap.

The targets.
In previous thinking about the middlegame I found piece activity as the nec plus ultra of positional play. I have come to the conclusion that that is not concrete enough. Pieces can be active like hell but accomplish nothing at the same time. The activity has to have a goal. That goal consists of targets. When there are no targets, all activity is in vain.

The natural targets of the chessgame are the slow moving pieces. That are the king and the pawns. The other pieces move too quick to hunt down. There are three preconditions before a pawn can be called weak.

It must be deprived of the help of its brotherpawns.
It must be restricted in its movement.
You must be able to attack it.

How to deprive a pawn of the help of its brothers? You cannot always force that, but often you can induce it.
You cannot shoot on a moving target. Before you can attack a pawn its movement must be restricted. It must behave like a sitting duck. You can restrict the movement of a pawn by occupying the square in front of it. Be it by covering it or by putting a piece on it.
The third precondition is that you are able to attack the weakened pawn. Often this means that the the weak pawn has to stand on a half open line.
There are countless methods to implement the three preconditions. It is necessary to dive deeper in this to understand how it works. I have not done that yet.

In my games weak pawns arise usually by accident. In order to make plans I have to learn how this mechanism works. Otherwise my results will always be the subject of (bad) luck. Of course it all starts by noticing that an accident has happened and to make use of it. But steering towards it is much better of course.

Actually pawns on the second or seventh rank meet already one precondition: they are deprived of the help of their brothers.

Diagram 1

.
.
.
Black to move
The pawn on c7 meets all three preconditions and can be called weak:

It cannot get help from its brothers
since it is restricted and cannot go to c6 which is occupied by white and
it is under attack.

Pawn d7 meets two preconditions:

It cannot get help from its brothers
since it is restricted and cannot go to d6

Since it cannot be attacked it is not weak.

Pawn b6 meets none of the preconditions.

BTW this is taken from a middlegame position, not and endgame position.

Often it is said that a square can be a target too. That makes matters unnecessary complicated. Squares are part of the roadmap. The roadmap consists of the pathways that give an attacking piece access to a target. In My system I consider squares to be no targets in themselves.

The attacking pieces.
The pieces have two different tasks in the scenario above. To restrain or blockade a potential weak pawn and to attack it. This is much more clear than the vague jobdescription of "to be active". I redefine the term "centralization" as following: a piece is centralized where it attacks the most targets. Often this will coincide with the center of the board. But not necessarily.

The roadmap.
The roadmap consists of the pathways that lead to the targets.
The pawnskeleton is the landscape through which the pathways meander. A pathway has a home for the attacking piece at one end and a target on the other end. Bringing the pieces from their initial position to their pathway is called developing while bringing a piece from a random position to a pathway is called manoeuvring. The pawns dictate where the pieces belong while we have to dictate where the pawns belong.

Moving pawns not only alters the roadmap but it can expand the space for manoeuvres, while diminishing the space for the opponent.

conscious exposure on a coathanger

2010-01-31T06:38:00.004+01:00

Tentative said:

"Yet in two very recent games against 1950 players I won by the basic pattern "Attack the Guard". They move, I attack the Guard, and they resign. This is a very simple pattern, yet they missed it in 1 move deep."

This indicates an ommission in their arsenal. There are a few tactics that are not well known by the old school while those who have done the stepsmethod are well familiar with it. This is expressed by the fact that the old school has to consciously think about these combinations - which is prone to error, time and energy consuming and can easy be overlooked - while the stepsmethodists see it right away.

More and more I'm beginning to believe that I look way too complicated towards training. Mere conscious exposure seems to suffice. No matter the form. The problem only being that we often think we are conscious while in reality we function on automatic pilot. Where did I park my car two weeks ago? It has disappeared in the blurr of all my parking memories. Just as the chessgames on the internet tend to dissappear in the chessblurr. What is the way out?

We simply have to organize our experiences and hang it on a coathanger. Keep a diary and analize the tendencies in your experiences. Immediately sort new experiences out and hang them on an appropriate hanger on the rack. Only then the experiences don't disappear in the mist of time. In fact a blog like this is (a very simple form of) such diary. Which prevents me from making the same mistakes over and over again. Child prodigies assimilate this with ease. Adults have to make a conscious effort. The shere numbers of different topics in chess tends to hold us back. That's why we need an all covering system. My System, for instance:)

Tentative said:

"To resume my advice: learn tactics and positional play well and then move on to improving your calculation skills."

Indeed calculation skills look different. There seems to be a part of the skills where specialized microdrills are needed. But enhancing the arsenal seems to have top priority for 1900 and below.

BTW I'm doing well at Corus with 4.5/8 sofar.
Margriet had to withdraw due to illness after two games, alas.
I have now read My System twice, so I have an idea what it is about. Time to read it for the third time and go into the details.

The what and the how. (continued)

2010-01-25T09:20:00.012+01:00

***I added new text below in green***.

.
.
.
.
***I added new text below in green***.

My play at Corus shows two evident areas for improvement. The what and the how. What to do (positional play) and how to do it (tactical play).
I'm working hard on the what-department by experimenting with the ideas of Nimzowitsch in my play. Of course that leads to the occassional disaster, but since I'm on a loosing streak anyway I don't bother. I'm learning and I feel happy with what I learn. Gaining the points back and more will be just a matter of time.

But walking around at Corus and following interviews I can't help but think about the how. I expect to need one or two years to fully incorporate the ideas of Nimzowitsch in my play. But I have to look at the future and think about what will be next. My experiences at Corus point clearly at the how-department. In the group next to me there is a 10 year old German girl who has a rating of 1842. At a certain moment she had black and encountered the Blackmar-Diemergambit. She obviously had never seen it before because she took a long think. Yet she managed to put here pieces on the right squares and outplayed her opponent tactically. I doubt she has read My System twice. Or even know the name of the author, for that matter.

The tactical skills comes from the player, the positional knowledge stemms from the coach. If the grandmasters of group A give their post mortem analysis, they show long tactical variations with ease. They have no problem to go 10 ply or so back to the original position. Positional knowledge is only implicitly manifest.

Ton Sybrands is a former worldchampion checkers. He is able to play blindfolded 25 games simultaneously and scores 92%. He is a decent chessplayer. But he can't play blindfoldchess above average. What kind of skill is that? He learned checkers while he was young and he learned chess while he was relatively old. This seems to be a clear indication towards the direction that age of learning is paramount. Indirect there must be a relation to grandmasters getting a lower rating when aging. The knowledge developes, so the understanding of the game of the older grandmaster grows, but his skills have stopped to assimilate the new patterns and they stick to the old ones. Thus losing games to the youth which uses the new knowledge. I must run now for my next game.

We have some strange contradictions here. Papa Polgar proved that the skills aren't innate. Sijbrands proved that it works only at a young age. MDLM has proven that it is possible at an adult age. Jan Timman has proven that it declines with age. The Knights Errant have proven that an adult who is plateauing at around 1500 for some years can gain about 250 points by mere exposure to tactical combinations. No matter in what regimen. No matter the effort. No matter the duration. No matter the amount of chessproblems. Repetition not necessary. Why only 250? Why not much more? Why not zero since we are adults?

What we need is a whole new look at the how-department. A new system for tactical training that differs from what we have proven to fail. Or maybe it isn't about tactics, but about calculation or visualisation or whatever.

Why tell me why

2010-01-23T11:18:00.008+01:00

.
.
.
Every rule in chess has a why behind it. If you don't know the why behind a rule, the rule leads necessarily to a ridgid application. John Watson has written a whole book about falsifying the rules of Nimzowitch. Without offering a workable alternative.

Obeying rules is the lazy man's way of development. In stead you must go after the reason behind the rule. There are a few cases where we only have a rule but the reason why remains in the dark. In such cases the rule is often used to describe something. Take for instance the description of the transition of advantages. It only describes what is happening, but it isn't clear why it is happening. And why it is inevitable. Such rules are useless for practical play.

Nimzowitsch beautifully explains the relationship between open lines, penetration into the 7th rank, outpost, inducing weaknesses, pawnchain, blockade, centralisation, overprotection and prophylaxis. He welds everything together. It really is a coherent system. For some reason he translated his ideas into rules, which is a silly thing to do. Maybe it was a matter of fashion and did he wanted to copy Tarrasch.

My play is prone to tactical weakness. After analysing I found that I miss tactical opportunities of my opponent once every three games. According to Rybka I seldom miss a tactical opportunity myself. The reason behind this may be that I am used to gambitplay. With gambits you have the initiative, so it is much less important what your opponent is up to, since he must react to your moves or lose. If you throw the kitchen sink at your opponent it is less important what he is throwing back. Usually. But now I'm trying to implement the ideas of Nimzowitsch in my play, tactical counterplay of the opponent must be taken into account. The initiative is less strong, usually. So there is more freedom for my opponent. I just must make it a habit to look at my opponents opportunities as if it were mine. That should lead to an improvement.

So far one loss, one win.

Corus

2010-01-21T20:43:00.002+01:00

.
.
.
Allthough the grandmasters are already busy for about a week, we start only tomorrow with the 9 rounds-event at Corus. I don't know whether it will be called the Corus tournament next year still. Maybe it's the Tata Europe tournament by then:)

What do I expect? I will try to implement my new understanding of My System. Alas I'm only halfway, so I don't expect it to bear fruit right away. My positional thinking is obviously still in its infancy, but it is developing rapidly. That means that I don't expect rating growth, but I do expect to learn alot. I have been on a losing streak lately, so I expect that rating greed will not stand in the way of my research. As usually is the case when I'm doing better. I do expect to make a quantum leap forward anyway, the next two years.

Due to illnes I couldn't prepair my new opening as well as I wanted, but I'm going to give it a shot anyhow. If I'm going to score 50%, I will be quite satisfied. Wish us luck.

Watch your six

2010-01-15T23:30:00.004+01:00

.
.
.
The rook belongs behind the passed pawn, no wether it is our passed pawn or our opponents.

Seen from my point of view everything close to me is in front and everything far away is behind.
Seen from the point of view of my king one might argue that the front is far away and if he sends a pawn forward he sends them to the front so behind the front is close to the king while in front is far away.
If I must put a rook behind a passed pawn from my opponent is that that seen from my point of view, my king's, my opponent's or my opponent's king's?

As a computerprogrammer ambiguity in language is my enemy and I'm used to drive my future users mad with questions. Rules as the above are quite useless if you don't understand the why behind the rule. Although My System obscures the why behind the rules with poetic language, close reading usally reveals the why. That's the big plus of this book. In this case: the why is because the rook must be as active as possible. Now that's enough to figure out where my behind is.

My System redux

2010-01-13T15:16:00.004+01:00

The first time I read My Sytem I deemed the term "system" to be somewhat exaggerated. The first time I read only the text, while ignoring the games mostly. The system looked like a bunch of quite inspiring ideas, hinched losely together.

Now, the second time however, I'm more thorough. And indeed I'm starting to see the contours of a System which I completely missed before.

Take for instance the following game between Nimzowitch and Tarrasch:

.
.
Black to move.

Nimzowitch writes about this position:
"The position we have here appears really harmless but is actually extremely dangerous. White is threathening to occupy the c-file and in addition he has a comfortable square for his king (e2) while it is hard to say as much for black. In positions like this, the defender must play with extreme care."

Most clubplayers I know would call this a fairly level position. Even Rybka agrees with this. So where does the danger stemms from? What Nimzowitsch shows here is that the danger lies in floundering around a bit in the belief that this position is equal. While Tarrasch is dabbling around, Nimzovitsch found a good move each time thanks to his System. His System inspired him where to look. The positon can only be kept level if black finds equally good moves as white. But since black doesn't use a System he wasn't able to find the right answer everytime. (I assume that Tarrasch used a system but not The Sytem:)

Nimzovitsch describes his ideas often quite poetic. The good thing about this is that it helps you to remember the points he is making. It is often witty and easy to read. Which is pretty rare for a chessbook. The downside of this is that it obscures matters and invites you to interpret his findings as "rules", dismissing us from thinking ourselves. The only way to come around this is to study the games in the book with extreme care and to read his comments very well en open minded.

As a result you can't get the information of Nimzovitsch from second hand. Since second hand writers miss out the tiny yet important little details. Which they tend to replace by their own inventions or mix up with their own ideas.

Dvoretsky said that a carefull study of My System lead him to masterlevel in no time. I belief him.

Finally an opening with black

2010-01-02T12:38:00.003+01:00

.
.
.
I don't really want to study openings anymore. Especially not now since I'm preparing for Corus. Yet sometimes events have their own momentum.

I have looked for a suitable opening against 1.d4 for about 10 years now. My main problem with 1.d4 always has been that you are almost obliged to play e6 at a certain moment, thus leaving a hole on e5 where sooner or later a piece or a pawn appears. Sofar I have tried the Pirc, KID, Slav, Semislav, Benko, Budapest, Fajarowitsch, QID, Classic Dutch, Nimzo-Indian, Albins Countergambit, Englund gambit, Benoni. I might have forgotten a few. At the moment I play the Polar Bear. That works fine, but the Polar Bear has a lot less "punch" with black than it has with white.

Against 1.e4 I have played the Najdorf, Scandinavian, French, Petroff, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Alekhine. At the moment I play the Caro-Kann.

A lot of these openings have started with a very nice initial idea. But due to refutations and novelties as answer to refutations, overtime most of these openings have becom monstruosities where the initial idea has disappeared out of sight long ago. Leaving behind a waterheaded opening with little more merit than being "playable".

The past two months I have been studying the Black Lion for Margriet, since she complained about her black opening against 1.d4 too. And so it happened that I stumbled upon the Hanham variation of the Philidor. In previous years I considered this opening as too unambitious and only suitable to bore your opponent to death. But I have changed my mind the past years due to positional study. Now I see that the positon of black is full of potential. Much like a hedgehog-position. You must bring the opening alive yourself! This is the same as in the Caro-Kann which I'm playing now. But I always felt the positions of the Caro-Kann as somewhat alien to me. While the positions of the Hanham feel familiar and trusted from the first time I delved into them. I could have invented it myself:)

The Black Lion provides me with the Pirc moveorder which is the only trusted way to reach the Hanham. It can be played against 1.e4 and 1.d4. I will give it a go at Corus.

In the mean time I'm busy to read My System for the second time. Now in the new English translation which is much better than the old one. For the moment doing exercises has fallen to the wayside, but I intend to give the Phaedrus exercises a go.

There are a few promises from me about which I would write (a reaction to the comments at the previous post, a reaction to Robert Pearson's question) , but I cannot substantiate that at the moment due to Corus preparation. I will not forget it though. I must be careful with my time.

The battle of the cues.

2009-12-25T09:54:00.006+01:00

.
.
.
I didn't exactly wanted to show the world how I blundered. I gave this example in my previous post in order to investigate how the mechanism of the choice of moves works. I thought this was a clearcut example. But the blunder element turned out to be distractive.

I tend to overfocus somewhat when thinking about something. Such focussing seems to work by means of suppressing the signals that could interrupt. Or by raising the threshold.

Nevertheless, certain signals manage to exceed the threshold and certain do not. This determines which move we chose. Guidance of focus seems to manipulate these signals or thresholds. Whether this guidance is conscious or not. This guidance seems to be driven by habits when its not conscious.

Besides that, those patterns that are stored with strong cues for retrieval seem to produce stronger signals.

Forgetfulnes dampens the signals overtime. Especially those that are acquired on automatic pilot.

I estimate the amount of patterns you need to know to play chess well somewhere between 100 and 400 patterns. This amount is so little that it means that on the highest level of chessplay the difference cannot be made by knowing more patterns. Hence other factors must be decisive.

If you look at a position, some patterns seem to scream "see me!" while others do not. Which patterns manage to scream louder than the threshold are highly personal and depend on the make up of the cues.

Take for instance the following example: we have a few older members of the club who play chess for 40 years or so. One of them is rated about 1500. He gives lessons to the youth. He tells them exactly how to move the pieces in the opening. Develope well etcetera. The strange thing is that when he plays himself, he doesn't obey these rules at all. He has forgotten everything.

Now what kind of cue is that? Which let him retrieve certain knowledge from memory when giving lessons while leaving him on his own when playing. There seem to be a lot of circumstancial factors.

Example of a transferproblem

2009-12-16T22:30:00.004+01:00

.
.
.
Black has just given a check.
I played black. After a wild game with a mutual kingside attack I couldn't find the winning combination and traded off towards this ending. We both had about 5 minutes left on the clock.

I was blissfully unaware of the danger of the passer on the h-file. I was still biased by the previous moves and felt I was slightly better. But if you aren't aware of the danger you can easily lose. Which I did.

Why wasn't I aware of the danger of the h-pawn? My teamleader saw it long before, he declared later. Wasn't such a position in my database? It sure was. There just wasn't a cue that retrieved the pattern from memory. What missed in my system was an evaluation of how dangerous such passer can be.

That is what I meant by "So what we need is a database with evaluations, my friend." in my previous post.

Phaedrus said, You shall hear, if you can spare time to accompany me.

2009-12-05T10:25:00.005+01:00

.
.
.
Phaedrus said:

"Reading this post I do get the feeling that it does seem to imply that good positions are created. I tend to believe that this is more or less a false assumption. We only achieve an advantage if the opponent allows [himself making] mistakes (or "creates" weaknesses). There is a strong case to be made however for the assumption that it is possible to create imbalances, and with them the targets that can be attacked. My feeling is that if one tries to understand endgame play, it is better to talk about imbalances than about advantages."

Tempo said:
It is tempting to talk semantics about advantages versus imbalancies, but that would obfuscate anything to be learned from these erudite words, my dear Phaedrus. Let us see what's the fabric of which imbalancies are made. In order to get an imbalance, the opponent must make a mistake, you said. Implying that you cannot force it, the opponent must cooperate. A mistake can happen when there is a difference in the database of patterns of the players. This can have one of the following forms:

Both players have the same omission in their patterndatabase. The mistake goes by unnoticed.
Only one has an omission. In that case he makes a mistake and won't notice it. This will usually not happen in tactics, since both players at our level know the few tactical combinations there are all too well. To expand your database you need the help of somebody else. Be it a coach or a chessbook author.
There is a transferproblem. Both players know the pattern, but one of them fails to remember it behind the board. For me, the coathangerrack is the solution for the transferproblem. Take for instance the coathanger I use do decide on a positional move in the middlegame: "the pawns decide which piece is active". By just remembering this one sentence, everything I know about outposts, open lines, strong squares etc. comes to mind.
There is a valuationproblem. Both players recognize the pattern, but one of them misjudges the consequences. How often do you hear yourself say "I thought about that move, but I rejected it because. . ."? Being wrong with hindsight.
There is a difference in skill. If you cannot calculate far enough, or have difficulties to visualize a position, you can make mistakes which you can't help. A lot has been said about skill and skilltraining. It certainly takes quite an effort to fix it.
A blunder is made. It looks a bit like the transferproblem but it is more basal. With the transferproblem it is normal that you don't remember it behind the board, but with a blunder it is unusual. Discipline and good habits are your weapons here.

How many difference can there be in our patterndatabases? The tactical database consists of only 15 items or so while the positional database has about the same amount. It is difficult to make the difference there. Ok, an openingsdatabase can become big, so there can be some relation between work and result, but since you are left on your own when you are out of book it usually doesn't bring you very far either. The same is true for an endgame database.

This leaves three topics to make a real difference:

Transfer. As said, coat hangers are imho the solution for me.
Valuation.
Skill. We already talked too much about this. Read my blog if someone doesn't remember it:)

Aha! Valuation! Now everything else is excluded by rhetorica, the only possible culprit of our abysmal chessperformance is left, dear Phaedrus!
And indeed, if I look at my latest loss against Lysias, I quite ignored that little passer at the rim since I thought the game was about killing his king with a beautiful combination. So even when I had the chance to get rid of that little bugger I followed the figments of my deluded mind instead. How wrong my judgement was!

So what we need is a database with evaluations, my friend.
A database where we put in our experiences in order to make use of them later.
Thus speaking, our main enemy appears unhidden before our eyes: Forgetfulness. Our thirst let us drink from the river Lethe all too much. Forgetfulness is very useful for our daily life. If we wouldn't forget where we left our car the day before yesterday, and the day before the day before yesterday, our remembrance where we have left the car yesterday would soon be obscured by a cloud of memories with all possible places where we have left the car ever. But forgetting our chess experiences will yield mediocracy.

Towards the endgame

2009-11-28T15:30:00.006+01:00

What is the difference between the middlegame and the endgame that makes it so difficult to get a good endgame when having an auspicious middlegame?

In the middlegame the highest goal is to get active. The pawns decide which piece is active and which is not. It remained always a bit vague of what the activity actually consists. In the endgame the activity must be transformed into the achievement of concrete goals. The problem I have is that I'm insufficient concrete in the formulation of my endgame goals.

In the endgame there is for the first time enough space on the board to actually penetrate into hostile territory and to attack pawns from behind. During the middlegame you can only threat to penetrate but usually it is not going to happen when there are still too many pieces on the board.

Logically it must be all about pawns. However mate with pieces in the endgame is not uncommon it is very difficult to show any common tendencies in that. So I better dismiss that subject for the moment completely. That means that it is all about promoting pawns and hunting pawns down as targets.

At the same time it is about piece activity which again has a relation with the pawns. As in the middlegame, the pawns decide which piece is active.

What are the elements in the pawnstructure that make the difference?

The passer.
A passer immediately inflicts the enemy forces with defensive obligations. But often there isn't a passer right away when starting the endgame. In that case the possibility to create a passer acts as a substitute. What are the possibilities in this area?

A local pawn majority. Trade all the pawns and a passer is what remains.
One holds two. Which is a way to emulate a local pawn majority while the total amounts of pawns are equal.
Breakthrough. Both sides get a passer but the most advanced wins.

Targets.
If you can't create a passer in a save way the next thing to do is to create and attack targets. A target is a pawn that can't be covered by its brother. Since you can only shoot sitting ducks the first thing to do is to fix a target so it sits still. Then attack it!

Penetration.
In the endgame there is more space so there is a chance to actually penetrate into the hostile territory and to attack the pawns from behind. Here it is about squares and lines and to extinguish defenders of the invasion route.

Long think

2009-11-23T21:50:00.002+01:00

.
.
.
Despite the risks there are still people who managed to infiltrate the Knights Errant. So we have to dismantle our organization and continue under another name.

The first step of endgame strategy seems to be to acquire a list with endgames which are favourable. That gives direction at the end of the middlegame where to head for. For the time being it is not too important to know how to actually win such favourable endgames. The first step is to recognize them and to get them materialized on the board. Once I'm able to get them on a regular base the need for knowledge how to handle these positions will arise in a natural way.

In general when I think long in a position that is a clear indicator that I have no clue where to head for. Where more knowledge is needed. Now it's the end of the middle game that leaves me clueless and costs me time. Only in very few cases a long think serves a purpose, like working out a long variation or finding a dual purpose move.

In search for the ultimate coat hanger

2009-11-18T22:12:00.007+01:00

.
.
.
This is about the 8th time that I look at endgames. It seems that the time is finally ripe now.

My first attempt to get better at endgames was when I picked up an endgame book by Euwe. Euwe is one of those terrible endgame authors who wanted to give his book a whiff of science, I assume. Which meant that he tried to be complete in his writings. Well, sort of. The result is that his book started with 8 chapters with endgames that you get only once in a lifetime, if you are lucky. An author must protect you from wasting your time. As novice you look for guidance, not for completeness, of course. The idea of an encyclopedia is totally wrong for a novice in endgames.
It took me about a half year of daily study to get an idea where to start with endgame study. That I count as my second attempt.
The third attempt was based on my discovery that all endgames were judged by the underlying pawnending. So I started with SOPE of Muller and Lamprecht. That seemed to work well for some time untill I collided with the habit of those authors to put in lots of beautiful endgame compositions into their exercises with positions you will not even get once in 10 lifetimes. That is so silly in an endgame book when you are a novice and looking for guidance. I had to stop that spilling of my time in disgust.
The fourth attempt was papa Polgars endgame brick which suffered from the same flaw.
An endgame CD with 2400 exercises of Convekta: same waste of time
Sixth attempt was PCT. Darn you, Gregoriev! Darn you silly endgame authors!
My seventh attempt was Lars Bo Hansen's SOCES. Now that was a revelation! Finally a book that guides you in stead of being encyclopedic and wasting my time with beautiful studies! I had to stop that study though since my positional middlegame skills were so poor that I never reached an endgame that wasn't lost anyhow.

Now I have improved sufficient in positional middlegame skills, I picked up the study of Hansen's book again. I really love it! Hopefully I can find the ultimate endgame coathanger to hang all those bits of knowledge on which I have gathered overtime but forget to implement in my games.

From the middlegame into the endgame

2009-11-15T12:45:00.004+01:00

.
.
.
Blunderprone commented on my previous post:

"Being able to reach a middle game position and in my head run through a calculation only to mis-evaluate the outcome is an issue in my mind's eye. Visualization skills are critical for calculation of a position's value at the end of a variation. Much easier to see if it's forced moves with a distinct and clear advantage or loss ( material or space). But to reach a middlegame position and evaluate the correct course is most difficult in static positions. In it's simplest terms, the decision to play a minority attack or try to make your opponent advance a pawn in front of his king first, requires teh ability to see the resulting position and say " then what?" and " who is better?" That's where knowledge of typical endgames from your games could really come in handy. Recognizing a subtle panw structure in your minds eye can give you an advantage."

The improvement of my positional middlegame play happened as follows chronologically:

First there were loose bits of positional knowledge with no interconnections in my mind. Knowledge about outposts, half open lines, king safety etc.. I used to forget to apply this knowledge in my games all the time.
After a period of serious thinking and abstract arcane blogging I found the common idea behind all these different loose ends of knowledge: piece activity. That generalization made it possible to incorporate the knowledge into my play. That helped my positional middlegame play greatly.
Then I found the relation between pawnstructure and piece activity. That it are the pawns which determine which piece is good and which piece is bad or ugly.
Due to this new insight I often reached a middlegame position with pieces which were active like hell but is was not clear to what avail. Allthough it was possible that the pieces could do something "active", the concept of "something" wasn't clear. That is where my latest blogging comes in, it defines exactly of what the activity consists. What the pieces do by being active. And it defines the hierarchy of the moves which should be played first.

The problem is now that towards the transition into the endgame I am in about the same position as I was towards positional play two years ago. That means there are a lot of loose different bits of endgame knowledge which I forget to apply in my play. If the above list can be generalized into a recipe for improvement then that means that my next step should be to find the common factor in those bits of knowledge. Which is what I'm up to now.

If I return to the comment of Blunderprone, all this means that you can't evaluate a position until you have transformed the bits of knowledge into an applicable form. Only then evaluation becomes automated enough to be useful in a game. The visualization he touches upon has a close relation to this internalization of knowledge. If I translate it to my own situation, I have difficulties to visualize the cage. Which should be trainable separately perfectly. Visualization without a relation to internalized knowledge I consider to be luxury. It will have no effect on the outcome of the game. If you can't evaluate two different positions right even if you see them physically on a board, then you will not be able to do any better when visualizing these positions in your mind in stead.

Abstract

2009-11-14T21:56:00.006+01:00

.
.
.
Some fellowbloggers seem to tend to see my writings as abstract, arcane or theoretically. I'm totally to blame for that. I don't make any efforts whatsoever to make it look differently due to other priorities in using my time. Yet I can assure you that they can't be further from the truth and totally miss the point in my writings.

On the contrary, my musings have a 1:1 relation to the games I play. They form the actual guide for my moves during the middlegame. They are very, very concrete.

The past year a drastic change in my middlegame approach has manifested itself due to these very concrete musings. In 90% of the cases I reach a very good middlegame position. Even against players with a much higher rating. Most of my opponents agree with that judgement.

Due to this new middlegame approach, a new weak element has surfaced though. I can't finish off my opponents. I misjudge a position, I'm drawn into an endgame and lose the game, even without knowing why.

I had put the Secrets of endgame strategy of Lars Bo Hansen on the backburner because I had lots of positional middlegame troubles about a year ago. Now my middlegame troubles seem to be corrected, sufficient for the moment at least, it seems to be about right to switch places and put my middlegame computing algorithms on the backburner. Only for a while, of course, but there is a very concrete cause for this change: Corus is nearing.

concrete

A.C.I.S. Arcane Chess Innovation Society

2009-11-14T11:17:00.004+01:00

.
.
.
In a previous post I discovered that chess is the ultimate trap. You might think that that leads to a simple algorithm which closes the trap. Just take away as much squares as possible from your opponent's pieces and you're done.

Matters are somewhat more complicated, though. As I stated in my previous post, you are dealing with a cage. A cage with walls that are closing in on the hostile piece. This are the problems to be solved:

The walls of the cage have a freakish shape.
The walls constitue of many different elements like the rim, own pieces, hostile pieces, covered squares and tempo's.
The walls are partly invisible.
The fabric of a wall can be made of tempo's. That means there are holes in the wall but the opponent cannot make use of it since it takes too many tempo's to walk through it so you can close it in time.
The pieces that form the walls have to cooperate in order to close in.
The walls can be attacked.
Only cages that you can shrink to zero squares do really matter.

A very good example of all these elements of a cage is mating the king with bishop and knight.
I will not start with such complexity though. I start more simple with an algorithm to mate the king with two rooks in an attempt to optimize the coordinating of the pieces. I will not bore you with the details.

More boring stuff

2009-11-08T08:19:00.001+01:00

.
.
.
Writing the previous post I was pleasantly surprised that the proposed algorithm "The position to strive for is to maximize the difference between the current potential of your own pieces and the current potential of the pieces of the opponent" lead to a tendency to walk towards the center without any additional programming. After some thinking I realized that this very same algorithm would create a few other tendencies as well without extra programming:

the tendency for a pawn to walk to the promotion square, which brings him closer to its full potential.
the tendency to capture pieces.
the tendency to trap pieces.
the tendency to occupy open lines and outposts.
the tendency to base exchanges on the dynamic value of a piece.
the tendency to trap (mate) the king. Maybe this should be stimulated by letting the potential of the enemy drop to zero if that happens. This would cause the game to go in the right direction any time.

The programming of this algorithm will by no means be simple. It isn't guaranteed that it is even possible with less than an infinite amount of calculations. My attempt to avoid the tree of analysis will be based on formulating the ideal position and working backwards to the beginning.

First of all I have an important problem to solve. A problem that I haven't even formulated yet.

What is the exact relationship between tempo's and squares?
The fact that you can only make one move at the time makes that the squares don't have an equal value for a piece. The fact that you don't occupy a square 7 tempo's away is not as pressing on the performance of a piece as the fact that you don't own a square just 2 tempo's away. But how many squares of the 7th order have the same value as a square of the 6th order (=6 tempo's away)?

After some thought it becomes evident that it isn't sufficient to look at the future of one piece only. It is the combined effort of different pieces that constructs a cage in which pieces can be trapped. This needs separate investigation.

How potent is my piece?

2009-11-04T21:39:00.009+01:00

.
.
.
This is the hypothesis:
All kinds of positional topics like piece activity, king safety, outpost, color complex etc.. can be described using only a few elements. Space and time are two of them.

If I am able to express every topic in these same few elements than I can compare them on a realistic basis in stead of awarding them with arbitrary statistic bonuses. I want to stretch matters even further, even the tactical elements can be expressed using these very same few elements. Everything isn't worked out completely yet. That's the reason for this post. Let me give it a shot.

What happens when a piece is dumped on the board?

Diagram 1

.
.
.
In 7 tempo's, the King can reach every square of the board. That must be his potential in the shortest time from his position on h8.
Potential from h8:

Space = 64 squares
Time = 7 tempo's

That shows immediately that there must be better squares on the board. If you place the king in the center of the board, for instance on e4, he becomes even more potent.
Maximum potential:

Space = 64
Time = 4 tempo's

Even if you give the king more tempo's, he cannot accomplish more than reaching 64 squares.

I'm a bit afraid that you might find these posts a bit boring. For me they are very important though. Without them I would never be able to find the third element as I just did:

Position on the board.

Only on d4, e4, d5 and e5 the king will have his full potential and hence his greatest future possibilities.

What happens when other pieces are being dumped on the board? It is evident that they can only limit the full potential of the king by influencing the elements.

Diagram 2

.
.
.
The blocked pawns are lengthening the pathways of the king. To go from h8 to g7 the king needs 15 tempo's. To go from h8 to h7 he even needs two tempo's more.
The king can still reach all 64 squares. But he needs an incredible amount of tempo's to do so.
It is possible to place the pawns in such way that a certain part of the board isn't accessible to the king at all.

Conclusion for now:
The position to strive for is to maximize the difference between the current potential of your own pieces and the current potential of the pieces of the opponent. Potential can be expressed in squares and tempo's. Not every square has equal potential for a piece. Hence the inclination for some pieces to head towards the center.

Hanlon's razor:
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

PGN viewer almost ready

2009-11-01T22:56:00.007+01:00

.
.
.
On my quest to find the pot with gold I'm almost ready with my new PGN-viewer. It took me 3 days of programming and I need another few hours. Of course only when it is finished the actual work begins: writing analysis-algorithms that answer my questions.

In the comments on a previous post there were different methods proposed to find the static value of a piece. A static value is some kind of average based on a statistical method. What I'm looking for though is the dynamic value of a piece. Based on what a piece actual does in a position. In the corner a rook sometimes has merely the same function as a pawn, just covering the pawn in front of him. Especially if he has little prospect in the future his value is about 1 (pawnunit, that is) . While a rook that is about to deliver mate has a value that approaches infinity. Usually the dynamic value will be hoovering somewhere in between and can change drastically during the game.

The algorithms I intend to write are meant to shed light on how it can be calculated what a piece actually does and how to calculate its future prospects. Since that is what you want to maximize.

Chess is a trap

2009-10-27T22:42:00.005+01:00

.
.
.
In this post I will take a few huge steps that may be hard to follow. Or swallow. But I feel the intrinsic logic behind it allthough I don't spend much time to write it down clearly. Don't let that keep you from commenting though. I hope you can bear with me. I will try to clarify matters later.

In a previous post I defined the following triptych for what to do when there is nothing to do, I found:

a bipolar goal to strive for. Decline the possibilities of your opponent while improving your own.
A hierarchy of moves based on the amount they attribute to the optimal position and the amount of tempo's needed.
A hierarchy in piece move vs pawnmoves.

I looked close into this and realized that you are actually trying to trap your opponent by denying him possibilities. Mate is just the ultimate trap. Unfavarouble moves arise as the only options when trapped. I wrote about traps as one of two tactical methods here. Now I found out that the trap is the basic of chess. Even of the duplo attack.

To identify the elements that are involved in a trap I start with looking at simple positions. In the hope to derive more complicated laws from it. Take the following position.

Diagram 1

.
.
.
Investigation of the relationship between space and tempo's.

The rooks have to take away space of the black King. From a limiting point of view, the move Rh6 comes to mind. But you can't mate a king in the middle of the board. Why not?:
An uncovered rook can only take away 3 squares of a King. Two rooks can take away 6 squares. But to trap the king you should take away 9 squares. Where do the last 3 come from?:
The edge of the board is able to take away another 3 squares. In fact you can treat the rim as a piece, when it comes to write an algorithm of mobility. The corner even is able to take away 5 squares.
The King needs tempo's to attack a rook. You have to put your rooks out of reach, in that way you add tempo's to the counterattacking King.
On a board with 3x3 squares you can't mate the King since your rooks cannot be placed out of reach.

These are the key ingredients of a trap. Every move that isn't driving the King by force gives the opponent free tempo's. Tempo's he can use to prevent the trap.

From this point of view the duplo-attack is a special case of a trap.

Diagram 2

.
.
.
Black to move.
The black King cannot go to the 6th rank due to the double attack Rf6+
So the double attack limits the posibilities of the black king. Thus adding to its trap.

My own chessanalysisprogram

2009-10-25T21:40:00.006+01:00

.
.
.
Finally I found the time and energy to write my own chess analysis program. That is to say, I wrote the first step. I wanted to do that for about seven years. The problem with chess programs as Fritz etc. is that they don't give you a good insight in how they arrive at a certain move. When I tried to get insight lately in what aspect of piece activity causes the most problems for the opponent I missed that dearly.

The idea is as follows. The program reads a PGN file and shows it. For every aspect I want to investigate I write a specific algorithm that will show the development of that aspect during the game. For instance, I want to know how much every piece is standing in the way of other pieces. Or how many squares manoeuvring room each side has. The questions will change overtime when insight grows. The sky is the limit.

The parser for PGN games is now completed and it works like a charm. To be continued.

When to move a pawn

2009-10-22T19:23:00.004+02:00

.
.
.
Initiative and symmetry.
There are some remnants to be dealt with first: initiative and symmetric positions.
I will do that by disqualifying the initiative. The scope of my investigation is what to do when there is nothing to do. When there are no weaknesses to provoke and the preconditions of a kingside attack aren't met. The initiative works by means of threats which have to be dealt with. An extreme example is a quite symmetrical position. None of the sides can claim a positional advantage, since everything is equal. Yet the game can be lost due the other side having the initiative. So the initiative is clearly beyond the scope of this research. For now.

When to move a pawn.
Pawns are a means to reduce the space of your opponent and to improve the manoeuvring room for your own pieces. Whenever you can do it unpunished, you have to move your pawns. In practice unpunished without preparation means in the opening. Further in the game you have to improve your position first before you can move a pawn unpunished. So that gives another hierarchy to the moves.

Summary.
I have now come to the end of this triptych about what to do when there is nothing to do. I have found:

A bipolar goal to strive for. Decline the possibilities of your opponent while improving your own.
A hierarchy of moves based on the amount they attribute to the optimal position and the amount of tempo's needed.
A hierarchy in piece move vs pawnmoves.

Now it's time to work with these idea's and to see what they are worth in practice.

Time is on my side

2009-10-21T19:30:00.008+02:00

.
.
.
Count down to the hypothetical ideal position.
While thinking about tempo's in chess I realized that we tend to count them in the wrong direction. When the chess pieces are in the begin position, I can imagine an ideal position where all the pieces are on their best squares. There is a minimum amount of tempo's required to reach that ideal position. You can only do it slower, by spilling moves, but not faster. As long as your pieces haven't reached their optimal positions, tempo's do play a role. If your opponent spills some tempo's, you can afford to do the same, without being punished. Once the ideal position is reached, the word tempo starts to loose its meaning. So you count down the tempo's until have reached the hypothetical ideal situation. From the start of the game, to become well developed is the ideal situation. In the opening you can lose tempo's. Once well developed, you can't. That is what Nimzowitsch meant by "there is a difference in falling asleep during your work or after your work".

Hierarchy of moves.
An ideal situation is the goal. There are moves that contribute much to that goal and there are moves that contribute little to that goal. Some moves even are counterproductive for the goal. This is important to realize, since it gives an hierarchy to the moves. Those pieces that contribute the most to the goal with the fewest series of moves must be played first. So first the one movers, then the two movers etcetera. Finally, when you are close to the ideal, you can permit to improve your worst piece with a long series of moves.

Continuous shift.
Due to the moves of the opponent, the ideal places for the pieces do shift continuously. One side can decide to deviate from the ideal line. For instance he can decide to start an attack while not fully developed. That can have great implications for the ideal placing of the pieces. Ofcourse you must then act accordingly and change your plan.

Mutual exchangebility of time, space and matter.
To a certain degree, time, space and matter are mutually exchangable. Time manifests itself as geometrical or spatial patterns on the board. Take for instance the rule of the square in the endgame. By drawing an imaginary square around a passer you can see if the king is in time to stop it.

If you can deprive your opponent of space, he may need too much time to shift between attacked targets.

In a gambit you sacrifice matter to gain time and space.

Time is up.
Ok, time is up now. Still to cover: the initiative, symmetry, when to move a pawn.

Where to aim

2009-10-20T20:21:00.006+02:00

.
.
.
When all my pieces are active as can be but there are no weaknesses to aim at I often ask my self "now what?". What should be the goal of all my manoeuvres, moving of worst pieces, pawnmoves and piece activity? In order to find out I have been counting covered squares, attacked pieces, manoeuvring squares, amount of pieces on the covered diagonal etc.. I read articles about piece activity and mobility. I compared the outcomes of my countings in problempositions with the final solution.

Slowly it dawned upon me that everything boils down to two principles which are two sides of the same coin. There are two aims to strive for:

Disrupt the hostile communication lines of the enemy pieces and deprive them from possibilities.
Do the opposite for your own pieces. Ask yourself which piece or pawn is standing in my way?

If no targets have cristallized yet, the battle is about possibilities. He who has the most possibilities has the biggest chances to come up with something that the enemy can't parry. Once formulated it is almost too simple for words.

The next thing to think about is about time, tempo's and initiative.

What to do when there is nothing to do?

2009-10-17T09:12:00.010+02:00

.
.
.
When the preconditions of a kingside attack aren't met and a weakness cannot be provoked, the game is in such a stage that it is not evident what to do. I have a whole bunch of loose idea's that can be applied at this stage. But there is no cohesy nor hierarchy in this bunch of idea's. At a certain point I bundled a lot of these idea's together under the same noumer piece activity. This is no longer sufficient. This is a first attempt to bring somewhat more order. First of all I have to give this stage a distinct name for convenience. Let me call it the stage of improving the position.

Summing up the ingredients.
Before order can be applied we must know which ingredients play a role. Sofar I have identified the following topics:

Prophylaxis.
Piece activity.
Flexibility.
Manoeuvring your pieces.
Preparing for potential targets.
Attacking two weaknesses.
Outnumbering.
Pawns.
Manoeuvring space.
Dual purpose move.
Improving your worst piece.
The tempo of the game.

Prophylaxis.
Dvoretsky defines in his Secrets of positional play prophylactic thinking as the habit of constantly asking yourself what the opponents wants to do, what he would play if it were him to move, the ability to find an answer to this question and and to take account of it in the process of coming to a decision.
The main principle of converting an advantage is the restriction of the opponent's possibilities.

As a gambitplayer I was used to totally neglect the moves of my opponent since initiative is everything and I usually had no time to consider other moves than answers to my threats. So I definitively have to learn a quite new habit.

Piece activity.
A lot has been said in this blog about piece activity. There is no necessity to repeat that. My latest dicovery is that I treat it way too static. I remember well an experiment to try to invent my own opening by placing my pieces as active as possible in as less moves as possible. That lead to some kind of Colle-Zukertort kind of position. I played it in about 20 cc-games. The opponents found 20 different ways to defuse the threat of Qc2 and Bd3. Once defused, the position of the teamed up Queen and bishop continued to be harmless.

A concept related to piece activity I often use is when a pawn is very well defended by pieces it probably stands in the way.

Flexibility.
A more dynamic approach is not to put your pieces on their best squares but to stop one move short. On a square where you have the most possibilities to reach a good square in one move.

Manoeuvring your pieces.
When the effect of a piece at a certain square peters out you have to regroup it. There are several different elements needed for this. First you need time. There mustn't be urgent tasks to accomplish elsewhere. Furthermore you need space to manoeuvre. Such space is typically created by pawns moving forward. At last you need a new square to go to.

Preparing for potential targets.
At some point you want to provoke a weakness or start a kingside attack. How on earth do you prepare for that? what does a potential target looks like? How do you know you are ready?

Attacking two targets.
This is commonly known. But how do you prepare for it?

Outnumbering.
You have to outnumber your opponent on a certain square on the board. But how do you choose your targetsquare? How do you know which square is important?

Pawns.
Pawns can have multiple functions. To claim space for manoeuvres, for instance. How do you know it is time to move a pawn in stead of a piece? How do you judge the irrevocable effects of a pawnmove?

Dual purpose moves.
How can you learn to design them?

Improving your worst piece.
How do you know it is time to move your worst piece?

The tempo of the game.
In the opening you can't waste tempos. But once you have developed the tempo of the game can change. Sometimes you can permit to dabble around a little. Sometimes it is time to improve your worst piece. Sometimes there is time to regroup. How do you judge this?

As you see there are a lot of ingredients and a lot of questions. I going to look for some order.

Improving my position

2009-10-14T22:33:00.005+02:00

.
.
.
There are two obvious targets in chess: the opposite king and a weak pawn. I can attack the king if the preconditions of Vukovic are met and I can attack a weak pawn if I have induced one (see previous post). If the preconditions are not met or if I can't induce a weak pawn I have to:

Improve my position.
I can move pieces or pawns in order to reorganize my pieces. But how do I improve my position? Logically I suspect that my organizing manoeuvres must be related to the two targets mentioned above. But how? One of the preconditions of a kingside attack is that I have to outnumber the defensive pieces by 3 (2 in the case of a pawnstorm). But I cannot force that!

Yet the moves I do must have at least some relation to the main targets. Otherwise I'm just moving back and forth.

Outnumbering.
Now I mention it, outnumbering seems to be an essential element of every attack. The problem is, that if I do pile up my pieces against a target, my opponent can do the same by piling up his defensive pieces. The trouble is that I can move only one piece at the time.

The problem bears a lot of simularity with two possibilities to gain wood by force in tactics: the duplo-attack and the trap. With a duplo-attack (all variations of attacking two pieces at the same time with one move) the opponent has a lack of time. That is to say he cannot save both pieces with one tempo. With a trap the opponent has a lack of space.

Logically time and space are the ingredients to work with. This implies two methods to get an edge. The first one is the multipurpose move while the second method is claiming space. With the multipurpose move you win time by accomplishing two things with one tempo. Claiming space is best done by pawns. Claiming space has two results: it diminishes the manoeuvring possibilities of the opponents' pieces and it improves the manoeuvring room of my own pieces.

Dynamic vs. static.
It now appears that my view of the much praised piece activity has been fairly static. I put my piece on an open line from which it starts to stare into enemy territory. Once my opponent coped with that he doesn't need to use any tempos anymore to continue parrying the threat.

In order to pose threats I must not put a piece on its best square and leave it there, but I must put it on a flexible square from where it can reach two or more good squares with one move. The threat is stronger than the execution. If my opponent starts to defend against threats that aren't manifest yet, he is basically wasting tempos on phantom threats. In stead he has to keep his pieces ready on flexible squares too, ready to defend when necessary.

The use of flexible squares demands another approach to the pawnstructure.