I just watched the second episode of the documentary series "My Brilliant Brain", dealing with Susan Polgar. The episode contained a lot of familiar concepts, like 'paralysis by analysis', chunking, pattern recognition by repetition and the like. All concepts which most of us chess improvement freaks are used to dealing with. And without going into details, the documentary agreed with most of the philosophical grounds for my training, which is heavily based on training intuition and subconscious processing instead of a structured rule-based approach. Feed the brain, and let it work it all out as it sees best. Also my layman 'theory' of a specific neural 'sub-processor' being developed into the brain was confirmed by neurological scanning of Susan's brain. So, all is nice & good on the pedagogic front, and therefore there's no reason to adjust my learning methods.
Naturally I'm aware this line of reasoning has nothing to do with scientific rigour, but then again, I'm not looking to publish a paper on chess improvement theory. Lack of theoretical proof doesn't concern me, only the practical results. "It works" is close enough for me.
Also, during the latest batch of blitz craziness, I've also come to the conclusion that my paradoxically weak blitz vs. strong tactics -problem has one quite probable cause: Although I've developed the ability to spot & execute tactics very efficiently (compared to my other abilities), I haven't developed the ability to improve the position similarly. I never think about how I can improve my position while solving tactics, instead I completely ignore that aspect. And although I can think my way through all that in slow games, I need to develop my intuition and do it without thinking, just like I when I solve tactics. Thinking just isn't fast enough, I need to recognize and 'feel' the right moves. Well, 'right enough' moves to be more exact.
The way I'm planning to go about this, is to start going through master games once again. Just grinding the games in, over a long period of time. I'll start gathering games in my pet openings, handpicking them as I go, and going through them exactly the same way like I would proceed with tactical problems. I should probably keep a game count here also, to prevent the typical lapse of effort after the initial excitement wears thin.
One last thing about the documentary: Once again I'm dumbstricken by the sheer amount of work Susan has gone through already as a small child. Up to 6 hours of hard studying daily, with pops watching over in the background. That's not some half-assed doodling with the study material, watching telly at the same time, but instead sitting down and working at your desk. Somehow that's very inspirational to me. -If a little girl can have that kind of dicipline, I have a lot of room for improvement there.
Master games: 1
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5 comments:
That documentary about Susan was very interesting indeed.
You should definitely have a look at the strategy module of PCT.
I've thought about it, but I want to do the endgame modules first. and I also want to focus my efforts on the openings I use, as I'm still very inexperienced with them.
How is your progress going at PCT, endgame-wise?
it started well as usual, but all the holiday stuff has thrown me off the track, also as usual. but I'm getting back on the wagon and have been doing them again for a couple of days.
what I've gone through so far has stuck pretty well, and already the second iteration through a unit goes relatively fast and with little to no errors. they should go a lot faster though, and totally without errors.
the "improving the position" part seems to be my weakness as well. i know i need to, but given a choice between 3 moves, i invariably chose the worst one. as for her discipline, i suspect a great deal of that was her father there enforcing her discipline. if you had someone standing over you, you too would spend 6 hours studying.
this was a really good post, it got me thinking about all sorts of things, thanks....
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