Not been doing much of CTS lately for various reasons, and it's already been a month since the last accuracy update. Also thought I wasn't doing all that well, but as it turns out I just barely managed to reach the goal of 90% session average over this short batch of 1265 problems. The numbers are: 118214 problems done at 1610 rating, 80.7% total accuracy, giving a 90.0% session average. Which is nice, but I'll need to get that accuracy higher and do much more problems. No more slacking.
CTS: 1610, 118214 problems, 80.7%.
Showing posts with label tactics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tactics. Show all posts
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Tactics Revisited
It's been a long time coming, but I finally started doing tactics again. Haven't been doing any for 3-4 years now, as there's been so much other holes to work on in my game. But I've always known I'll need to take my tactics to the next level for further improvement, and for some reason it now feels like the time to do just that.
I'm not gonna do anything overly rigorous, no big structured training plans or anything like that. Just keep it very simple and straightforward, 30 minutes or so every day. I started with the ICC training bot set for now, but if need be, I might later switch it to a 'slower' harder set for the real mind torture effect. For now I'll be just taking it relatively easy, keep it fun and establish a daily training routine.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Capture Blindness - A Horror Story
I've been thinking a lot about why I'm so terrible at blitz, when my slow games are going better all the time. What is it that I do so differently in blitz? Well one thing is extremely obvious: I miss a lot of simple 1-movers. Meaning I drop material in every game, sometimes even missing obvious mate-in-ones. I don't miss those almost ever in slow games anymore.
One thing I've come to suspect is my thought process in blitz. Do I really check if a move drops a piece? Not really. I just make a move that looks intuitively good. There's some checking of course, but it's more unconscious, and obviously not very efficient judging by my score.
So this got me thinking about how to exercise my blitz thought process. I could obviously do it on CTS, or even in real games. But somehow that gives me the nagging feeling that it's just my laziness trying to get way without dealing with any real, and inherently uncomfortable, change. "Just carry on dude, it'll all blow over in time." - Then I suddenly remembered someone mentioning some kind of a capture training mode in fritz, so I fired it up and took a peek at the thing.
It's called 'attack training', and the basic idea is to click every piece that can be taken, regardless of color or the result. If the capture is legal, click the target. You can set a time limit for a session, and fritz automatically selects new positions from the database, as soon as you've found all the captures correctly. When the time runs out, it displays your number of found captures in that session, the average score between sessions, and the highest score. "Sounds like child's play, this must be so easy it can't possibly be useful" I thought. "There's not even looking for the simplest tactics involved, just captures."
So I set the session timer for three minutes and started clicking. And after a few sessions, it turns out my average scores were horrible!!! There was always a simple capture or two escaping my eye, and finding those simply took a lot of time! My average score for 3 minutes was 10 captures found!?! That just must be incredibly weak. I also found it surprisingly hard to concentrate on finding my opponent's captures in an orderly fashion. Which indicates that I indeed have the bad habit of just ignoring my opponent's threats.
So it seems like there's yet another element of board vision I wasn't aware of. One which is possible to disregard even while doing a huge amount of tactics. And even though it can be argued that most of these captures are irrelevant, as they simply don't have any possibility to work out, I still think I should be able to find them fast or immediately. There's clearly a lot of work to be done on that area, and I think this weakness might actually be the very reason why I play so badly in blitz.
From now on, I'm going to do a couple of 3 minute sessions daily, also focusing on the thought process I use. Nothing complex, just conduct the search in orderly and complete fashion. First search for my opponent's captures, then my own.
I would also be extremely interested in how others do on the attack training mode. So please try it out with a batch of 3min sessions, and leave your result as a comment on this post, complete with your blitz rating. I'm hoping we'll see some kind of meaningful differences between blitzers of different level.
my stats:
3min sessions
average: 10
highest 17
ICC 5-minute 1100
update: I've just been told that the 'attack training' mode wasn't introduced until Fritz 9. I'd still love to hear about it from those of you who have it. Whether you do well or not doesn't matter, I'd just like to find out if seeing those captures faster is a property that good blitzers have. A bad blitzer doing well on it would also be very interesting, as it would pretty much prove me wrong and close the case as irrelevant to blitz training.
One thing I've come to suspect is my thought process in blitz. Do I really check if a move drops a piece? Not really. I just make a move that looks intuitively good. There's some checking of course, but it's more unconscious, and obviously not very efficient judging by my score.
So this got me thinking about how to exercise my blitz thought process. I could obviously do it on CTS, or even in real games. But somehow that gives me the nagging feeling that it's just my laziness trying to get way without dealing with any real, and inherently uncomfortable, change. "Just carry on dude, it'll all blow over in time." - Then I suddenly remembered someone mentioning some kind of a capture training mode in fritz, so I fired it up and took a peek at the thing.
It's called 'attack training', and the basic idea is to click every piece that can be taken, regardless of color or the result. If the capture is legal, click the target. You can set a time limit for a session, and fritz automatically selects new positions from the database, as soon as you've found all the captures correctly. When the time runs out, it displays your number of found captures in that session, the average score between sessions, and the highest score. "Sounds like child's play, this must be so easy it can't possibly be useful" I thought. "There's not even looking for the simplest tactics involved, just captures."
So I set the session timer for three minutes and started clicking. And after a few sessions, it turns out my average scores were horrible!!! There was always a simple capture or two escaping my eye, and finding those simply took a lot of time! My average score for 3 minutes was 10 captures found!?! That just must be incredibly weak. I also found it surprisingly hard to concentrate on finding my opponent's captures in an orderly fashion. Which indicates that I indeed have the bad habit of just ignoring my opponent's threats.
So it seems like there's yet another element of board vision I wasn't aware of. One which is possible to disregard even while doing a huge amount of tactics. And even though it can be argued that most of these captures are irrelevant, as they simply don't have any possibility to work out, I still think I should be able to find them fast or immediately. There's clearly a lot of work to be done on that area, and I think this weakness might actually be the very reason why I play so badly in blitz.
From now on, I'm going to do a couple of 3 minute sessions daily, also focusing on the thought process I use. Nothing complex, just conduct the search in orderly and complete fashion. First search for my opponent's captures, then my own.
I would also be extremely interested in how others do on the attack training mode. So please try it out with a batch of 3min sessions, and leave your result as a comment on this post, complete with your blitz rating. I'm hoping we'll see some kind of meaningful differences between blitzers of different level.
my stats:
3min sessions
average: 10
highest 17
ICC 5-minute 1100
update: I've just been told that the 'attack training' mode wasn't introduced until Fritz 9. I'd still love to hear about it from those of you who have it. Whether you do well or not doesn't matter, I'd just like to find out if seeing those captures faster is a property that good blitzers have. A bad blitzer doing well on it would also be very interesting, as it would pretty much prove me wrong and close the case as irrelevant to blitz training.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
1650 On CTS
Another milestone reached. I just did about a hundred problems staying on the 1645-1650 level, even though I had slept only three hours last night. My eyes felt weary, but it was like the pins, skewers and double threats were flying at me, and I solved a lot of them in less than three seconds. Still, I got only 6 wrong of the last 50 problems. That's a solid 88% success rate. Weird.
I had been forcing myself to look for my own king safety first for a couple of days, which felt very awkward and difficult to maintain. It also slowed me down quite a bit, and didn't seem to make that big of a difference. So now I just went with the feeling, mostly not concentrating on the king safety. And I just flew through the variations, spotting all relevant aspects in the positions like they had big, red lights blinking on them. I hope this isn't an isolated incident.
Feeling quite tired with my CC games. I divided them in three and now try to force myself to run through a group on most days. But I've clearly overdone it, and I'll need to cut my gameload down. Once again. There's also the 7/14 Clan Leagues starting in a week or so, which will apparently land me another 18-20 games playing board two. Which will probably mean the opponents are rated 1600-2000 depending on the clan.
I don't even have much energy for the 30 30 games, so I've slowed that down as well. Not to mention CT-ART and PCT. No sense in doing them until I have the necessary energy back.
Started going through Kasparov's KID games though, which seems nice and interesting. Taking maybe 30-45 minutes a game, not trying to wreck my brain or anything. Just getting some easy fun. I'll probably be trying KID out myself on 30 30 games soon.
CTS: 1650, 77546, 77.6%
RHP: 1822
FICS standard: 1623 (1662), wdl 28-2-16
I had been forcing myself to look for my own king safety first for a couple of days, which felt very awkward and difficult to maintain. It also slowed me down quite a bit, and didn't seem to make that big of a difference. So now I just went with the feeling, mostly not concentrating on the king safety. And I just flew through the variations, spotting all relevant aspects in the positions like they had big, red lights blinking on them. I hope this isn't an isolated incident.
Feeling quite tired with my CC games. I divided them in three and now try to force myself to run through a group on most days. But I've clearly overdone it, and I'll need to cut my gameload down. Once again. There's also the 7/14 Clan Leagues starting in a week or so, which will apparently land me another 18-20 games playing board two. Which will probably mean the opponents are rated 1600-2000 depending on the clan.
I don't even have much energy for the 30 30 games, so I've slowed that down as well. Not to mention CT-ART and PCT. No sense in doing them until I have the necessary energy back.
Started going through Kasparov's KID games though, which seems nice and interesting. Taking maybe 30-45 minutes a game, not trying to wreck my brain or anything. Just getting some easy fun. I'll probably be trying KID out myself on 30 30 games soon.
CTS: 1650, 77546, 77.6%
RHP: 1822
FICS standard: 1623 (1662), wdl 28-2-16
Thursday, February 08, 2007
CT-ART Level 20 Complete
After the initial enthiusiasm about CT-ART, I haven't been much on it. Today I just finished level 20 after a break, that makes it 396 problems solved. I've tried to do it only when I'm not tired, concentrating on exhaustive calculation, but even one tired session brings the success percentage down quite a lot. It's really hard to fight the natural laziness and jump the gun when you're tired. But I'll try to do better again on level 30.
first round:
level 10: 96%
level 20: 88%
rating: 2007
I've also looked into the basic endgame modules of Personal Chess Trainer, which seems quite nice. Of course the interface is crap as usual, and its inability to understand anything but the one pre-set 'correct line' annoys the hell out of me. But at least there's a nice set of basic endgame problems to drill and get the theoretical knowledge transformed into procedural knowledge.
Otherwise I've been playing 30 30 games on FICS almost every day. Mostly it's been going well, but yesterday I messed a game like a total idiot. First I declined material on the 10th move because I got greedy trying to pressure his king in the center, then got into trouble because of the previous retreat of the pinning g5-knight which gave him a pawnstorm. I was looking for the flashy win, of course, the cardinal sin in a winning position. Then a long period of adequate defending, only to succumb into a fork, only to insanely drop the queen right after. Although the end was humiliating, I'm even more pissed off about allowing that kingside pawn storm. My only hope is that the painful mistake will burn into my brain, never to be forgotten. Here's that miserable excuse for a game:
[White "wormstar"]
[Black "Versiano"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1628"]
[BlackElo "1575"]
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 g6 4. Bg5 Bg7 5. e4 d6 6. Qf3 Nc6 7. Rd1 h6 8.Bh4 g5 9. Bg3 Nd7 10. d5 Bxc3+ 11. bxc3 exd5 12. cxd5 Ne7 13. Bc4 Ng6 14.Bb3 b6 15. Ne2 Qe7 16. O-O Nc5 17. Rd4 h5 18. h3 g4 19. hxg4 Bxg4 20. Qe3 h4 21. Bh2 O-O-O 22. f3 Bd7 23. Ra1 h3 24. g3 Rdg8 25. Kf2 Ne5 26. Ke1 Qf6 27. Nf4 Kb7 28. Bc2 Qg5 29. a4 a5 30. Bd3 Nb3 31. Rb1 Nxd4 32. Qxd4 Nxf3+{wormstar resigns}0-1
Let that be a lesson for me.
first round:
level 10: 96%
level 20: 88%
rating: 2007
I've also looked into the basic endgame modules of Personal Chess Trainer, which seems quite nice. Of course the interface is crap as usual, and its inability to understand anything but the one pre-set 'correct line' annoys the hell out of me. But at least there's a nice set of basic endgame problems to drill and get the theoretical knowledge transformed into procedural knowledge.
Otherwise I've been playing 30 30 games on FICS almost every day. Mostly it's been going well, but yesterday I messed a game like a total idiot. First I declined material on the 10th move because I got greedy trying to pressure his king in the center, then got into trouble because of the previous retreat of the pinning g5-knight which gave him a pawnstorm. I was looking for the flashy win, of course, the cardinal sin in a winning position. Then a long period of adequate defending, only to succumb into a fork, only to insanely drop the queen right after. Although the end was humiliating, I'm even more pissed off about allowing that kingside pawn storm. My only hope is that the painful mistake will burn into my brain, never to be forgotten. Here's that miserable excuse for a game:
[White "wormstar"]
[Black "Versiano"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1628"]
[BlackElo "1575"]
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 g6 4. Bg5 Bg7 5. e4 d6 6. Qf3 Nc6 7. Rd1 h6 8.Bh4 g5 9. Bg3 Nd7 10. d5 Bxc3+ 11. bxc3 exd5 12. cxd5 Ne7 13. Bc4 Ng6 14.Bb3 b6 15. Ne2 Qe7 16. O-O Nc5 17. Rd4 h5 18. h3 g4 19. hxg4 Bxg4 20. Qe3 h4 21. Bh2 O-O-O 22. f3 Bd7 23. Ra1 h3 24. g3 Rdg8 25. Kf2 Ne5 26. Ke1 Qf6 27. Nf4 Kb7 28. Bc2 Qg5 29. a4 a5 30. Bd3 Nb3 31. Rb1 Nxd4 32. Qxd4 Nxf3+{wormstar resigns}0-1
Let that be a lesson for me.
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