@GnocchiPup said in #26:
>
@Wodjul>
> A brief background on how I came up with my exercises.
>
> My chess activities back then were just blitz bullet and puzzles. Even after thousands of puzzles, I can't get to 2200 puzzles, and there are no noticeable improvements in my games. I stagnated at around 1800 1900.
>
> And then puzzle rush in chesscom came along. No matter how I tried, I can't get past 31 in 5 mins.
>
> After a long hard look and trying to root cause analysis my tactical deficiencies, I came to the following conclusions:
>
> 1. I miss lots of things because I just don't see some moves at all. It seems like some weird blind spot.
> 2. Pattern recognition is important for tactics, it's just like reading in words instead of reading letter by letter.
> 3. Calculation strength is a different skill vs pattern recognition.
> 4. I developed severely bad habits from playing tons of bullet.
>
> From these four, I made exercises for myself, to target each of these problems. All the exercises use free resources from the web.
I am very interested. Can you share the information on these exercises and resources? In this thread or by private message would be equally good for me thanks.
I can certainly relate to number 1 on your list. (I can agree with the others too.) I also do not see some moves at all. In puzzles and games, I can have the experience of "not seeing a move at all" and then finally it pops out and I "see it". I can be stuck on a simple puzzle for minutes thinking "I have been through every possible candidate move and I just don't see a candidate forcing move." Then finally I just see it. It is finally so obvious I wonder why I couldn't see it for 3 full minutes.
On the board the experience is what I call "leaving tactics on the board". I had it recently where my opponent with black made a bad move with his Q knight from e7 to g6 which essentially set up a trap for his own bishop on h5. All I had to do was push my pawn to g4 (my h pawn was on h3) and trap the bishop. Post game analysis showed I missed this move for 3 consecutive moves as did my opponent. I had a strong position and he and I were obviously fixated with our tunnel vision on other moves attacking (me) and defensive (him). It seems to be this tunnel vision on "the one problem of our own choice" which prevents us seeing a new tactical opportunity or danger when it pops up. I used to leave pawn forks on the board, for and against me, until I did a lot of fork puzzles which included quite a few pawn forks.
Somehow, we need to develop the ability to "see the position afresh" after every move rather than remain stuck in our tunnel vision preconceptions. But this is not the only reason for missing tactics of course. Often me or my opponent can make a move with an objective in mind (he must have had an outpost square in mind for that knight or else just a motive to clear e7 or get that knight a little more forward.) But the move can be a blunder if it removes a necessary defence on another piece, leaves another piece overloaded or sets up a trap against one of its fellow pieces,
All these oversights must fall into categories or types. I noted three types above. I have just started a crude Blind Spots diary. It looks like this so far:
1. Being fixated on a move already decided upon and missing the significance of the opponent's move.
2. Forgetting to use the King for Defence in endings mainly.
3. Forgetting to use the King for Attack in endings.
4. Overlooking a long sideways capture or tactic by a rook on a clear rank on an otherwise crowded board.
5. Leaving good tactical moves on the board for a few moves until I see them or the opportunity is lost.
6. Missed a piece trap for 3 moves – bishop trapped by its knight and my pawn push.
Of course, a long list of these mistakes would have to be analysed and categorised to find the common features and reduce all the mistakes down to a certain limited number of basic category mistakes.
Sorry that this post is so long but my final thought is this. As well as the exercises you can recommend I think I need to work on developing a protocol for move checks. I would need to practice this protocol in slow games, I would say in games against Stockfish at about level 5 or 6 with 40 moves in 90 minutes plus 30 second increments. Then I should go through my protocol checks laboriously every move.
These protocol checks would start with looking at opponent lines against me and then my possible lines against him and utilise checks, captures, threats (obviously), sacrifices, positional moves. repelling moves, exchanging (when good for me), improving moves, prophylactic moves, taregetiing weak squares and pawn breaks. Finally there would be a blunder check in the protocol. This protocol checklist might end up about 20 points long! I might need an even longer time limit to practice it?
The idea would be to practice this list slowly over and over every move to internalise it and "automate" or chunk it in my mind as well. Then idea would be that it becomes reflex and intuitive also, I would get to the point where I automatically follow it in games without having to consciously and laboriously think every step. I would just do it automatically. That's the idea in theory.
