I recently had a blog entry on my journey in relearning chess. These past few weeks have had lots of learning and self discovery along the way. Exactly what I was in the mood for. That’s the good part.
I had also read in several places that improving our own chess tactical knowledge can take us very far towards the road to mastery. In the past blog entry I had identified an app called chess tempo that has an excellent tactical trainer. And it does. After diligently practicing the puzzles in chess tempo (It contains more than 2000 I think) I was seeing steady progress until recently. Chesstempo has a built in ratings analyzer. I don’t know how it works, but it seems to reward correct answers and quick solutions. My rating peaked at about 1200-1300 and refused to go further. Why is that?
Going back to my previous book review on “Ultralearning” I discovered that I was missing an important part of the process–reviewing previous problems. Chesstempo apparently has a mechanic to help do that but being impatient when I couldn’t figure it out right away I needed to move on.
So, I found two tools. One is a book/training method. The other is an app.
The book/training method is called “The Woodpecker Method”.
I don’t know where the name came from but it basically works like this, at the beginner level. There are around 200 tactical puzzles in the book. The idea is to solve them in about a month. The puzzles only tell which side is to move. Your goal is something to figure out–to win material, checkmate, and so forth. Spend a few minutes on the puzzle and if you get stuck there is a solution in the back. You’ll need to do close to 10 puzzles a day.
Now here’s where things change. After taking a day or two off. Do the puzzles again. In half the time! Repeat this sequence for 7 cycles.
The goal is to improve your “tactical vision” and intuitive awareness of the possibilities in the various chess positions. By the end of the 7th cycle you should in theory be able to do all 200 puzzles in a couple hours.
This is an Ultralearning principle in practice. I’m working through this now. I haven’t done any puzzles in a few days due to illness but will be restarting soon.
The app is called CT-Art 4.0 There is a free version and the full version is pretty inexpensive. There are two modes. A learning mode, and a test mode. Its available for iOS, google, and a software download. Here’s the logo for the app
The test mode is some number of tactical puzzles with various themes and various levels of difficulty. By themes I mean different kinds of chess tactics. Difficulty is easy/medium/hard. The cool thing here is that you have several chances to solve the puzzle correctly. Each chance you get a little more info in the form of a hint to help you solve it. At the end of your test session (you pick how long you want to do it) you can look at your statistics and see
- Problems you solved perfectly (I think this is the first time)
- Problems you solved correctly (I think this is after one hint)
- Problems you solved partially (you needed lots of hints)
- Problems you solved incorrectly
Now. Here’s the cool thing. You can go back into each category and solve them again! The app wants you to wait at least a day before resolving them.
It also tells you the problems you got correctly in the easy/medium/hard difficulty levels. For me it was around 80/70/60 percent.
Of course you can repeat or continue the test anytime you want.
There’s also another feature that I’m just now discovering. It’s in the Learning section of the app. In this section you can pick a specific tactical theme (I picked annihilation of the pieces defending other pieces) and just work on those. There are several puzzles in this theme and of course you can review them as often as you want.
There are several other themes also for you to work on.
And all of this is for the free version. I’m not exactly sure yet how to structure a study plan to get the most of the system but I’m still thinking about it.