beginchess.com » learning

My Brilliant Brain

beginchess — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 05:46:02 +0000

This has been out for a while, but I just got a chance to view it and it has a lot of interesting references to expertise and talent pertaining to chess. Highly recommended.

Overcoming Chess Training Plateaus

beginchess — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:03:30 +0000

Plateaus and You

The brain needs time to assimilate and integrate new information as knowledge and to resolve conflicts with previously learned concepts and plateaus equate to slower progress while we assimilate new ideas. Not until we internalize these new ideas as knowledge are we able to move on to the next phase in our learning. Plateaus are a normal phase of the learning process. The goal is to minimize the amount of time spent in a plateau, and to identify if our plateau is part of the normal learning curve or if it is a result of a deficiency in our learning process.

Sometimes we plateau for reasons that fall outside the normal learning curve. You might plateau if you are missing fundamental knowledge which would have served as a building block to move on to the next level. Or perhaps the information you are learning is too advanced for your level, and you cannot internalize the concept.

Another common cause for prolonged plateaus is overtraining. If you find that you do not look forward to practicing, or are finding less and less time to devote to chess, these are common symptoms of overtraining and a break from chess might be in order.

Less, Different, Harder

As we mentioned before plateaus are normal, and the slow and steady progress made during this phase is critical to a healthy learning process. The length of time spent in a plateau differs between people and even between learning curve phases. As a result, it is very difficult to diagnose if a plateau has overstayed its welcome. The only way around this, is to be proactive in your training program and to build it in such a way where you are constantly challenging yourself and feeding yourself the right amount of content at the right time in your development and you have the appropriate feedback mechanisms in place to detect weaknesses.

Study your own games so you don’t make the same mistakes over and over again.
Have a coachevaluate your weaknesses, and focus your work on your weakest areas .
Are you overtraining? If so, it might be a good idea to take a 1-2 week break from chess. You will find that you will return refreshed and invigorated.
Change your training program periodically. This allows you to be a better rounded chess player, and by keeping your training sessions new and exciting it doubles as a cure to overtraining.
Don’t be discouraged by plateaus, remember you are still improving at a slow pace and that this is part of the normal learning process.
Increase the intensity of your training. A good method of increasing your training intensity is to cycle intense training session that last 1-2 weeks to help jar yourself free of a plateau. You need to be careful that you do not over train yourself during these intense study cycles. An example of cycling intense training cycles might go something like this: 2 weeks of intense training followed by 4 weeks of normal training activity.
Enjoy the practice, these things take time.

By working hard and enjoying the practice improvement will come sooner or later (I hope so).

Kotov's Method for Chess Improvement

beginchess — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:15:15 +0000

The Road to Chess Improvement

Ruke Vin Hansen in his amazing article Mind Games: Who is Doing the Playing? comes to the conclusion that the best way to improve chess skill is not through reading chess books or watching DVDs. He argues that reading more books only helps fill your short term memory whereas quality moves are a result of the subconscious processes which are not affected by the “conscious” short term memory.

Hansen asserts that the best way to improve playing strength, improve judgement and to combat blunder tendencies is to follow a similar approach as that found in Kotov’s Think Like a Grandmaster.

Here is the process described by Hansen:

No matter what position you choose to analyse, opening, middle game or end game, complex or simple; find annotated games and play through them till you to come to the point with the greatest number of variations.

Cover up the annotations with a sheet of paper and, without moving the pieces, analyze the position from 30 minutes to an hour. If the variations are extremely complex, you might write down your analyzes while analyzing.

When time is out, stop analyzing and uncover the annotations in the book or magazine, and compare your notes with the annotator’s. (This is crucial since this trains and disciplines the brain’s ability to perceive positions correctly)

Strictly speaking, this, and not his highly criticized graphic presentation of tree-analyzes, is the Kotov-method. This was the method catapulting Kotov to super GM strength and even if Kotov was unable to, we can partly explain why it works, and in short, it can be put as TWT or “Targeted Wiring Training”. As long as thinking is subconscious, we have no idea what the mind looks like when pondering or producing chess moves or analysing positions. This method simultaneously teaches a whole array of different chess skills even if not targeted individually or specifically.

When starting out, there might be a great discrepancy between your analysis and the annotators’ but with time, you learn to delineate relevant moves and variations as this training and final comparison will exercise and target the mind’s ability to perceive chess positions and produce high quality moves. Initially, this system of training may appear time consuming and even monotonous, but patience and diligence will return generous rewards since you will:

* Achieve total mastery of a new and important position

* Broaden your opening repertoire and theoretical knowledge.

* Become better acquainted with positions of similar pawn structures or themes (note; not “pattern”)

* Absorb motifs which you can also apply to other positions.

* Dramatically improve combinative skill.

* Improve both long and short range planning.

* Analyze more deeply, accurately and efficiently.

* Increase concentration and attention span.

* Sharpen board visualization.

* Develop patience and perseverance

* control impulsive tendencies.

For the full article please go to: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5055

For those of you who follow Dan Heisman, this training technique is very similar to Stoyko Exercises.

Stoyko Exercises
from Dan Heisman’s Exercises page

A summary of Stoyko exercise:

1) Find a fairly complicated position

2) Get out a pen/pencil and paper

3) You have unlimited time

4) Write down every (pertinent) line for as deep as you can see, making sure to include an evaluation at the end of the line. This will likely include dozens of lines and several first ply candidate moves. Evaluations can be any type you like:

a) Computer (in pawns, like +.3)
b) MCO/Informant (=, +/=, etc.)
c) English (“White is a little better”)

5) At the end state which move you would play and it’s “best play for both sides” line becomes the PV

6) When you are done, go over each line and its evaluation with a strong player and/or a computer. Look for:

a) Lines/moves you should have analyzed but missed
b) Any errors in visualization (retained images, etc.)
c) Any lines where you stopped analyzing too soon, thus causing a big error in evaluation (quiescence errors)
d) Any large errors in evaluation of any line
e) Whether the above caused you to chose the wrong move
etc.

Classic Endgame Pawn Breakthrough

beginchess — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:00:54 +0000

These Things Take Time : The Challenges Adults Face When Learning Chess

beginchess — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 23:45:28 +0000

(first in a series of adult learning posts)

“These things take time.” the grand master explained to his young pupil. Ten years and nearly one thousand rating points later, the student now finally realized the truth in the words of his teacher. One must realize that there is no quick fix to becoming an expert in any field, you need to pay your dues and in time you will reach one of many “a-ha” moments as your skills improve.

Cognitive psychologists Chase & Simon in 1973 studied chess experts and found that they had often spent as many as 50,000 hours practicing chess. That means that a 35 year old master who has spent 50,000 hours playing chess must have spent 4-5 hours everyday for thirty years on the chessboard starting at the age of 5.

Good heuristics on the time it takes to improve and reach certain milestones in your chess development could go like this (Note that results may vary based on the amount of time you spend, and the intensity of your training sessions):

The average adult will need to invest approximately 5 years of practice to become a decent player (ELO 1600)
The average adult will need to invest approximately 10 years to become an expert (ELO 1900-2000).
Because time is against them, the average adult learner will have an extraordinarily difficulty time in surpassing the 2000 ELO rating.
Measureable progress comes in 6-12 month periods.

Experience a Double Edged Sword

While children absorb new knowledge and quickly become proficient in chess, the biggest difference between an adult and a child is experience. Children are a blank slate, while adults bring experience to the table this experience also includes bad habits, and less of an open mind when learning new ideas and concepts. While prior knowledge is necessary in order to learn something new (aids learning by building on top of this existing experience), this same experience can stand in the way of the adult learner because their existing knowledge might have internal inconsistencies and it might make the adult learner resistant to learning new things. Children are willing to start from the beginning, which allows them to build strong fundamentals with fewer knowledge gaps. Adults on the other hand want to immediately apply what they learn and their egos sometimes stands in the way, not allowing them to learn the fundamentals because they think that the fundamentals are for “children”. This reluctance to start with the basics creates knowledge gaps in the adult’s learning development which will eventually manifest itself as learning plateaus. Plateaus occur because the learner is missing the required knowledge which they need to build upon to attain the next level in knowledge.

Learning Like a Child

So how do we translate this information into improved performance and ultimately a higher rating? Based on the way adults learn, we need to take advantage of our experience but at the same time be aware of the negative side of having this experience.

Adult Learning Design

Besides using experience to aid their learning, according to Piaget, adults learn better when learning design follows the following four guidelines:

1. Adults need to know why they are learning something.
2. Adults learn through doing.
3. Adults are problem solvers.
4. Adults learn best when the subject is of immediate use.

Focus on the Fundamentals

This is the only way for the adult learner to eliminate their internal inconsistencies. This will initially set the average adult learner back, but it will payoff in the long run with limited and short-lived plateaus and a smoother learning curve on their way to expertise. The adult learner needs to accept that they might need to restructure existing conceptions when necessary.

Here are a couple of ways that you can focus on the fundamentals:

1. Focus on the endgame, starting with basic endgames such as King and Pawn, and then moving on to rook endgames.

2. Learn from the older masters and progressively move up to modern times. A sample timeline could be: Morphy, Nimzowich, Capablanca, Alekhine, Petrosian, Tal, Karpov, Kasparov and Kramnik. Choose your own mix based on your personality, but the important thing to remember is that you should go over these master’s games chronologically.

3. Learn to manage plateaus.

Don’t learn too many topics at once

You need time to understand the information you are learning before you are able to put it into practice. Learning takes time and cannot be rushed. Remember that it requires considerable time along with plenty of practice to start building expertise in any area (usually an average of 10 years!).

Focus your training

1. Choose books relative to your playing strength.

2. Focus and don’t jump from book to book and from topic to topic.

3. Be consistent in your training, – it is better to train for 30 minutes per day 5 times per week than it is to practice 2 hours per day but only 1-2 times per week.

Mix learning with playing

1. Based on the way adults learn, you need to quickly put into practice what you learn.

2. This is the way to convert knowledge into skill.

3. Play against players who are no more than 100 ELO ratings below you and up to 200 ELO points above you.

4. Go over your games afterwards, in order to learn from your mistakes. This will allow you to identify any internal inconsistencies that you need to restructure in order to move forward.

Aim towards understanding not memorization

This is true especially when dealing with openings and endgames. It is better to understand the why, than to memorize 11 moves of the Sicilian Dragon.

Build a training program that caters to the way adults learn

1. Focus on problem solving.
2. Mix study with practice.
3. Engage in effortful study.
4. Learn to quickly identify and get over learning plateaus.

I’ll be away for a while, as I try to follow my own advice and prepare for the Miami Chess Open on September 3rd. I do plan on following this up with two additional posts at a later date, one will be on effortful study, and the other on identifying and surpassing learning plateaus in chess.

The New Begin(ning) Chess

beginchess — Wed, 06 May 2009 00:48:50 +0000

This post marks a new beginning for this blog. After a long hiatus from blogging and chess, I return reinvigorated and refreshed.

The new purpose of this blog is exploring how adults learn (chess). It has become obvious to me after four years of my chess journey, that the adult learning experience is clumsy, slow and inefficient. This flaw in the way adults learn is at the root of why it takes us so long to improve and why we reach frequent and lengthy plateaus.

While the blog will continue to focus on the “what” to learn, it will also address the “how” we learn aspects of learning chess. Perhaps by better understanding the learning process, we can better focus our time and energy and see true improvement as if we were eight years old again.

Stay tuned…