Rapid Chess Improvement

Do you believe in rapid chess improvement? Or only slow chess improvement?

http://dev.jeremysilman.com/shop/pc/Rapid-Chess-Improvement-p3511.htm

IM Silman (and GM John Nunn) sound convincing to me.

Hello, 

It seems to me that the faster the time control is, the more quick pattern and tactic recognition seems to be. I guess, alongside it, choosing a repertoire where you know the various ideas and plans without diving too much into deep variations helps

"IM Silman (and GM John Nunn) sound convincing to me."

That is my thought.

I agree with Silman that De La Maza may have exaggerated his own chess improvement in a full book that could have been much shorter.

I feel the basic idea of tactics study and review is sound.

Although I have never read RCE, I did read parts of it and do agree with his method, especially for beginning players who are serious about improving.

I read your review of RCE and find it unbiased. I re-read Silman's review and find it too critical. Lower rated players and beginners need a system. RCI gives them a system. Even at the Expet

level, but especially at the beginner level, one needs to focus on tactics.

It is an entertaining short read. His point makes sense and I see many high level trainers recommend concentrating on technical concrete exercises (tactics and endgames) which have clearly best/decisive answers (mate or large material gain) and clearly bad consequences for wrong answers.

You can debate de la Maza’s 7 circles method, but ultimately he put the vast majority of his hours on tactics (where he was weak), he played many OTB tournaments, and at around 1900 level, he began learning openings by looking up only the single move for whatever position where he was stumped or left book. This sounds like what a lot of high level players advise as well. I don’t know what the state of amateur chess studying was prior to Rapid Chess Improvement.

Silman annihilated the book in his classic review, maybe because De La Maza mentions Silman books as an example of knowledge not leading to increased playing strength (knowledge versus skills), yet Silman himself advises that the best way to improve is to quickly play through thousands and thousands of high level chess games in order to subconsciously absorb fundamental chess patterns, and that his books are a good compromise because he knows almost nobody will do that.

It's funny to hear it called an old book, because I was around when it came out. Does that make me old?

 

My complaint at the time was he sounded exactly like a snake oil salesman. He said he had a secret, and the secret was tactics. Even worse, that's no secret at all. Every coach and player over the last 100 years would advise anyone to do tactics.

That was my complaint many years ago, and it's still my criticism of him today, that first and foremost his premise is a fraud.

But also like others have said, his book is 98% fluff and has a few pages of actual teaching which can be summed up in a sentence or two: "select a collection of tactics, and do them over and over until you've more or less memorized them."

That's it.

 

I have the book.  It is worse than worthless.....it's a scam.

When "Rapid Chess Improvement" was first published, it created quite a sensation among amateur players. Lot's of people decided that this was the secret sauce they had been looking for and quite a few blogs started up where people would log their study hours and chart their progress.And each of these blogs had links to other bloggers who were doing the same thing, so that it became a mutual support group. When I looked up those blogs a couple of years ago, many of them had been abandoned, and the rest seemed be updated infrequently. No one was reported that they had become a master, or a candidate master. This is not to say that tactics training isn't a very important part of chess development, but simply to note that De la Maza's magic method didn't produce the promised results for most players

Actually the idea is not memorization. If you read the book, Pump Up Your Rating

you would see the author introduce his "woodpecker" method which goes past the seven circles idea but with the same goal; namely, to develope rapid board vision. It works, try it.

So basically you study the same set of tactics problems over and over? Tarrasch was teaching this method about a hundred years ago. You should do a review of Tarrasch's The Game of Chess.

It created a "sensation" among a bunch of idio.ts who didn't understand or appreciate the first thing about chess. 

de la Maza also worked hard to try to make out it was more popular than it actually was. He was trying to make it seem like it was a big craze - a lot of people did fall for it but not as much as claimed. 

Tarrasch's book is excellent, especially his explanation on how to mate with bishop and knight. Yes, Vernon, tactics are not everything. But I have seen more games won by tactics than positional play at the lower levels. Also when I beat a master, it was purely tactical. In most of my wins, I have no idea what is going on and even assess my pi

position as worse but win by playing forcing moves, tactics. Also I feel that rapid board vision is at least as important as tactics and strategy. I have lost more won games by being blitzed out than by blunders.