Rapid Chess Improvement

The rapid chess improvement process is useless.

So is the Woodpecker Method.

I have read many comments on chess.com in forum posts, in comments, and in articles about the importance of tactics and pattern recognition.

 

Given this near universal acclaim, then the criticism of this method (which I have not done... yet) must center on its method.   The HOW of this tactics training and pattern recognition.

 

My question is why is the HOW of MDLM's method bad?

 

It is bad because it is trying to get you to think like a robot.  That is not how to master the game of chess.  That, in essence, is what he's doing.  He's trying to get you to think like a Robot.  Just like the uselessness of repeated answering the same tactical problems quickly like the Woodpecker method.  Now you are just memorizing and not actually calculating or understanding.  Move 1 pawn up 1 square and the whole position changes.

 

Those two, along with Standard Chess Openings by Eric Schiller, are probably the worst three books ever written on the game of chess.

 

Ahhhhhh, I see.  

 

What's funny is that when I solve problems, I call out the motif when I solve, sometimes out loud, sometimes silently.  (Depends if I'm alone.)  I'll examine the positional mistake by the losing side and call it out.   I try to do this fast, but it's still way slower than rapidly solving puzzle after puzzle.  I'm basically verbally trying to ingrain the logic of the tactical solution in my brain.

 

My son has solved 1001 Chess Exercises for beginners once through.  I'm asking him to go through it again "verbally" before getting him the next 1001 book.  I want him to understand the motifs and recognize them for tactics detection.   I am afraid of robotic sterility, but I also want to aid in building rapid intuition and board vision.

Exactly - there's a big difference between sheer memorization and actual understanding/insight. The reason players improve with The Woodpecker Method is because they practice solving tactics puzzles in a structured and focused way, rather than not doing it at all. Absolutely no research has been done on the woodpecker method versus normal tactics puzzle training: i.e. measuring the cumulative benefit of, on the one hand, solving a limited set of problems every day from one book over and over again (regardless of whether it's done at increasing speed or not) against the cumulative benefit of solving tactics puzzles from one randomly selected book after another (regardless of the level of difficulty or whether a conscious attempt is done at increasing the level of difficulty), on the other, and comparing the results over the course of years.

It's worth noting what former world #2 and World Champion finalist GM Jan Timman (peak rating E2680 back in 1990) said many years before the publication of The Woodpecker Method, whose authors are GMs, sure, but not world class - Hans Tikkanen's peak rating was E2596 (nearly 10 years ago), and Axel Smith's was E2516 (4 years ago). Timman said something along the lines of 'I've probably solved all tactics puzzles there are to be found under the sun'. My own humble experience: When I was working through Maxim Blokh's 'Combinational Motifs' (1,200+ puzzles) Art, I noticed very early on how I started recognizing themes and motifs, regularly experiencing a feeling of déjà vu. Simply put, just solving the exercises in that book once greatly improved my intuition and my feeling for tactics. I strongly doubt that rereading that particular book one or more times would be nearly as beneficial as moving on to some other top authors' selection of tactical puzzles, because they would be different, helping to expand my intuition and my tactical prowess even further.

I'm fairly confident that such a comparison would show a 1:1 relationship on the first reading of W-P M and any other random tactics book, whereas the second reading of W-P M would yield a rather limited benefit compared to reading a new, randomly selected tactics book. This benefit gap would surely widen even further on subsequent readings. The reason for this is fairly obvious, also: we all have greater or smaller gaps in our chess knowledge. Repeating the same book over and over again will only to a limited extent help plug the gaps, whereas chances are much greater that each new book would help do the opposite over time.

 

Personally, I like naming the motif when I solve tactical puzzles.  I like naming the internal logic of a position and its solution.

I don't think so.

My biggest beef with the 7 circles method is that you repeat the same problems ... why not do different problems, but with similar themes/patterns to be able to recognize them in novel situations?

Now I am curious... what is wrong with “thinking like a robot”? What does that phrase mean? If it means “systematically evaluating the concrete threats and opportunities of a position”, how is that any worse or different than “evaluate the imbalances” or “evaluate the elements of a position”? The better players seem to “evaluate” more systematically, thoroughly, and consistently.

The program promises too much, but then again, how many of us amateurs actually play 50-100 OTB tournament games per year, analyze the games, train tons of tactics, and don’t improve? Meanwhile, lots of us read books, learn a lot, yet never improve.

But do you need to know the names of tactical motifs and themes to understand them or get a better feel for them? I'm sure for some us, it does help, but for others less so. To me, at least, I find it much more important to be able verbally describe or formulate strategic concepts to enhance my understanding of them, than when it comes to tactics where I feel it's much more a case of subconscious pattern recognition.

 

The evaluate more systematically, thoroughly, and consistently because they've put in the much more of the work really required. They've played over thousands (these days hundreds of thousands or millions on ChessBase) of master games, they worked on tactics relentlessly, middle-game strategies etc. Bobby Fischer didn't just tumble out of bed one morning being GM standard. He virtually ate, slept and talked chess 24/7 from his early teens. I once played a game in a team match against an opponent that was far inferior to me (we're talking 500 Elo points lower), and in my favourite opening as Black too boot. However, my opponent didn't anything much wrong and we drew the game. In the car back home, my team mate and I gave a lift to GM Jonathan Mestel, who's a very friendly and approachable guy (apart from highly intelligent in general), and I told of my chagrin at being unable to defeat my opponent despite me thinking I knew my opening inside an out. So he asked me to read out moves aloud to him, and when we got somewhere in the early middle-game, he said, 'I think in a similar position to this, Korchnoi played x against Karpov in the World Championship match in 1978. The idea is to do such and such. Check out match game y.' His erudition was (and still is, I dare say!) far superior to mine, because he has covered far more ground in training than I have. This goes for all aspects of the game, not least tactics. Repeating the same puzzles over and over are not going to do you half as much good as putting in the same amount of work with new (for you, that is) material by picking a different book once you've finished the first one.

Just so, vernonryoung!

 

And GM Mestel, if I recall correctly was not considered a super GM yet he knew from trained memory what the ideas were via blindfold!

Exactly. A player of his standard is able to calculate deeply, but more importantly, they also typically have a feeling for when they don't need to calculate more than maybe a couple of moves, whereas as we simple duffers have a tendency to calculate a lot of irrelevant stuff.

In his prime Mestel was something like top 30 in the world (his peak Elo was 2540 back in 1984), and I think he remained an academic  throughout his career (he's a Professor of Mathematics, if I remember correctly).

To offer another opinion on tactics training, I believe there is a difference between studying tactics and practicing tactics. A lot of people practice tactics by solving problems here and on sites like Chesstempo. And that has it's place. It's good mental exercise and helps with pattern recognition. But to study tactics, you need to see how the tactic arose.

 

I'll use an example from Tarrasch's book.

In this position it's not too hard to see the move 1.Rxe6. And if black recaptures with the pawn then 2.Rf3 wins the queen. But Tarrasch doesn't show this diagram in the book, instead he shows the position one move prior.

Would you see the same tactic from the first diagram if you had this position in a game and play 1.R1e3? Granted if black sees the threat he can avoid it with a move like 1...Kg7. But 1.R1e3 is not a bad move and it poses black a problem. Black could plausibly respond with 1...Re8 and then you can play 2.Nxe5. You can't force your opponent to make bad moves but you can nudge him. That's playing chess.

 

200 Miniature Games of Chess by Du Mont is an excellent book for improving your tactics. Du Mont doesn't use games where one player just makes a gross one move blunder. He uses games where the losing side makes plausible bad moves. You'll get to see how the tactics came about. That's an important part in becoming better at tactics.

 

I've also been told by more than one strong player that Estrin's book The Two Knight's Defence is an excellent book for becoming better at combinations.

"But to study tactics, you need to see how the tactic arose."

Great comment Hrungnir!  Superb instructional value!  Thank you.

Hrungnir: Yes, very good point. For me, this is one of the reasons why I play over games of the old masters - they tend to be more clear-cut than more recent games, and players like Tarrasch, Lasker, Rubinstein, Capablanca, Alekhine etc. could more easily implement their strategies, plans and ideas.

I don't understand why everyone trashes de la Maza when he achieved amazing results as an adult amateur who was rated in the 1300's starting out, and he did a lot of what higher-level players and coaches seem to recommend (don't study openings, study tactics, work on your weaknesses, play and analyze lots of slow OTB games, systematically evaluate threats when you play OTB, etc.).  I understand that folks don't like his tone or his 90% fluff book. 

As far as I know, De La Maza did not study chess as a substitute for a primary education, under a professional coach, or as his number one hobby for several years during in his childhood ... As far as I can tell, his results are better than anyone else I have heard about starting at 1300 at the age of 30.  

dannyhume: There's no doubt that both the Woodpecker Method and 7 Circles will make you a better player. The question is whether the effort is well spent compared to casting your net wider.

Anyone who claims that the two methods mentioned have the sole purpose of memorization do not understand the value. I have an excellent memory and do not need rote memory techniques to remember. What the woodpecker method gives one is, besides rapid board vision, a feeling for tactics and an improvement in analyzing. I have found, but cannot explain why, that repeating the same tactics(usually about 50) over and over and faster and faster causes me in tournaments to see tactics I never studied and analyze rapidly. It is not enough to see a tactic or a combination in tournament chess; it must be seen quickly. These methods grow one to be able to play rapidly. Try it yourself .

Nwap111: No one is claiming these methods don't work, the question is whether they work better than other methods of working on tactics. Other coaches and authors are proposing working differently on tactics, and there is no direct comparison between the methods over the course of years. In short, we don't actually know whether the one is better than the other, although from what we know of how world class players, such as Jan Timman and Viktor Korchnoi, work on tactics they appear not to be repeating tactics puzzles, but rather to work through one book after another.

Personally I have my doubts about the repetition methods (as I've already pointed out), and looking at my own experience, I saw the same improvement in my own game that the authors of The Woodpecker Method saw when they employed their method, but I used a different method and different books (Maxim Blokh's Combinational Motifs and Combinational Art - in my view the best tactics books there are to be found, in total something like 3,500 puzzles, with a great number of positions with solutions for both Black and White). I didn't repeat puzzles, and I didn't try to solve puzzles in an increasingly shorter amount of time: I worked on the puzzles as if I was playing a game (make sure practice is similar to competition), set up the positions on a proper board and used a chess clock to allot myself a limited amount of time (between 30min and 2hrs 30min depending on the level of difficulty). Wrote down the solutions to each one, and only checked the solutions once the time was up for the entire session.

Given what Axel Smith (one of the authors of Woodpecker Method) wrote about how he worked on it, he seems to have nearly gone around the bend in his attempt at finishing faster and faster (finally succeeding in doing it in 24 hours) as preparation to getting his last GM norm. In the first tournament he played after this preparation he actually failed. He was top-rated at E2480 in the tournament, but only finished second with a modest E2458 performance. He did get his final GM norm a couple of weeks later, once again being the top dog, and this time scoring an E2611 performance winning the tournament outright.

The point is that if you work regularly on tactics you will improve, there's no doubt about that. However, repeating a limited set of exercizes over and over again, you will also inevitably remember most of them after a while, making the exercize relatively less about working out the specific tactic, and more about memorization. If you instead work through one book after another, you will indeed recognize and spot ideas, themes and motifs more easily (that's your intuition), which is the aim also of the woodpecker method. However, you would also still engage your brain to a greater extent in working out the specific solution, because it won't be a position that you have previously memorized (assuming that we manage to find books with few or no overlaps in terms of the positions to be solved). The positions will be different from the ones you've done before, it will have different snags to the original one. There are many well-known positions - Levitzky-Marshall, Breslau 1912 to name just one - to which I would immediately know the solution. I wouldn't be engaging my brain in working out the solution.