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Very Hot Topic (More than 25 Replies) Chess Book Review blog (Read 336246 times)
proustiskeen
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #177 - 11/24/14 at 05:36:02
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..and now it's back. So odd.

Sorry to bother everyone. Keep up the debate. Smiley
  
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proustiskeen
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #176 - 11/24/14 at 05:34:54
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This thread is not showing up in my normal view of the forum. I was only able to post this by going into my list of posts and commenting at the bottom. Is it just me?
  
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TonyRo
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #175 - 11/24/14 at 03:03:21
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ReneDescartes wrote on 11/24/14 at 02:33:56:
They lied.


^^^^ He's right you know.
  
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ReneDescartes
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #174 - 11/24/14 at 02:33:56
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They lied.
  
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brabo
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #173 - 11/22/14 at 08:25:37
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Very strange, you mention that you were able to detect 48.784 identical number of doubles in the database of Openingmaster with the new Chessbase 13. However on the site of Openingmaster I read: "The exciting new Opening Master chess database features a unique chess games collection with more than 8,7 millions of top human chess games, making it the largest human chess database without duplicates. "

Without duplicates but you just found 48.784 so how can this be explained?

Personally I don't care too much if there are some duplicates as long it is not doubling the size of my database.

Anyway thanks for the review !
  
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proustiskeen
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #172 - 11/22/14 at 02:06:21
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Jupp53
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #171 - 11/22/14 at 00:05:00
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When I have to learn something movements are a necessary part. In case of chess it's moving the pieces. In case of learning any field I started in school writing everything down. When I was young I knew where on a page the content was, even if I couldn't verbalize it.

Verbalization is another function, important for learning and understanding. I can't remember any more if it was Bandler or Grinder who told that he believed people telling in hypnotherapeutic learning groups that they would see something - like a flower sinking down - were pure liars. When several members in the group did this he thought to observe a phenomenon of mass hysteria. Later he learned that he was in a minority and that he had misinterpreted the situation.

Maybe I'll work out more on this topic when I retire in some months and start a blog if the time is left for this. For the moment this:

1. Visualization is not imagination in the sense chess books talk about imagination.
2. If you don't move pieces around at least at the beginning, you'll never learn chess.
3. You need ideas about the content however you call this.
4. Verbalization is important, but only a part. Pan narrans et movens?

Lazarus, one of the fathers of behavior therapy, said all people are of the same value (=equal) but no two of them are alike (=equal). So everyone has to find it's own way in learning. Even if there are a lot of equal steps they don't have the same meaning for us.
  

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dfan
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #170 - 11/21/14 at 19:58:46
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Stigma wrote on 11/21/14 at 18:23:18:
But I wasn't talking about thinking, rather about the learning/encoding of chess, and there I maintain that seeing a pattern visually is the best known way to encode those patterns and hopefully transform them into some long-term, chess-specific memory. How does that work for you with your Anki cards dfan; is it enough to see positions and the right moves visually, or do you have to also explain/comment verbally to have any learning effect?

Yes, I agree with you there. The whole point of my Mnemosyne cards was to notice patterns at the raw level of actual positions instead of having to convert everything into verbal principles. However I have found that for a significant number of cards, generally the more positional ones, it has been useful to add some explanatory text to the answer to give me something more meaty to associate with the position. This keeps the problem and solution fairly concrete while giving me a more general tag to associate with it.

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dfan wrote on 11/21/14 at 13:45:26:
I do calculate, I just keep track of the position in a more abstract manner than I understand most people do.

Possibly many, maybe even most players think in roughly the same, more abstract way you do; they just call it "seeing" or "imagining" because that's the closest thing to it and they haven't thought much about the difference.

Absolutely. I've read some surveys of what strong players "see" when they calculate, and it seems to vary a lot. That said, from the research I've done, I'd guess that I'm at most 10th percentile on the visualization spectrum in general, so I think most chess players do use their "mind's eye" more than I do.
  
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #169 - 11/21/14 at 19:05:10
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I wouldn't be able to play chess at all if the thinking had to be explicitly visual Smiley Can play blindfold though.

Huge amounts of calculation are subconcious of course, so incredibly hard to know precisely what you're doing.....
  
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #168 - 11/21/14 at 18:23:18
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Yes, actual chess thinking isn't necessarily visual. I think it's been shown (with brain scanning) that the visual cortex is hardly active at all when experienced players are thinking. So not being able to visually imagine doesn't have to be a handicap.

But I wasn't talking about thinking, rather about the learning/encoding of chess, and there I maintain that seeing a pattern visually is the best known way to encode those patterns and hopefully transform them into some long-term, chess-specific memory. How does that work for you with your Anki cards dfan; is it enough to see positions and the right moves visually, or do you have to also explain/comment verbally to have any learning effect?

P.S. I wonder if any of the blind people who play chess were born blind, and if so how they went about learning the game. I would conjecture that verbally isn't even the second-best way to present chess patterns for encoding, and instead tactile should be used as much as possible, as in the special chess sets blind players are allowed to feel during play.

dfan wrote on 11/21/14 at 13:45:26:
I do calculate, I just keep track of the position in a more abstract manner than I understand most people do.

Possibly many, maybe even most players think in roughly the same, more abstract way you do; they just call it "seeing" or "imagining" because that's the closest thing to it and they haven't thought much about the difference.
  

Improvement begins at the edge of your comfort zone. -Jonathan Rowson
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dfan
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #167 - 11/21/14 at 13:45:26
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hicetnunc wrote on 11/21/14 at 08:51:28:
But if you can't imagine visually, how can you play chess ? How do you calculate variations ?

(Honest question : I'm not versed at all in these fields)

I pretty much just keep track of where everything is in my mind, rather than "seeing" a position with pieces. It is certainly made much easier by the fact that there is a position on the board in front of me that I can refer to, and just think about the differences between it and the position I'm thinking of. I do calculate, I just keep track of the position in a more abstract manner than I understand most people do.

Despite being 2000 USCF, I can't play blindfold at all, which I understand most people even a bit below my level can. I can do much better if you put a blank chessboard in front of me, though, and I can imagine where pieces are on it.

I used to blame my lack of further progress on my lack of visualization, but then I realized that if that were the case then my correspondence play would be much better than my OTB play, which it isn't. So I don't think that it's really holding me back significantly (yet).
  
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #166 - 11/21/14 at 11:57:42
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Jupp53 wrote on 11/20/14 at 22:54:07:
A drop of water in your visual wine: 20% till 25% cannot imagine visually. So there must be something else.

Hendriks is educated in this field. I saw this when reading a little in his book.

[Maybe it's the same problem I have with understaning why Rowson's Seven deadly sins are mostly more appreciated than his Chess for zebras. The letter shows clearly a deeper understanding of the thinking process.]


I want to alter this statement a bit as to my experience.
In the beginning there is nearly no visualisation and how should it. And then step by step it begins very slowly to spread over the board. Most of us are able to control a certain sector of the board visualy but have problems to stretch beyond this.
When I do tactics training with my pupils they tell me that they are able to imagine the ongoing changes in the hot spot area. The infight with the King on g8 in the northeastern sector of the board is on the screen for them. But the farer you leave that hot spot the foggier the view gets. A decisive blow with say Qh2-a2 is hard to see for them all the more if it is a silent move. That's coincides with what Korchnoi (to my knowledge) once said about such long moves.
What's too interesting: When I advice them to close their eyes just to get an image clear enough of the future position they are irritated. They like it more to stare at the board even if there the very piece positions may disturb the calculation.
That behavior of Carlsen hanging in his chair staring into thin air or seemingly nearly falling asleep comes to them as a strange perhaps neurotic behavior of a genius mind...   
  

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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #165 - 11/21/14 at 11:33:39
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Very interesting topic.
In their marvellous, scienceloaded but all the way humorous trilogy "Science of Disc World" Terry Pratchett, Ian Steward and Jack Cohen suggest to better call homo sapiens as pan narrans, the talking or more concrete, story telling ape.
I found that very stricking. It's the so unbelievably highly differentiated ability to talk that makes us human or narratic. As Pratchett et al. underline we allways tend to make a story of it, whatever it is. And may it be chess.
We tend to structure it verbaly as we are social and try to communicate, try to give every position a story understandable for others. How much we need a talkable structure may be shown in the fact of pawn structure. If there is one, we can talk a lot about what to do, if there is none (wide open centre) we get quite wordless.
Of course the verbalisation is very important in teaching, simly because we are pan narrans and can't do it another way. Just allways silently hand out combinations wouldn't make. Even in the Stapen method a teacher must be alert to give the content of every position verbaly.
And this story telling goes even further and enters the thoughts process. Some Russian chess teacher and GM once gave a simple advice: "If you can't describe your plan verbaly (talk the story of it) you have none". I too don't remember exactly (I think it was an English GM) who gave the advice to "talk to your pieces". Even in our thoughts we head for a story. That misplaced knight on h1 shall tell us where he wants to go to... And there too was another one (oh my mind leaves me a third time) who adviced some sort of Christmas time on board to find the optimal placement of pieces (the squares they wish to be) and only then to look for possibilities to reach out for it.
Verbalisation is not in a conflict to the Stapen method. The latter simply tends to massively feed your subconscious mind.
It's a matter of fact that chess is a game that relates largely on knowledge. How our brain exactly works is not yet known. But we all know that very situation where we detect seemingly out of nothing that smoothered mate. We do not see the first move and then calculate on to get to it. We see at once the whole mechanism.
That's what Stapen method is for. To load your brain with patterns. And then you hope, that out of subconsciousness the motive will pop up in your thoughts when it comes to boil on the board - even if the structure is a bit different.
That's too what de la Maza with his book "rapid chess improvement" is out for in quite a rude way (1000 repetions a day at the end) - to feed you up with patterns.

And that's what too counts in verbalization in the end as these subconcious patterns massively interact with your concious mind.
Yesterday I gave a lecture in simple pawn endings. To me, with a bit higher level of knowledge, it was very insightful to see the young guys somehow stumbling arround. They were very much out for rapidly getting a story to tell. Take this one:
White: Ka3, pawn d5; Black: Kb5, pawn c7.
"I take the opposition, that's it", was the quick outing. The knew opposition but not yet critical squares. They shied away from concrete calculation and obviuosly missed a lot - they missed the whole of the story, to stay in the pictur.
Why is this so? They do not know enough (and as being young they tend to a quick response).  One who knows may wonder about that but then he would fail to adapt. Not knowing makes unsure in the highest degree.
In fact the given position is open to solution even if you don't know the story of the critical squares. It's not too deep, you can calculate it. But calculation too is allways infected by subconsciousness. If it is not filled with information you do not know how to tackle the task. When they gave 1.Kb3 - opposition - their subconcious fuel was burned yet. And after my hint to think twice they weren't able to use other patterns.
And calculation into the blue is difficult. It then is even difficult to give away a pawn actively even if you see that otherwise you would loose it anyway.

So we need to fill the tank of patterns stapen by stapen  and then the whole story reduces to an understandable few words.
Play 1.d6! and your opponent won't get his King to the critical squares in front of his pawn. And only then go for the opposition.
Btw. I wouldn't believe that very true story anyway and despite of it would calculate that thing - but then I will be well guided by my knowledge.
  

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hicetnunc
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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #164 - 11/21/14 at 08:51:28
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But if you can't imagine visually, how can you play chess ? How do you calculate variations ?

(Honest question : I'm not versed at all in these fields)
  

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Re: Chess Book Review blog
Reply #163 - 11/20/14 at 22:54:07
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A drop of water in your visual wine: 20% till 25% cannot imagine visually. So there must be something else.

Hendriks is educated in this field. I saw this when reading a little in his book.

[Maybe it's the same problem I have with understaning why Rowson's Seven deadly sins are mostly more appreciated than his Chess for zebras. The letter shows clearly a deeper understanding of the thinking process.]
  

Medical textbooks say I should be dead since April 2002.
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Narcissm is the humans primary disease.
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