Hello:

It is a bit hard to say in terms of rating as I was away from chess for 10 years and suffered a big drop in rating, which is fairly typical. But I am gaining the points back. How much of this is due to the Seven Circles I don't know. I think I am seeing the bad things my opponents can do to me better than before; IOW I am more aware of tactical mayhem so I can try and prevent it happening. But it still takes me too long to calculate sequences.

Other threads have talked about whether to study what you are weakest at or what you are good at.  Like you, I would prefer to study other things. However, at the moment, I am not ready to give up on tactics as it is so important. I probably also need to do some everyday and I haven't done that again until recently. Hence my attack on the Reinfeld book. I will be curious to see where I stand in terms of tactical ability in a year or so.

Good luck,

Gerry

P.S. Only 11,000 hours study needed for 2200. Better get cracking.
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5147

Gerry, I'm currently doing the book called combinative motifs which that program is based on and I'm about half way through the book for my first time. My intention is to go through it in the same style as Seth_Xoma. Although now I'm not focusing on my time at all. This is probably going to take me another month perhaps.

I must admit, that just like you I have a very bad apetite for tactics. I really have to force myself to do 20 puzzles aday, or even 10.

My question to you is simply whether is helped or not. Is there any point to what I'm doing, because to me it feels mostly like WORK. It's not enjoyable and I should probably spend my time on other things instead. But there is that dream of adding 200+ points to my OTB rating. Is it achievable.

Anyone else who has done anything similar, feel free to respond. Is tactics mostly inate or can you get majorly better at it by doing what Gerry and Seth_Xoma has done?

Seth_Xoma, haha this is nuts but I might just do the same, just to become a national master like you How long did it take you to do all of the 15 repetitions? Did your chess become better because afterwards and do you think it is reflected in your rating (how much in points?).

Maybe around 15 times, from front to back. I don't remember exactly. I worked on it each day, but still took me about a month to get to that speed.

analyzethat wrote on 01/11/09 at 23:47:40:


I am 20, and discovered CTS 6 months ago. I have always been fairly good at tactics, but a year ago I tried to improve this area some more. I read a GM Maurice Ashley interview on the web, and he suggested taking any combination book (Reinfeld is perfect for this) and try to solve all the problems. Then go through it again and try to get them all right. This is repeated until you can do the whole book with maybe 95%-100% accuracy. Then comes the fun part. You try to halve your time each time you go through the book. Obviously 1,001 puzzles is a little much, so I started by chopping them up into 100 puzzle segments.

I got so I could go through one Reinfeld book (1,001 puzzles) in about 24 minutes.

I found this was a really good way to cram tactical patterns into my head and have them stay there. Since then, I've been using CTS in conjunction with "Perfect Your Chess" to keep my skill level up.

Seth_Xoma wrote on 01/11/09 at 23:35:24:


I've been solving hundreds and hundreds of puzzles from different books, but I have seriously reached a plateau npw, without a doubt.

I don't know how old you are and if you have always been able to measure your tactical streangth through CTS, but perhaps you can tell me what sort of training you have done. I would be very happy to hear what books you've read for example.

Btw, to another poster about Chess Tempo, I tried it out some time ago and reached a blitz rating of 2200 or something like that.

Never unilaterally give up an absolute pin.