an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 08/13/18 at 02:23:54:


There is a benefit of repetition. My comment was only about the expectation. I just read a sentence, which I think is very true imo: The master has failed more often, than the apprentice has ever tried. So repetition helps you to see, what you did and did not unterstand. Skills need practise, repetition is a good way to practise.

My point is: Don't expect to hold the level reached by studying too long. The best effect for a tournament will be finishing a circle two or three days before it begins. Then there will be a time of three or four weeks and the effect on concentration and short-term-memory will be faded. The effect to long-term-memory will still be useful.

Thank you to all answers to my question. Especially the short review of ReneDescartes was helpful.

dfan wrote on 08/13/18 at 12:54:36:

I like it too, but one possible criticism is won't there necessarily be individual differences here? Someone like Tikkanen may be able to trust his intuition that "this must be winning" way earlier in a line than I could or should. This can depend on differences in both strength, playing style and "thinking style" (more calculating vs more intuitive).

Well, the sample is up on Forward Chess, and except for the introduction, it seems to be just a book of tactics from world champions, arranged in three levels of difficulty and then chronologically by champion. Pono, Khalifman, Topalov, etc. are included--not my taste, but ok.

One very nice feature is a little check the authors place before the point you have to see in each variation, even if the variation goes on further. "This is as far as you have to see. It is obvious that Black's king cannot survive." This is great. I know of no other material that trains you where to  stop calculating.

Another nice feature is that not all the positions have a tactic that works! Until you have them memorized, you'll have to verify everything using "System 2," as the saying goes (slow, careful logical reasoning). This is a nice feature--but only if the book is viewed as in YATB. If the unproven theoretical idea behind the Woodpecker method is, as An Ordinary Chessplayer avers, to train System 1 (fast, intuitive, "blink" thinking),
then the red herings are an idiotic,throw-in-the-kitchen-sink feature. The authors more or less admit this.

There is an old world-champions tactics book by Tangborn, and a large Russian multi-volume set of complicated WC combinations, but nothing like this book, which fills a nice niche--as Yet Another Tactics Book.

A well researched psychological fact:

Training of sustained attention (I use "concentration" further) is only possible with short time effects. Is there someone doubting that concentration is one part of the process leading to the performance in chess?

You can see the "Woodpecker method" partly as a concentration training. So doing it before a tournament you will get: Better understanding of some positions you could not solve at first or later. Activating your chess memory in the area the tasks the book gives you. If done till the last week before the tournament some specific chess concentration training.

The second to last and the last effect will vanish after a month, at least if its about concentration. I do not remember any specific research to the memory. But there is surely someone who knows more.

So I would recommend to see the book as YATB yet another tactic book. My question: How is it under this point of view?

Man, this stuff by Vik-Hansen is such garbage. Pattern just means something similar, like recognizing a face by facial pattern (chess positions have been shown to activate similar regions of the brain activated when trying to recognize faces). The word and idea of "pattern" in chess makes sense and is useful, what doesn't make any sense and is not useful is questioning its existence as he is doing. An example of academic catastrophe, how the process could have gone so wrong that such a thing got published, suitable only as an April Fool's.

ReneDescartes wrote on 07/27/18 at 14:18:11:

There's no direct, "scientific" evidence that I'm aware of. That was just an afterthought anyway, the rest of the paragraph was the actual point I wanted to make there.

But OK, if that's what you want to focus on, I have had some success with going through the same tactics sets again personally. Especially as a warm-up just before tournaments. And I could repeat my earlier point that compared to new material there may be less need to calculate, so more of the time is spent effectively drilling the patterns into the brain.

And wouldn't it be nice if it's true that once you find a really good tactics book, you can get that much out of it - instead of having to seek out new material all the time?

There could also be a more general point for chess study here (taking the same point beyond just tactics), one I've seen claimed by various people: It's better to study a few good books well, until you really know the material, than to study many books superficially. And examples of good ways to ensure you know some material well are of course spaced repetition and (maybe to a lesser extent) the woodpecker method.

@Jupp53:
Very interesting observations on the value of the "subconscious" vs automaticity as models of nonconscious behavior, thank you. I have to think about this a bit more and get back to the thread over the weekend.

I am trying to take a break from ChessPub even if it doesn't look that way... I have a weekend tournament coming up and still quite a bit of work left this week.

What I'm mostly complaining about is sloppy thinking as people cite deGroot's research or its terminology when advocating particular kinds of study, as if that research were prescriptive. In our forum, for example, you get this sort of thing, as advice to a player asking for general help [the poster does not speak English as a first language, and I have no wish to mock either his ideas or his expression of them]:

"What you need for thinking is as many patterns as possible stored in your brain (which has to make use of this storage in his own enigmatic way. You only can wish that this knowledge may [come to mind when it's needed] - and it does cf. smothered mate)...But one thing is clear to me: You need much more patterns. I would say, Top players have at least some 50,000 in store...I definitely feel that pattern knowledge is the key. As it can be used for strategical patterns too. And too for Endgames."

Now, what that poster advises is merely (1)studying large books of tactics and (2)making file cards or Chessbase files of interesting positions one encounters and practicing them--both of which I myself do and would recommend doing, but not because of a psychological theory. (I would conjecture that the benefit of making your own file-card index and drilling it has more to do with active learning and with identifying and repairing your deficits than with the theory of pattern-recognition, which, in its ability to find benefit in almost any method of study with the exception of visualization exercises, is nearly a universal solvent). Strictly speaking, I would say that we just don't know what works best and why. Scientific studies would help (not that they're forthcoming).

Yes, of course, I'm also thinking of Heisman, de la Maza, and Smith/Tikkanen advocating repeating the same exact exercises, but they don't actually say that the theory indicates that their methods are best. Interestingly, I know personally a private devotee of this method who started using it in the early 1990s by memorizing games, citing pattern recognition.  He was a 1900-rated tactically-minded player. He only took a leap, however, when he read Silman's explanatory positional book Reassess Your Chess--without going out of his way to repeat anything.

I'm also thinking of the vogue for what you once called "a la carte" strategic and positional study manuals--van de Oudeweetering, Soltis's 100 Grandmaster Secrets, Guliev, and Broznik/Terekhin. I own those books, and I think them of decent quality; the last one I think very good; for that matter, My System is not so far from their approach. But given the kind of statements I've heard, and the way people now like to throw around the term "pattern recognition," I suspect some purchasers might think that the method of these books is scientifically supported by deGroot, etc., when for all we know the best way to acquire patterns is the way deGroot's original subjects presumably did it--playing a lot, interacting with  strong players, reading and annotating master games, preparing openings, examining studies, etc.