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Overcoming Chess Training Plateaus

November 17th, 2009

Plateaus and You

Chess Men The brain needs time to assimilate and integrate new information as knowledge and to resolve conflicts with previously learned concepts and plateaus equate to slower progress while we assimilate new ideas. Not until we internalize these new ideas as knowledge are we able to move on to the next phase in our learning. Plateaus are a normal phase of the learning process. The goal is to minimize the amount of time spent in a plateau, and to identify if our plateau is part of the normal learning curve or if it is a result of a deficiency in our learning process.

Sometimes we plateau for reasons that fall outside the normal learning curve. You might plateau if you are missing fundamental knowledge which would have served as a building block to move on to the next level. Or perhaps the information you are learning is too advanced for your level, and you cannot internalize the concept.

Another common cause for prolonged plateaus is overtraining. If you find that you do not look forward to practicing, or are finding less and less time to devote to chess, these are common symptoms of overtraining and a break from chess might be in order.

Less, Different, Harder

As we mentioned before plateaus are normal, and the slow and steady progress made during this phase is critical to a healthy learning process. The length of time spent in a plateau differs between people and even between learning curve phases. As a result, it is very difficult to diagnose if a plateau has overstayed its welcome. The only way around this, is to be proactive in your training program and to build it in such a way where you are constantly challenging yourself and feeding yourself the right amount of content at the right time in your development and you have the appropriate feedback mechanisms in place to detect weaknesses.

Study your own games so you don’t make the same mistakes over and over again.
Have a coachevaluate your weaknesses, and focus your work on your weakest areas .
Are you overtraining? If so, it might be a good idea to take a 1-2 week break from chess. You will find that you will return refreshed and invigorated.
Change your training program periodically. This allows you to be a better rounded chess player, and by keeping your training sessions new and exciting it doubles as a cure to overtraining.
Don’t be discouraged by plateaus, remember you are still improving at a slow pace and that this is part of the normal learning process.
Increase the intensity of your training. A good method of increasing your training intensity is to cycle intense training session that last 1-2 weeks to help jar yourself free of a plateau. You need to be careful that you do not over train yourself during these intense study cycles. An example of cycling intense training cycles might go something like this: 2 weeks of intense training followed by 4 weeks of normal training activity.
Enjoy the practice, these things take time.

By working hard and enjoying the practice improvement will come sooner or later (I hope so).

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Posted in Chess, Improvement, Studying, Training, learning

Tags: chess improvement Improvement knowledge learning Training

Kotov’s Method for Chess Improvement

July 26th, 2009

The Road to Chess Improvement

Ruke Vin Hansen in his amazing article Mind Games: Who is Doing the Playing? comes to the conclusion that the best way to improve chess skill is not through reading chess books or watching DVDs. He argues that reading more books only helps fill your short term memory whereas quality moves are a result of the subconscious processes which are not affected by the “conscious” short term memory.

thinklikgm

Hansen asserts that the best way to improve playing strength, improve judgement and to combat blunder tendencies is to follow a similar approach as that found in Kotov’s Think Like a Grandmaster.

Here is the process described by Hansen:

No matter what position you choose to analyse, opening, middle game or end game, complex or simple; find annotated games and play through them till you to come to the point with the greatest number of variations.

Cover up the annotations with a sheet of paper and, without moving the pieces, analyze the position from 30 minutes to an hour. If the variations are extremely complex, you might write down your analyzes while analyzing.

When time is out, stop analyzing and uncover the annotations in the book or magazine, and compare your notes with the annotator’s. (This is crucial since this trains and disciplines the brain’s ability to perceive positions correctly)

Strictly speaking, this, and not his highly criticized graphic presentation of tree-analyzes, is the Kotov-method. This was the method catapulting Kotov to super GM strength and even if Kotov was unable to, we can partly explain why it works, and in short, it can be put as TWT or “Targeted Wiring Training”. As long as thinking is subconscious, we have no idea what the mind looks like when pondering or producing chess moves or analysing positions. This method simultaneously teaches a whole array of different chess skills even if not targeted individually or specifically.

When starting out, there might be a great discrepancy between your analysis and the annotators’ but with time, you learn to delineate relevant moves and variations as this training and final comparison will exercise and target the mind’s ability to perceive chess positions and produce high quality moves. Initially, this system of training may appear time consuming and even monotonous, but patience and diligence will return generous rewards since you will:

* Achieve total mastery of a new and important position

* Broaden your opening repertoire and theoretical knowledge.

* Become better acquainted with positions of similar pawn structures or themes (note; not “pattern”)

* Absorb motifs which you can also apply to other positions.

* Dramatically improve combinative skill.

* Improve both long and short range planning.

* Analyze more deeply, accurately and efficiently.

* Increase concentration and attention span.

* Sharpen board visualization.

* Develop patience and perseverance

* control impulsive tendencies.

For the full article please go to: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5055

For those of you who follow Dan Heisman, this training technique is very similar to Stoyko Exercises.

Stoyko Exercises
from Dan Heisman’s Exercises page

A summary of Stoyko exercise:

1) Find a fairly complicated position

2) Get out a pen/pencil and paper

3) You have unlimited time

4) Write down every (pertinent) line for as deep as you can see, making sure to include an evaluation at the end of the line. This will likely include dozens of lines and several first ply candidate moves. Evaluations can be any type you like:

a) Computer (in pawns, like +.3)
b) MCO/Informant (=, +/=, etc.)
c) English (”White is a little better”)

5) At the end state which move you would play and it’s “best play for both sides” line becomes the PV

6) When you are done, go over each line and its evaluation with a strong player and/or a computer. Look for:

a) Lines/moves you should have analyzed but missed
b) Any errors in visualization (retained images, etc.)
c) Any lines where you stopped analyzing too soon, thus causing a big error in evaluation (quiescence errors)
d) Any large errors in evaluation of any line
e) Whether the above caused you to chose the wrong move
etc.

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Posted in Chess, Exercises, Improvement, Thinking Process, Training, learning

Tags: chess improvement Improvement Kotov learning Stoyko Exercises Training

Calculating your Chess Skill and Knowledge Rating

October 3rd, 2008

Here’s a fun exercise to determine your estimated skill and knowledge chess rating. While this is just for fun, it can prove helpful in determining how you should focus your chess training. If your knowledge rating is much higher than your skills rating, then you you need to focus your training towards skill building where if your skill rating is much higher than your knowledge rating, then you need to focus more on book learning. You should strive to have your knowledge and skill ratings at no more than 100 points apart.

Here’s how this works.

Formula: (Skill + Knowledge) / 2 = ELO

You need to plug in two of the numbers, and the two best to plug in are ELO and Skill. Ideally, you would use your USCF rating, but if you don’t have one, you can use your ICC of FICS rating, just remember to subtract 150 from your ICC or FICS rating so that it approximates an official USCF rating.

For your skills rating, I would use Igor Khmelnitsky’s Chess Exam and Training Guide to test your skills and get a rating approximation.

Example:

Skill rating: 1138 (based on Khelmenitsky’s book)
USCF ELO: 1340
Knowledge rating = K

(S+K) / 2 = ELO

(1138 + K) / 2 = 1340

1138 / 2 + k/2 – 1340 = 0

569 + K/2 – 1340 = 0

k/2-781 = 0

K=781 * 2

K= 1562

So my knowledge rating equals 1562, while my skill rating is approximately 1138 giving me an ELO of 1340. This means I have to focus on getting my skill rating to par with my knowledge rating in order to play at an estimated 1562 ELO rating.

The goal should be get my skill rating within the same ballpark as my knowledge rating (+/- 100 elo points) before focusing on adding more chess knowledge.

You should repeat this process every three months, but you will need to take the skill’s test again as well as play in a tournament in order to update your USCF rating and get an accurate reading.

I would love to hear feedback on this, especially if you actually try it out.

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Posted in Chess, Improvement

Tags: assessment calculation formula Improvement knowledge skill

Why Our Chess Does Not Improve

August 17th, 2008

Frustration

Over the last few months while my knowledge of the game has increased my skill has not improved. If anything I have sufferred a decrease in performance over the last few months. The frustrating part is that I have invested time into my improvement plan, and while I feel that both my tactical pattern recognition and strategic knowledge of the game has improved this new knowledge has not translated into increased playing strength.

I have a tournament in 1 month and I am concerned about my plateau. I am nowhere near where I wanted to be 3 years into my chess improvement plan.

My Downward Spiral

ICC standard rating at an all time low of 1330 from a peak of 1663
FICS rating temporarily increased to 1350, but over the last few weeks it is back down to 1225
ICC Blitz 5 0 dropped from 1250 to 970, it is now back up to 1170 and on the way up
USCF rating is the same (1278) I have not played any rated USCF tournaments in several months
OTB performance in friendly skittles games is the same as 6 months ago, I still ocassionally lose to players who do not take chess as seriously as me

Why I am Not Improving

Playing too much blitz versus longer games.
Not analyzing (not learning from) my games
Theory based learning versus practical learning
Faulty thought process

Getting to the bottom of it

I selected several of my latest games and anlayzed them looking for the reason I lost the game, and guess what I found:

Over 80% of the games I lose were because I blundered and not due to knowledge gaps.

Modifications to the Plan

Focus more on my thought process while I am playing in order to eliminate senseless blunders.
Begin playing at least 1 non-blitz game every night, which I must analyze before playing any other games.
Focus my study time around tactics and topics that I need help on based on discoveries during game analysis.

I need to strike a balance between blitz versus and standard games, and I must eliminate blitz play several weeks before playing in a tournament. While tactics will be a strong component of my training, I will be more flexible in my training schedule selecting areas of weakness that I uncover during my game analysis.

The key is to focus on building skills over knowledge, and learning to apply the knowledge I already have. As Dan Heisman likes to say, we need to subtract negatives if we want to get better. I have made the mistake of thinking that studying and reading chess books (adding positives) will make me a better player, and while I am increasing my knowledge of chess this does not translate into improving my performance (because we need to subtract negatives).

I hope that these modifications to my training plan, which will focus more on ’skill building’ than ‘knowledge building’ will show improvements in my play. I’ll keep you posted…

6 comments »

Posted in Chess, Improvement, Thinking Process, Training

Tags: blunders Chess chess improvement Improvement thought process Training

Developing Chess Skill

May 31st, 2008

According to Johnathan Rowson in his book Chess for Zebras we can develop chess skill through a combination of playing combined with chess training, where ‘training’ means working things out by ourselves. The main skill a chess player needs is skill in making decisions so making decisions is what you need to do over and over when training (learning by doing).

The best training is the kind that pushes you up against the edges of your comfort zone, where you force yourself to take responsibility for difficult decisions.

- Johnathan Rowson in Chess for Zebras

So here’s what you can do to put his advice into practice:

Playing and then analyzing your games afterwards
Solving complex chess problems
Trying to win won positions against strong analysis engines
Blitz games (comparing your first impression of positions with the way they actually developed)

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Posted in Chess, Improvement, Training

Tags: analysis Chess for Zebras chess skill Improvement Johnathan Rowson learning tips Training

Virtual Chess Coach – Part I

May 7th, 2008

About the Virtual Chess Coach Program

This program is geared for my improvement (a 35 year old 1278 USCF rated player), but I hope that others in a similar situation will be able to derive benefit from it as well.

I will be modeling this program on the teaching’s of Dan Heisman. Dan Heisman is one of the best chess teacher’s in the United States and if you don’t already know this, then run to danheisman.com and check out his Novice Nook articles at Chess Cafe.

Now not all of us can afford a chess coach, so we will be using books and information available on the web (Heisman’s Novice Nook Articles) to create a virtual chess coaching experience. If you can afford a coach, then there is no substitute for the hands on feedback that they can provide but I’m aiming to make this the second best thing.

Things to know before we go on:

This program is aimed at the adult beginner / intermediate player (ELO 1200 – 1700)

Our chess philosophy will be based around Dan Heisman (with a sprinkle of Purdy and Silman for good measure)

Absolute Beginners

For complete beginner’s to chess Heisman recommends they start with The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chess and then go to a basic chess tactics book like John Bain’s Chess Tactics for Students. After doing this you should be approximately 1200 ELO and then this guide will be more useful to you.

The Assessment Phase

We need to assess our strengths and weaknesses, yet we are in no position to do so (how can we assess what we do not know / understand). This is one of the weaknesses of not having the feedback mechanism a coach provides. But do not fret, there is a great book that helps you assess your strengths and weaknesses in chess, and that book is Igor Khmelnitsky’s Chess Exam and Training Guide. After going through Igor’s book, you will have an idea of which areas of your chess need to focus your improvement efforts.

Assessing Your Games

Another area where a coach can provide much needed feedback is in going over your games. Because we’ll be going at it on our own the following process is very important in order to get a close benefit to that of having a real coach.

Go over all of your losses.

Quickly re-play the game again making light annotations

Go over the game in detail, and this time make extensive annotations and analysis

Go over the game with a chess engine and compare your annotations with those of the engine

Key things to look for when annotating your game

You should jot these down as part of your annotations and include them in your chess notebook

See where you could have improved in the opening

Look for missed tactical opportunities (both defensive and offensive)

Look for missed positional opportunities

Look for missed opportunities in the endgame, if necessary refer to Mueller’s Fundamental Chess Endings

Look for moves that caused a shift in the game based on the engine’s evaluation. (any move with an evaluation change greater than .35) and find out the root cause behind the evaluation shift, then go back to your annotations and make sure you address this and don’t forget to add this to your chess notebook.

The games you annotate and go over, should be standard time control games if possible. You should make an effort to play at least 1-2 standard games (>= G/30) per week. You can do this by either joining the Team 45 45 league, or playing ICC’s Standard Tourney or even playing at your local chess club. These games will give you more food for thought than quickly played blitz games, but if you do not have at least 1 standard game to go over, then do go over your well played blitz games (which is better than not going over your games at all).

Thought Process Before Lessons

There are certain bad habits that you should eliminate before you consider taking lessons, otherwise you would be throwing your money away. Most of these stem from careless play or hope chess .