Developing Chess Skill

Striding Along

I'm halfway through my second circle of the 306 mate-in-one problems. I can certainly say that this time through, I've been seeing things more visually and recognizing patterns. I have even encouraged some of my habits of seeing a piece's influence. For instance, with my opponent's king I see the square perimeter around him. Of course I have always sort of tried to work out the influences visually, but for some reason it seems different now... perhaps easier?

Seeing a solution gets more complicated when you have a mesh of knights and pieces that make the visualizing more difficult, but it seems working on visualizing those and "sensing" the patterns are more quicker than logically trying to look at all the square each piece can attack. And now it's as if I can more easily assess what's happening on the board.


We all know how the pieces move. We know the rules. It seems it's about seeing and truly "understanding" the ramifications of the rules which allow us to make progress i.e. as I believe de la maza puts it: "chess knowledge" and "chess ability."


I started doing a few of the mate-in-two puzzles that follow the mate-in-one from the Polgar book, and I must say they are much more challenging than the former. I'll still continue doing the mate-in-ones as they seem to stress pattern recognition well, while mate-in-two (or more) stress calculation (or at least until they also become so simple that I don't need to calculate any longer.) So, I am starting some of the mate-in-twos also. I want to do several circles of the 306 mates to see how it affects my play/visualization.

In terms of CTS scoring, there has been no numerical improvement. If anything, my rating has dropped, now just hovering above 1100. But, I think that can be attributed to staying up so late, sometimes to finish some chess problems that couldn't be finished earlier. I know that I can now see solutions to many 1350+ rated problems, where as before I had no idea what to do. All of my CTS tropies are in the 1300+ range now.

In other news however, there is a local chess tournament on October 21 that I registered for. This is my first tournament and will also give me my first CFC chess rating. All the entrance fees for the section is returned as prize money. Hopefully I can put up a decent fight in the tournament as it seems there are players rated up to 1650+ entered so far.

posted by Board Scholar @ 9:13 AM