My turn to vent - I am not improving

[liky]

Hi first of all thanks Richard for this wonderful site and congrats to all who have made improvements by practicing here. The rating graphs of the vast majority of players here have been constantly ascending.

That is, except me. My CT standard rating shows a continuous decline until it hits rock bottom (assuming it won't go even further down in future) and i left the site for a month or so. Now i'm back and managed to pull it up a little.

But on the whole my point is that blindly solving problem after problem may not help much. I've read some suggestions here which maybe I should try (eg http://chesstempo.com/chess-forum/general_chess_tactics_discussion/err_this_is_annoying_venting_and_a_few_questions_about_studing_tactics-t405.0.html )

But then actually my rating is already quite high compared to most others, so am I already at my peak and can't go up anymore? Yet my peak rating was supposed to be 2099 before the long decline and now i'm left wondering how I once managed to achieve that level...

[revenant]

Liky, I see by your stats page that you play no blitz.  This is the purist approach recommended by Drahacikfm and it seems to have paid off for him and also for boromir, for example.  Boromir's standard rating graph reminds me of a monk climbing a mountain to make a pilgrimage at a shrine, or the tortoise in the Aesop's Fable about the Tortoise and the Hare (with the moral ("Slow and steady wins the race").

Then there are users like you and me who can't maintain the ascent.  I had one night playing standard where an especially annoying problem made me go "I give up, you stupid mountain!"  Then more recently a narrow spike in the graph when I said "Okay, top of the mountain or bust!" and got "busted" a few problems later.  :-)

If standard is making you feel frustrated the same way, I strenuously vociferously recommend you switch over to blitz at least for a while.  You'll probably find it's a lot more fun and rather than permanently ruining your patience for standard play, it will "burn-in the ROM" for a number of standard mating & tactics patterns you have to know anyway to play good standard in the first place.

I take the metaphor from Rashid Ziyatdinov's mysteriously laconic book "GM-RAM".  Chess Tempo is like a hyperaccelerated computer version of that book.  After several months on the site I have acquired many new "chess neurons", one for each tactical pattern.  There's a neuron that notices the possibility of an "epaulet mate", a neuron for a queen forking the enemy king and rook (or merely moving to a square where it threatens to), and a neuron for the pattern Kh8/Pg7/Ph6 and we have a bishop on the a1-h8 diagonal and we play Qxh6+ and Qxg7#.  Of course for each of those neurons you need a "companion neuron" that checks whether there might be a wrench in the works, e.g. at
http://chesstempo.com/chess-problems/45825
the pawn we want to take is guarded!  ("I'm up to your tricks now, CT! -- Oops, moved too fast!")

Now, those of us who are "harebrained" enough to play blitz can't necessarily expect any better or quicker results than at standard.  You might not see a climb in your graph at blitz either.  But I guarantee that you will be rewarded in the long run with the feeling of pride at having actually learned something, regardless of rating points.  :-)

[tama]

After you pass say 2000 standard on chesstempo, the goal becomes to get as many problems correct in a row as possible. The higher you go the harder it gets. This can also e said for 2300 in blitz mode.

[uri blass]

Hi first of all thanks Richard for this wonderful site and congrats to all who have made improvements by practicing here. The rating graphs of the vast majority of players here have been constantly ascending.

That is, except me. My CT standard rating shows a continuous decline until it hits rock bottom (assuming it won't go even further down in future) and i left the site for a month or so. Now i'm back and managed to pull it up a little.

But on the whole my point is that blindly solving problem after problem may not help much. I've read some suggestions here which maybe I should try (eg http://chesstempo.com/chess-forum/general_chess_tactics_discussion/err_this_is_annoying_venting_and_a_few_questions_about_studing_tactics-t405.0.html )

But then actually my rating is already quite high compared to most others, so am I already at my peak and can't go up anymore? Yet my peak rating was supposed to be 2099 before the long decline and now i'm left wondering how I once managed to achieve that level...

I think that part of the problem may be that rating is not correct when you start and if you are lucky to get positions that you solve easily you get higher rating than you deserve.

Another part may be that rating of the problems is not constant.
I wonder if the rating of problems does not tend to go down and take the users down.

Is there some statistics about it?


Uri

[liky]

Thanks for all your interesting replies... I'm going downhill again =(

Often after looking at a solution I just knew I should have got that right. What I lacked is a certain creativity and confidence I should have when playing at top form.

Yeah i definitely should try something new. Probably blitz as suggested by revenant.. or read up a fresher on tactics again.

All the best to your performances too!

[drahacikfm]

Yeah i definitely should try something new. Probably blitz as suggested by revenant.. or read up a fresher on tactics again.

Or do lots of low-rated problems to get your confidence back and to get all the basic tactical patterns so engrained that they are automatic.  Those are the building blocks for the more difficult problems, which might be a string of 3 easy tactics done in the correct move order.  Don't know if you have the silver membership, but if you do, you can make a problem set like "Standard under 1400" and do lots of those.  I do about 10 times as many easy problems as Rated-Standard each day, and the total time spent on each of those two sets is about the same.

[andreacoda]

I strongly recommend Drahacik approach.

After weeks of hanging around 1400, I talked to Drahacik via private messaging, because I was noticing he was doing plenty of low rated problems, and I was curious about the reason (given his level, I didn’t understand the point of doing so simple problems). He explained it to me, and I since started doing plenty of low rated problems, trying to understand every single position and motif – between ChessTempo and Chessimo, I have been doing about 1000 easy (<1100 ELO) problems a month.

Just with this, my ability in resolving more complex problems has been soaring, and my rating went up from 1400 to 1600.

The other thing I can recommend, to do in parallel, is to go through http://www.chesstactics.org/ : this (completely free) site will help you figuring out the thought process.

Don’t give up, and don’t get depressed!

[uri blass]

Note that if you do not care about rating you can use the CTS site for doing easy problems in a simple way

The method is simple.

do not care about CTS rating and use your time for every problem and give the solution only when you feel certain about it.

Your CTS rating is going to be low so you are going to get easy problems.

Uri

[chipschap]

Thanks for all your interesting replies... I'm going downhill again =(

I would suggest that going downhill presents an opportunity, to stop and reflect on what is going on.   When this happens to me, I slow down ... a lot, if necessary.  If it is really bad I stop and come back the next day.

A downhill slide is a chance to learn how to deal with your inevitable chess slumps!

[boromir]

First of all I have to thank Revenant for comparing me to my favourite animal, the tortoise   
Secondly I have to concur fully with Drahacik. Doing simple problems is the way to go rather than playing blitz, which in my opinion promotes superficiality.

Like Drahacik I do endless numbers of very easy problems (although I use other software than this site), and then I go here to actually test myself against some really tough problems.

One thing I find very useful is practising sets of problems that have a single motif as that will allow you to target areas where you are weak (or hone the ones where you are already pretty good).
Also, because my memory is terrible, I will repeat those sets until I am completely familiar with all the problems, going by the principle that if I cannot remember the solution to a problem when I see it a second time I clearly have not learned it, i.e. it hasn't been "hard-wired" into my brain.

So far this approach seems to have worked for me, given the limited time I have to practice.