Some Progress

[drahacikfm]

Note that I believe that most people can get the fide master title
if they invest enough time on it and get the right training.
The main problem is that most players do not learn to ask themselves the right questions in order to solve a problem.

They can get stuck with not considering some move because it seems to them illogical so they may never solve a problem.

Today the situation is that people who train without help need to think for themselves what are the right questions that they need to learn to ask and
I believe that most people even do not think to ask themselves the right questions and they simply get a position and start to think without some defined algorithm what to do in case that they see nothing good.

Uri, you think most people can become FIDE master and that you know the reason why people don't reach it and you know what they need to do to reach it.  Not to be rude, but then why is your FIDE rating more than 200 points below FIDE master?  You are not following your own advice?

[uri blass]

Tama,


I do not put much faith in the ICC or Playchess ratings.  I know players who have USCF or FIDE rating of around 2100 but who play Blitz or Bullet around 2700!  They even have wins against strong FIDE GMs with FIDE ELO of 2600+!  The same players would not have a chance against the same GMs in a regular over-the-board game.

It is nice to hear that it everyone can become FIDE FM if they JUST try, since I know many good solid players who have tried and not broken the FIDE 2300 ceiling.  This is not to say that FIDE FM title is unreachable.  But let us not be so cavalier about reaching it.

I find two points indicated here as remarkable.  You have only been playing chess for a short while and yet you solve tactical problems at 2400 level here?  As mentioned I do not put much faith in the ratings of these sites, but still.  You indicated that you were in the 1600-1700 but in three months you reached 2400 by being patient and taking your time!!!
 
Wow silly me, I see now that my whole chess strategy in all these years has been completely wrong. 

I thank you my young friend.

Shajbat

I suspect that players who have USCF or FIDE rating of around 2100 but play Blitz around 2700 are simply cheaters.

There can be some difference between OTB result and blitz result but there is a limit to the difference.

It is a fact that in the world blitz championship the 2700 players that qualified
based on rating in OTB games gave no chance to the other players who qualified from tournaments.

Here is a link for the ranking in the tournament.
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3334

I must say that the fact that all the 2700+ players came in the first places was a complete surprise for me because I expected at least one of them to be relatively weak blitz player and at least one of the 2500+ OTB to perform at 2700 level in the blitz tournament.
 
My conclusion from this tournament is that being stronger blitz player is clearly important for improving results in OTB games.
 
Uri

[uri blass]

Note that I believe that most people can get the fide master title
if they invest enough time on it and get the right training.
The main problem is that most players do not learn to ask themselves the right questions in order to solve a problem.

They can get stuck with not considering some move because it seems to them illogical so they may never solve a problem.

Today the situation is that people who train without help need to think for themselves what are the right questions that they need to learn to ask and
I believe that most people even do not think to ask themselves the right questions and they simply get a position and start to think without some defined algorithm what to do in case that they see nothing good.

Uri, you think most people can become FIDE master and that you know the reason why people don't reach it and you know what they need to do to reach it.  Not to be rude, but then why is your FIDE rating more than 200 points below FIDE master?  You are not following your own advice?

I think that the main reason that I am not a fide master is that I never trained hard to become a fide master.

I did not say that it is something easy.

I never trained seriously about tactics and my only training was from reading some chess books(I started to train in CT and CTS only lately
after I finished my last tournament and the fact that I could improve my fide rating without special preperation encouraged me to decide to train about it)

I can add that I never took private lessons to make progress in chess and I  learned mainly from experience and from analyzing my games with chess programs.

Edit:I said most people can get the fide master title if they invest enough time
and get the right training.
I do not promise that I am going to invest enough time and I do not plan to pay money for special trainers to teach me to improve my positional understanding
so a possible failure of me to get the fide master level is not going to prove that I cannot do it with the right conditions.

Uri

[drahacikfm]

My conclusion from this tournament is that being stronger blitz player is clearly important for improving results in OTB games.

That is not a valid logical conclusion.  A correlation does not prove cause and effect.  This data does not at all prove that blitz helps improve results OTB.  Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't.  That is just one of two possible conclusions.  The other possible conclusion is:

"Very strong OTB players are also good blitz players, but the blitz playing did not help them to become strong OTB players."

For example, maybe Roger Federer is very good at ping pong.  But you cannot conclude that ping pong helped him become good at tennis.  That is not a valid conclusion using rules of logic.  Maybe he is good at ping pong because he is so good at tennis.

Fischer was by far the best blitz player in the world, but he said that blitz "killed his ideas" for OTB.  Fischer was strong because he spent almost every minute of his life studying chess in his room.  He played some blitz, but from reading his biographies it was not an important reason that he was so strong OTB.

[uri blass]

I do not say that strong OTB players need to play a lot of blitz but only that they need to be strong blitz players.

Fischer was a strong blitz player and  it seems clear to me that what he learned to be strong OTB also helped him in blitz.

Edit:I agree that correlation does not prove cause and effect
I do not play blitz today but my experience from the time that I played blitz is that playing a lot of blitz games did not help me to become better blitz player and I simply hit some wall when I cannot improve in blitz by playing blitz games.

It does not mean that I cannot improve in blitz but only that playing many blitz
games is not the way to do it.

Uri

[tama]

I did a statistic with many people that i played on ICC and asked them after the game what there real life rating was? I got an estimate of around 1800-2000 fide when there icc rating was 1900-2200.

Anyways i don't think everyone that has average intelligence can become masters i mean everyone with average intelligence that has some talent in chess can become masters. My last tournament i played i met people with ratings ranging 1200-1400 Fide and have bin playing chess for over 10 years! some since they were 5! basically if you don't got some talent you wont go far.

And one last think! I never read a chess book in my life. I learned everything through the internet and studying the game. A very good way to learn fast is to watch chess lessons or annotated games, i did that for the first couple of months and i started my first rating on the internet at around 1500 easily.

I also think that people don't need a great memory to be good chess players, its more about comprehension and reasoning capability's. After all i have a really bad memory when it comes to languages, if i didn't have a spell checker at this moment i would have over 10 spelling mistakes a sentence.

[shajbat]

Uri,


The first part of your post just reaffirms my point about my lack of faith about internet Blitz or Bullet ratings.  There is a lot of cheating as we all now. 

However, there are some players who have unusual blitz rating as compared to their over-the-board rating.  I give you one example where the player is Kosher and he is a USCF national master of around 2200 (not even a FIDE FM) but plays bullet at 3112 and blitz around 2700.  You can check him out.  He goes by the name of Yaacovn (Yaccov Norowitz “the Chess Rabbi”).

There are even some strong GMs who are blitz specialists.  Bulgarian GM Kril-Georgiev is one of them.  He is a very strong FIDE GM.  Not in the class of a 2700 FIDE GM but even Kasparov at the height of his powers has gone down in front of him in flames in blitz.

I did not say strong players or GMs should not play Blitz. 

There is a big different in playing CHESS fast and playing garbage fast. 

Most improving players play garbage fast and they think that helps them.  They just repeat the same mistakes over and over again and the mistakes become ingrained since they repeat it so many times. 

For improving players I think Quick games of 30 to 45 are better.  But if someone thinks that playing 1 min bullets is helping them. 

Well, then more power to them!

I saw the list of tournament players in Rishon that you sent.  Well, are we surprised that all the solid GMs did well?  Thanks for reaffirming my points.

Shajbat

[drahacikfm]

I do not say that strong OTB players need to play a lot of blitz but only that they need to be strong blitz players.

No, they do not "need to be strong blitz players".  That is still not a logical conclusion.  Why should they need that?  Some very strong GMs over 2600 FIDE never play blitz.

Fischer was a strong blitz player and  it seems clear to me that what he learned to be strong OTB also helped him in blitz.

Yes, that is what I am saying.  He was good at blitz because he was so strong at OTB.  But in your first post you said it is clear that being strong at blitz is important for improving OTB results.  That is not a valid conclusion.

[uri blass]

I will not continue to argue about it and it is a question of definitions.

My point is that I believe that there is no way for me to improve significantly in OTB results without improvement in blitz results in case that I choose to play it.

Uri

[chipschap]

I know lots of people who love chess, have done it for 15 or 20 years, read all kinds of books, watch all kinds of lectures, do tactics problems, take lessons from masters, spend 10 or 20 hours per week on chess, and never get above 2100 FIDE. 

And in the end, it doesn't matter, as long as they enjoy what they are doing.  As I always quote, it's supposed to be fun, and if it isn't fun, spend your time on something else.

I will never reach master level or even expert level.  But chess is still a fine hobby and a fine recreation to keep my mind active.  For me, more time on chess equals more fun to a greater degree than it equals a higher rating.

[uri blass]

I did a statistic with many people that i played on ICC and asked them after the game what there real life rating was? I got an estimate of around 1800-2000 fide when there icc rating was 1900-2200.

Anyways i don't think everyone that has average intelligence can become masters i mean everyone with average intelligence that has some talent in chess can become masters. My last tournament i played i met people with ratings ranging 1200-1400 Fide and have bin playing chess for over 10 years! some since they were 5! basically if you don't got some talent you wont go far.

And one last think! I never read a chess book in my life. I learned everything through the internet and studying the game. A very good way to learn fast is to watch chess lessons or annotated games, i did that for the first couple of months and i started my first rating on the internet at around 1500 easily.

I also think that people don't need a great memory to be good chess players, its more about comprehension and reasoning capability's. After all i have a really bad memory when it comes to languages, if i didn't have a spell checker at this moment i would have over 10 spelling mistakes a sentence.

I have also bad memory when it comes to languages and I am good at mathematics but I believe that thinking correctly is something that is possible to learn and the people with rating 1200-1400 never learned to ask themselves the right questions during the game and never had teachers that taught them how to think.

I also never learned how to think from chess players but fortunately I was smart enough to teach myself because I asked myself why do I lose and did productive steps to prevent the reasons that I lose with no teachers.
 

Note that memory is clearly important in chess and you need to see the position some moves forward clearly in your head.

I think that you probably have better memory for chess than me if you solve problems when you need long calculations not by guessing because most of the time if I can solve them it is only by guessing(maybe I did not try hard enough but
inspite of the fact that I clearly use more time than the average solver here I do not like to spend an hour only to try to find some long mate when there are many lines to calculate that it is hard to me to see them clearly in my head).

I believe that people with bad memory like my memory or your memory can become fide masters with the right help but they have no hope to get fide rating above 2700
regardless of what they do.

I do not know if the people with talent for languages have better memory for chess
but if they have better memory for chess then they probably can become strong grandmasters because my feeling is that thinking correctly is something that is easier to learn relative to improving your memory.

Uri

[uri blass]

Yes, shajbat, I agree.  It was kind of a silly statement by tama that anyone of average intelligence can become a master-level player, or get a 2200 Standard rating here, if they try hard.

I know lots of people who love chess, have done it for 15 or 20 years, read all kinds of books, watch all kinds of lectures, do tactics problems, take lessons from masters, spend 10 or 20 hours per week on chess, and never get above 2100 FIDE.  And they are not stupid people.  Some of them are doctors, lawyers, professors, etc.

I missed this post.
I believe you about it and my opinion is that these people simply do not get the right training because I believe that they can become fide masters with the right training.

Teaching chess is something that clearly needs improvement and
most strong players if not all of them are simply relatively not good in teaching.

It does not mean that they are useless as teachers but only that it is possible to teach in clearly more productive way then what they do.

Uri

[tama]

Also i think its a good idea to take breaks from chess every now and then  because every time i took a month or even 3 months break i came back stronger, because it changes your perspective of how to play. Its like it refresh s your brain. I resantly took a month break and now my CT rating went up 100 points and i just beat a 2300 player on icc in the 15 min pool, witch is my record!

[drahacikfm]

I think memory and visualization are two very different things.

Memory is when you can remember some opening lines or some endgame theory that you studied 2 months ago.  Of course that is useful for chess but is not the most important thing.

Visualization is when you can clearly see the position in your head when you calculate a line 4 or 5 moves ahead for both sides.  That's a very important talent for being a strong player.

I have trouble with visualization.  After 4 or 5 moves I am not sure where all the pieces are, and I have to go back in my mind and replay the moves again mentally up to that position to be sure.  Other strong players can just "see" it immediately and know where all the pieces are and what they are attacking.  I can play a whole game blindfold without making any illegal moves, but I have trouble "seeing" future positions clearly in the variations I calculate when solving problems or when playing a normal game.

[tama]

Yes you are right and to be able to fully calculate those 5 moves ahead you need good reasoning, i think that's were most people have trouble. I think only very good chess players can see the board perfectly in there head, i usually look deep into a position then am forced to go back to the beginning in my mind and  double check if everything works out, usually more then once. People with higher then average IQ can visualize perfectly but for the rest of us, we got to use what we were born with,lol.