difference between CT and CTS good or bad?

[uri blass]

1)In CT each user has a chance of receiving any of the problems in the system.
In CTS it is not the case and weak players never get very hard problems(not that I never got a problem with rating that is more than 300 elo better than me in CTS)

2)In CT you always need to win
In CTS there are cases when you need to draw or find a drawing move

3)CT  gives the best computer defence
CTS simply gives human moves as defence

4)CT often have cases when there is mate in 1 and another win and you solve the problem wrong when you choose the first win that you see.
CTS does not have it often.

5)CT more often than CTS have more than one winning move when you need to find the computer move and finding a winning move is not enough.

6)The display of the board is different in CT and CTS

7)The problems in CTS tend to be shorter with some surprising move so sometimes it is not easy to solve them.

The problems in CT more often is to calculate some long line.

8)In CT in blitz both the problem and the user can lose rating points
This does not happen in CTS.

9)In CTS you know the rating of the problem when you start and it is not the case in CT.

As an experienced user in both sites I consider 1-8 to be an advantage of CTS
when 9 is an advantage of CT.

I suggest the following changes to improve CT and solve part of the problems and I wonder what is your opinion.
1)limit the range of problems that user can get and not only decide that users have bigger chance to get problems close to their rating.
2)add problems when you need to draw or to find only saving move.
3)use practical replies from human-human games to decide about the response in problems.
4)give the user part of the points in case that he finds a winning move that is not a mate in 1 and also give the user part of the rating point even if the user failed after getting this is a good move but not the computer move message.

The user proved that he could find a good move and giving him the same points as user who could not do it is not fair.
 

Note that CTS is clearly more popular than CT(only 1208 users in CT when there are almost 3000 active users in CTS)

Note that
Some GM's and IM's train in CTS

Here are some names
2 Faramir (IM)  2225 36 2257 42,054 84% Oct 06 - 01:46
10 BadViking (GM)  2060 38 2116 42,177 85% Oct 04 - 19:09
12 bani (GM)  2053 78 2206 18,442 88% Sep 21 - 20:39
14 Smurfie (IM)  2038 84 2061 6,221 81% Sep 22 - 19:47
15 themaheide (GM)  2037 61 2043 2,022 76% Sep 30 - 12:25
30 mnarciso (GM)  2008 82 2092 10,406 79% Sep 18 - 21:36
45 Dwidge (WGM)  1930 39 2015 41,124 82% Oct 02 - 19:36
46 frizz (IM)  1928 67 1960 3,259 81% Sep 19 - 23:44
82 tomohawk (IM)  1858 34 1914 26,987 93% Oct 05 - 15:12
317 TheGreat (IM)  1705 66 1824 3,542 78% Sep 27 - 22:41

tomohawk(place 82 in CTS) is one of the best tacticians here(place 4 in blitz and place 3 in standard) and it suggests that if you consider only top tacticians this site
is more than 10 times less popular than CTS so my guess is that today most chess players simply prefers CTS.
 

Uri

[newlook]

1)In CT each user has a chance of receiving any of the problems in the system.
In CTS it is not the case and weak players never get very hard problems(not that I never got a problem with rating that is more than 300 elo better than me in CTS)

The CT problem distribution for a particular player is a bell curve. Most problems are close in rating to the player's rating, but some are higher or lower. Below is the standard problem distribution for me, centered on my standard rating.



Most of the other points seem to be matters of taste and personal preference. Uri, why should Chess Tempo become more like CTS? It's different, and the people who use this site like CT for what it is. If CT becomes a CTS clone, what reason would anyone have to come here? I like the fact that I have a choice, and I have chosen CT over CTS. Everyone is free to try both sites and decide for himself/herself.

[uri blass]

I do not claim that CT needs to be CTS clone but only that I think that CTS has many advantages.

I posted in the past about
disadvantages that both CTS and CT share.

one disadvantage that I did not  post was about too short solutions

In problem 29240 the solution is clearly too short.
It is better if CTS extends the line until it is obvious that the side to move wins and I suggest simply not to stop the solution before the computer can see at
depth of 1 ply that the side to move has a winning advantage.

In the relevant problem people who guess QxQ earn rating points.
I thought about this move and initially thought that it does not work and after I found no solution with this move I went back to this move and found that I have 2.g4 and was frustrated when the computer did not give me to play this move and I lost rating points because I was too slow in solving it.

I now try to get back rating points that I lost in blitz but after I get success with it I will probably leave this site again and invest more time in CTS when I earn rating points every day.

Uri

[tama]

For people that are not Master level of higher chess tempo is much more useful then chess.emrald. even if your a master level or higher chess.emrald is a way to keep sharp, it doesn't help them much. Im on the best list in standard as #4-1 and im around expert strength but my tactics are even higher then my playing strength so i think i know what im talking about when it comes to tactics. Also about 9 months ago i was addicted to CTS, i played non stop until i discover the magic of ChessTempo, the moment i got serious with ChessTempo my rating increased 400 points!

And i have no idea were you see that CTS has an advantage over CT... CTS has problems that are 1-4 moves long MAX!!! most of the time. and the problems aren't very difficult because your expected to solve them in a very short time pireid. Its like playing week opponents on the internet that are 300 points lower rated then you, your guaranteed to win and you gain nothing from the game.

[uri blass]

I think that chess tempo tries to train me in what I can never do regardless of how much I train and I think that people underestimate the importance of short tactics.

I am 40.5 years old.
My visualization of the board is relatively weak and I
cannot play a single game blindfold and I do not believe that I can do it by training.

I tried to do it when I was a child and failed in this task.
Inspite of it based on analysis of my games there is a significant room for improvement for players with fide playing strength of 2000-2100 if they only can see short tactics that I can see easily in my imagination perfectly and
I am talking about CTS type tactics.

I am not close to perfect in seeing short tactics and the same is for my opponnents.

I think that the majority  of my improvement from 1600(when I was 20 years old) to rating above 2000 is thanks to improvement in my ability to see short tactics and I teached myself simply to miss less things when I calculate few plies forward by trying to do one ply search forward.

Inspite of it I do not feel that I am close to  be perfect in seeing short tactics
and I believe that only avoiding mistakes that are about calculating at most
4 moves forward can push me almost 200 elo forward.

In the last tournament I had 4 wins and 5 losses.

Looking at my losses in my last tournament (90+30 time control) I can say
that in 4 out of 5 losses I made mistakes of missing short tactics and in part of them my opponents also did mistakes of missing short tactics.

I could probably get 6 out of 9 instead of 4 out of 9 against the same opponents in case of not missing short tactics. 

Note that in all of the games that I won my opponents made mistakes of missing short tactics and I won against opponents with rating above 2000

I think that improvement in my ability to see tactical things can help me also to play better positional moves so the practical improvement from seeing short tactics can be clearly bigger than the improvement from avoiding CTS type tactical mistakes.

Edit:I posted 2 examples of tactics from my own games(players at my strength clearly do worse tactical mistakes than it but even these examples are only 4 moves of me and the opponent so I do not like to get some mate in 7 problem to solve that is clearly not the main decisive factor in games and cases when my opponent wins thanks to calculating more than 8 plies forward in the middle game do not happen often so I consider them relatively irrelevant for practical chess).


Uri

[chipschap]

I am a relatively weak class player.  I practiced 10,000 problems on CTS and improved USCF rating a little.  Then I practiced 1,500 standard problems on CT and my USCF rating went up a lot.

So why is it?  I don't think it's a matter of short vs. long tactics.  I still miss both in real play, as do my opponents.  But I miss less than before.  On CTS you have to react quickly.  This is like blitz.  On CT you have time to think and reflect.  This is like slow time control chess, so it is much more like what I play over the board.  So for me that is the difference.

Remember too as a weaker player, CT is serving me more of the easier (shorter) problems.  But not *only* short problems; it is also serving me problems that give me the chance to practice calculations.  So CT is giving me more well-rounded practice.

I think that CTS is currently more popular because it is older and much more well known.  I think some day that CT will have a wider reputation and will pass CTS in popularity.

Of course they are both good and helpful tools.  But CT has given me proven results that I can demonstrate from USCF rating improvements.

[uri blass]

Maybe you simply did not practice correctly in CTS
Here is the way that I practice in CTS.

1)My setting is break on failure and break on success so I do not get the next problem if I do not ask for it.

2)If I fail to solve a problem I try the same problem unrated and when I try unrated I have all the time to solve.

3)In part of the cases that I solve a problem correctly and not sure about
the solution I look again at the solution to think more time about the reasons that the solution is correct.


4)I decided recently not to guess moves in CTS and give a move only if I strongly believe that I know the solution even if it takes me a minute to solve
and I am improving my percentage.

yesterday was the first day when I did not improve in rating but I
expect to improve both my percentage and my rating in the long run.

There are still cases when I give a correct move from memory and look again at the solution to see why the move is right because 
I remember the right moves but not the full reasons and I want to get the full points by solving in less than 3 seconds.

There are also cases when I remember that I had the problem but it takes me more than 3 seconds to get the solution or that I remember the problem and do not remember the solution.

Uri

[drahacikfm]

I remember the right moves but not the full reasons and I want to get the full points by solving in less than 3 seconds.

There are also cases when I remember that I had the problem but it takes me more than 3 seconds to get the solution or that I remember the problem and do not remember the solution.

In my opinion making a move in a position that you have seen for only 3 seconds is completely useless and can only hurt your chess.  You can't even count up the material in 3 seconds.  Maybe you are a rook down, and you won't know it.  Then winning a knight would still leave you down material and you wouldn't even know that!  3-second decisions cannot improve your over-the board slow chess, no matter how much you want to believe that.  Doing problems that way is worse than a waste of time.

A 3-second move in a blitz game is different, because you already know the material balance and the basic tactical ideas in the position.  But in a position that pops up onto the screen on a tactics site, making a move in 3 seconds is silly, even if you had that problem before and you remember it. You learn nothing except to be very superficial in your thinking.

[uri blass]

I remember the right moves but not the full reasons and I want to get the full points by solving in less than 3 seconds.

There are also cases when I remember that I had the problem but it takes me more than 3 seconds to get the solution or that I remember the problem and do not remember the solution.

In my opinion making a move in a position that you have seen for only 3 seconds is completely useless and can only hurt your chess.  You can't even count up the material in 3 seconds.  Maybe you are a rook down, and you won't know it.  Then winning a knight would still leave you down material and you wouldn't even know that!  3-second decisions cannot improve your over-the board slow chess, no matter how much you want to believe that.  Doing problems that way is worse than a waste of time.

A 3-second move in a blitz game is different, because you already know the material balance and the basic tactical ideas in the position.  But in a position that pops up onto the screen on a tactics site, making a move in 3 seconds is silly, even if you had that problem before and you remember it. You learn nothing except to be very superficial in your thinking.

I disagree with the assumption that you see the position for only 3 seconds.

You see the position for more than 3 seconds and practically you have 6 seconds to look at the position when it is the opponent move.

6 seconds are clearly enough to count material.

Uri

[drahacikfm]

Ok, I see.  With 6 seconds you have time to count material in 3 seconds and think about a move for 3 seconds.  That will really improve your calculation ability in tournament chess.  Good luck.  Watching TV would improve your tournament chess strength more. 

I do lots of easy problems on here.  I have a problem set for under-1400 rating, and I do 50 or so of them every day, so I get all the basic tactical patterns firmly engraved in my brain.  But even for these simple problems, when it first pops up on the screen, I force myself to NOT think about moves or the solution.  I first count up the material, then look in general at the position to see such things as who has an exposed king, who has more active pieces, whose pieces are pinned or badly placed, who has checks, etc.  I try to get into the frame of mind I would have during a tournament game, where I am used to the position already.  THEN, after 20 seconds or more of general familiarization with the position, I start to look for moves for myself.

In my opinion this is the only reasonable way to do problems if you want to improve your calculation ability.  Blasting off a move in 3 seconds or 6 seconds or who-cares-how-many-seconds less than 20, is just a waste of training time.  Probably even worse, it develops habits such as superficial thinking and lack of careful checking that you don't want to have during tournament games.

[andreacoda]

Personally, I completely agree with Drahacik comments. If the intent (as it is for me) is to improve the OTB chess level, understanding the position and the weaknesses of both black and white is an instrumental step, for me.

The key reason is that this helps recognizing the “seeds of tactical destruction”, as Heisman calls them, i.e. those elements of weakness that can lead to a tactical combination. What I want is not to only to be able to “solve a puzzle”, but to have kind of a bell to ring in my head when a position that could result in a tactical combination manifests itself on the board.

Based on what I have read so far, what Drahacik is suggesting is the best method to achieve this, in my honest opinion.

This said, I appreciate the fact that my level is nil compared to you guys, so I just try to learn from both of you and follow the debate

[uri blass]

drahacikfm,I understand your point but the main target of training in CTS is to improve my tactical knowledge and not to improve my calculation ability.

Tactical knowledge is about knowing patterns and it clearly can help in games.

I will give an example for a tactical pattern:

Qb3+ Kh8 Nf7+ Kg8 Nh6+ Kh8 Qg8+ Rxg8 Nf7#

A player without knowledge of this pattern may find this combination in OTB game thanks to good calculation ability but life is a lot easier if you remember
the pattern and do not have to calculate many lines until you find it.

I hope simply to remember more tactical patterns so I can use the same calculation ability that I have in games in more productive way.

Uri

[drahacikfm]

Ok, I understand your point about learning patterns, not calculating.  But if you look at a pattern for only 3 seconds, are you going to remember it very well?

If I wanted to learn patterns I would prefer to look at it for 20 seconds, and not do as many problems.  Or at least after the 3-second problem, spend 20 seconds asking myself what tactical motif was involved (one reason I tag problems a lot here), and what was so good about my position that I had a tactic (lead in development, exposed enemy king, etc).

[uri blass]

I can say that I often look at the solution after solving the problem in CTS.

3 seconds per problem is also a target time and not something that I now achieve.

If I get problems that I remember and I remember them well enough to be sure about the solution my solution time is less than 3 seconds.
 
In the other cases I usually do not get the solution so fast.


There is limited number of positions so hopefully if I train enough I can remember 10,000 problems well enough to give the solution in less than 3 seconds.

Here is my times for the last 20 problems that I solved in  CTS
(I decided to save the problem numbers so I can repeat them later and every 20 problems I simply copy the data from the CTS site)

2008-10-08 19:08:11 1698 failed to solve p11354 1580
2008-10-08 19:07:24 1698 solved (20.3 secs.) p58315 1748
2008-10-08 19:06:51 1698 solved (6.1 secs.) p62157 1621
2008-10-08 19:05:04 1698 failed to solve p08119 1812
2008-10-08 19:04:36 1698 solved (5.0 secs.) p26944 1603
2008-10-08 19:04:13 1698 solved (9.8 secs.) p39870 1588
2008-10-08 19:03:35 1698 solved (9.8 secs.) p03504 1773
2008-10-08 19:02:48 1698 solved (21.4 secs.) p45282 1820
2008-10-08 19:02:13 1698 solved (33.7 secs.) p15796 1723
2008-10-08 19:00:54 1699 failed to solve p62251 1734
2008-10-08 19:00:24 1698 solved (3.8 secs.) p65135 1599
2008-10-08 19:00:01 1698 solved (4.1 secs.) p21745 1587
2008-10-08 18:59:11 1698 solved (1.5 secs.) p22358 1559
2008-10-08 18:58:50 1698 solved (8.2 secs.) p04213 1841
2008-10-08 18:58:29 1697 solved (7.7 secs.) p63655 1714
2008-10-08 18:57:59 1697 solved (7.4 secs.) p40692 1585
2008-10-08 18:57:07 1698 failed to solve p62281 1715
2008-10-08 18:56:48 1698 solved (8.5 secs.) p11409 1676
2008-10-08 18:56:17 1697 solved (2.1 secs.) p05555 1592
2008-10-08 18:55:58 1697 solved (1.8 secs.) p11976 1583
 

[drahacikfm]

There is limited number of positions so hopefully if I train enough I can remember 10,000 problems well enough to give the solution in less than 3 seconds.

What's the point of memorizing the winning move to 10,000 problems so that you can do them all in less than 3 seconds?  You will never have exactly the same position in a real game.  You might have a position with a similar tactical idea in it, but if you are only memorizing a solution, you can't apply ideas later in real games.

If you are solving a problem you had before in less than 3 seconds, you are not using any learned ideas or learned tactical patterns to solve it.  You are only playing a memorized move.  It's not possible to apply learned ideas or patterns in less than 3 seconds.  It's only possible to play a memorized move.

Anyway, I won't argue any more.  Chess is supposed to be fun.  If you have fun trying to solve thousands of problems in less than 3 seconds, that's great.  And by the way, if you think that will make you improve, and you don't care so much about tactics ratings, you can of course try to do all the Chess Tempo problems in 3 seconds too.  Nothing on Chess Tempo prevents that, unless you are worried about the rating.  But the goal is chess improvement, not tactics site ratings.  Higher rating for very fast problems does not equal chess improvement.