Improvement - finally!

[andreacoda]

It is with immense pleasure that I let the whole community know that, after hours and hours, I am finally seeing a clear improvement trend! 

Following our beloved FM's advises (BTW: any news from Draha? He has not been around for a while), and spending much more time doing simple tactics (0-1100) and less time doing tests, I have been steadily improving from my lowest 1487 standard rating to the actual 1601.6!

I am also seeing great improvement in my OTB games: not only I recognize more  tactical themes when I can play them, but I also avoid many blunders.

So once more: thanks Richard, for this very nice site!

Thanks for reading!

Andrea

[revenant]

That's great news Andrea!  With the objective improvement in your results from studying on Chess Tempo, maybe now is the time to pause and reflect on the nature of the change that has taken place in your internal "chess engine" and then hopefully, disclose the secret to your struggling friends.  20 years since I first started playing the game, I'm still dumbfounded by the beautiful mystery of what differentiates one chessplayer from another player rated 400 points higher or lower.

Usually, all the better player can say is "I don't know, I just see more at the board, I don't actually consider myself very good."  But what exactly has happened inside their brain?  More importantly, if someone has improved 400 points in a year, why can't they improve another 400 points in one more year?  Why is there any limit to what we can do?

Of course, in some sense it is amazing that us pitiful humans can accomplish even very "simple" things like calculate mate-in-1 just by staring at little symbols on a board on a screen, or walk through a crowd without bumping into each other, or shoot an ordinary 2-point basket in basketball.  I think it's because we have all evolved together.  The healthy side of competition is that it keeps producing better "bests".

I suspect that Chess Tempo is going to start "catching on" (especially now that it allows alts) and you'll find that more and more often, the people you're facing across the board at tournaments have studied extensively at CT as well.  The site is already accelerating the learning process in hundreds of players and soon it may well be thousands.  We're all going to be finely honed "tactics sharks" trying to slice each other up.  :-)

[andreacoda]

Thanks for you post, Revenant! What a scary thought, imagining all those sharks around... 

To answer some of your question, the best thing I can recommend (unless you already know it) is to read, methodically, Dan's Novice Nook article on ChessCafe: http://home.comcast.net/~danheisman/Articles/Novice_Nook_Links.htm

I recently started, from the first article he published back in 2001, and I do believe there are pearls of wisdom in each article: really practical things about how to improve, do's and dont's.

I know there are so much stuff out there that we can read everything, but I would check them out...

Cheers, and thanks again for your post!

Andrea

[richard]

Well done Andrea, nice to hear success stories :-)  I've also found Dan's articles useful, if only I wasn't too lazy to consistently follow his advice :-)

Regards,
Richard.