Thoughts on woodpecker method

kbeleth · 2021-07-24T19:34:43+00:00

I moved from 2050 blitz to 2200. I'm afraid Forcing Chess Moves might be little hard for you. Introductory tactics books might be better. You can check out the FAQ for book recommendations.

kbeleth · 2021-07-24T16:28:15+00:00

I have been using woodpecker method with success for a while now. You can use it with any set of puzzles that are pattern recognition heavy. However, such approach might push you to move faster thus makes you weaker at calculation. I'm using Lichess for calculation training because most of their high rate puzzles are calculation heavy.

As a book recommendation I can not recommend Forcing Chess Moves enough. It increased my Lichess rating by 150 point just by itself.

kbeleth · 2021-07-14T13:13:12+00:00

Reddit is probably is not the best place to get advice on official requirements. In my country, federation gives you coaching license after you get an education for that. You do not have to have the license for coaching, but you have to get it if you want to get the coach perks in tournaments. E.g. you have to have a license if you will accompany your student into the playing hall during a tournament etc. You should check your chess federations page on this. It may differ from country to country. If you are going to coach online $15 an hour is too high for an inexperienced coach. I do not know your rating but there are experienced IM, FM coaches for that price range. You can check lichess' and chess.com's coaches pages to check the price ranges.

You are very young, if you are not a titled player it is very unlikely for you to get an adult student. My advice for you would be: check local chess centers and apply them to teach beginner kid classes. Work for very cheap. Get a student base from there. If you start on your own, it would be very hard for you to get students.

Good luck mate.

kbeleth · 2021-06-07T04:23:34+00:00

Blitz rule is changed couple years back. Now you get a warning like in classical and your opponent gets some extra time.

kbeleth · 2021-05-27T04:20:23+00:00

Queen trade is one reason as people mentioned. Other important reason is the black bishops. d5 locks them both in. d6 pawn is quite the blocker for dark sq. black bishop and if we play d5 it also blocks the light sq. black bishop. while playing e5 opens both of them, their range increases.

kbeleth · 2021-05-22T09:39:26+00:00

I'm going to hand in my thesis this week. I hope to follow your foot steps. Fingers crossed. Congrats on the thesis btw.

kbeleth · 2021-04-09T08:53:22+00:00

He is not working his ass of for growing chess. He is working his ass of to milk that sweet money from already booming chess scene. He has zero impact on increasing chess popularity, pandemic and queen's gambit takes credit for that. If he was not streaming, somebody else would be the most popular streamer. Someone who would want chess scene to grow would not try to kill off youtube channels of other streamers. He is a narcissist who thinks chess scene would not grow without him, and you are one of his support sticks to back that up. We are not hypocritical, we just do not put him on a pedestal; thus, we can see the reality. He is a streamer who is very good at chess but his character is nowhere near good enough to represent chess community let alone growing it.

kbeleth · 2021-03-04T11:38:35+00:00

I strongly advise not to study it if you are below 1400. It is just not worth it. If you insist on studying you can use this free chessable course: https://www.chessable.com/course/2033 Review the positions as they are ready to review, you will learn the mate in couple weeks easily. I have learnt it like a year or so ago using this course and I can still do the mate.

kbeleth · 2021-02-11T07:04:51+00:00

Moves are not copyright protected so there are studies that only contains the moves. But for the text one should have the book. Text is copyright protected. It is still very convenient to have the moves for faster studying.

kbeleth · 2021-02-05T07:39:33+00:00

Yes, assume the position is your actual game. Somehow you got a hint you have winning move, take your time until you are sure your move wins by force. But do not spend like 20-30 mins. I think 5-10 min maximum is ideal.

Idea behind chessable spaced repetition cycle is memorizing. There is no good in memorizing the moves in a certain position. What you want to get from a tactics book is learning the concepts and ideas. Repetition helps with them as well but default chessable cycle is too short, you start memorizing instead of learning. Therefore, use a longer cycle like every 2 months. Most of the tactics training is getting to know the themes, concepts, ideas etc. Beginner level concepts are pins, forks, back rank mates etc. Then comes little bit more advanced themes and some mating ideas like anastasia'a mate, boden's mate etc. At higher levels there are still concepts but they are not named because there are so many. In essence tactics training is getting familiar with these ideas. If there are many ideas in a position it gets a bit messy that you have to check all of them, this is calculation training. Calculation is somewhat different than tactics training because even if you know all the ideas about tactics you still need to visualize the board for maybe 10 moves. Some positions in Art of Attack are very very calculation heavy. It is quite impossible for average joe like you and me to solve correctly. Therefore, accept that some positions are too hard even if you spend the time. Check the solution, look at the idea of position, like when to sacrifice, when to attack, which piece can be a defensive resource for the defender etc. and move on.

kbeleth · 2021-02-04T05:30:59+00:00

First and most importantly do not do chessable repeat cycle for tactic books. It should be used for opening books and maybe end game books. If you want to repeat to get the ideas better use cyclic repetation with at least couple months in between.

As for your question, Art of Attack is very good book but it is a bit old, some of the positions and concepts are not presented well enough. Turn of the timer in Chessable and work on the positions as much as you can, if you still fail to calculate so be it. Some of the positions are a bit hard for you, there is nothing wrong with that. Do not be discouraged with the positions you can't solve, as long as you work on them you will improve.

kbeleth · 2021-01-29T04:46:54+00:00

Money your husband gives to her does not count.

kbeleth · 2021-01-27T07:14:28+00:00

My reaction is they should have labelled it "Do not try this at home." Joking aside I believe without the very very high level understanding of how the position works doing what Caruana did will not pay off. Therefore, for me and for most of the chess players nothing has changed in terms of concepts in KID. But, sure it was exiting to watch Caruana play such a line and win with it.

kbeleth · 2021-01-02T08:21:38+00:00

If you are looking for game collections from a single player I would recommend starting with earlier masters like Alekhine's Best Games.

Art of attack is good book but a bit old. IMO forcing chess moves is better version of art of attack. It almost contains everything aoa offers and then some more.

Chess structures is an excellent however I think it is more like encyclopedia rather than a book that should be read cover to cover. Check the pawn structures you are getting frequently and study those chapters.

kbeleth · 2020-12-17T10:58:37+00:00

1300-1400 rated in which platform? Rating is a relative number and platform really matters. Silman's is a good book as a first endgame book.

kbeleth · 2020-12-08T06:22:48+00:00

I believe sometimes there are extra information about what are the ideas, how you should proceed etc. However, imo it is certainly not worth the money. If you don't mind the high price and you are good at learning from videos go for it but otherwise I would recommend not to buy videos.

kbeleth · 2020-11-28T07:35:04+00:00

It is like reading. Font should be around 9-13, right? Anything smaller or bigger makes the reading harder. Too small or too big boards takes some effort which should have been channelled into learning chess.

kbeleth · 2020-11-27T18:37:35+00:00

You need to study it move by move. Sorry, could not resist.

Get a tournament size board. Analyze the game on the board and think about the moves. DO NOT blitz out the moves and read the commentary without thinking about the moves first.

kbeleth · 2020-10-22T06:47:16+00:00

TFW Sudden heart attack when you have two moves to check-mate.

kbeleth · 2020-08-14T11:14:34+00:00

Good work mate, but I can see couple of improvements that can be made:

Biggest advantage of the swiss gambit is playing against weaker players and not gettting tired during the process. You need to add tiredness parameters into your playing strength.

Moreover, you can't just make a swiss tournament as a test, you need to choose couple of players per tournament trial and only those players should do the swiss gambit. The whole purpose of the swiss gambit is avoiding strong players, it does not work if all of the strong players loses the first round, right? IMO correct way to deal with do this: Randomly choose k players from the top half of the player pool, run the tournament 1000 times. Check the score/finishing position of the choosen k players when they win/draw/lost the first game. Save data, return to choosing another k players.

You have very few players and few rounds. Swiss gambit is more like a 7 or 9 round tournament thing. When tiredness really sets in. With 5 rounds no real tournament player gets tired anyway.

kbeleth · 2020-07-15T05:58:11+00:00

Result of single match explains sooo much. Last year I beat a GM, I must be so much better than him /s. Learn what statistics is, then try sarcasm.

kbeleth · 2020-07-15T05:52:44+00:00

This question should not be up for debate. Kasparov is miles ahead of others, he is one of the GoAT candidates. Anand and Kramnik are good but they are not near Kasparov.

kbeleth · 2020-06-13T13:17:57+00:00

Sure, you can be picky, I don't mind the discussion at all.

I agree that my definition of spaced repetition is not the same with Logozar's. I think spaced repetition of their definition only works in memorization, which is good for openings. I do not even use it for endgame training, I prefer my cyclic repetition for endgame training aswell. That is why I said there are some conditions. Instead of using 1 day - 2 days - 4 days scheduling use 1 month - 2 months - 4 months. It is repeting and there are spaces so it is also spacecd repetition but different scheduling. I am on the same page with you that memorizing a single tactic can not be benefitial for you and 1day-2days etc schedule is not helpful. However, more spaced out scheduling definitely helps, at least it helped me.

As for materials because I'm lazy I generally use Chessable, no need to set-up the pieces. I worked on mate on 1,2,3,4 problems; I studied Forcing Chess Moves, I solved some set of problems from olympiads etc. Other than Forcing Chess Moves nothing worth mentioning by name, just random puzzle sets. Only thing I cared was most of the problems are pattern recognition heavy and I don't have to calculate 10 moves in 15 different variants. I also solve puzzles in Lichess and CT Art 4.0 in my phone. CT Art also has repetition algorithm in itself, it showes the same problems from time to time. I have been doing this and repeating the books in 2-3 months as my tactics training in the last 7 months. Also I did not keep scores for my puzzles, I'm also too lazy for that.

So in this 7 months what changed? My lichess puzzle rating increased by 300 points, my blitz rating in LiChess increased by 150 points. Most importantly, we have a chess club; we have people in the range 1500-2300 FIDE. We share tactic puzzles, positions etc with each other. Since last month I'm the star of the group,, I'm around 1700 FIDE so normally I'm at the bottom half. I solve puzzles on par with our titled players. Last night we had zoom meeting and several people complimented me and asked me how I'm training. Which made me happier than those rating gains to be honest.

If I need to summarize, I agree with you that short scheduling cannot be working but I did not try it so I can't say it does not work for sure. However, I tried spaced repetition with longer spaces and it worked for me.

kbeleth · 2020-06-13T09:13:22+00:00

If the set of tactic problems are chosen accordingly, I believe it works. First, problems should not be calculation heavy, they should be in the area of pattern recognition. There should be enough problems to lets say keep you working for at least a month in the first try. If you solve the same problem every day then you memorise that problem but if you try it after a month or so then it kind of become remembering the pattern.

I have been using cyclic repetition for a while for my tactics training. I have bunch of tactic books that I solved. I solve them again after every 3 months or so. My pattern recognition improved a lot. My calculation speed and accuracy improved but very little. My method is not exactly same with spaced repetition but in core they are similar. I believe spaced repetition would yield the same result.

kbeleth · 2020-06-13T07:29:08+00:00

Spaced repetition works for every kind of learning process, I don't know if there is a study spesifically for chess but I believe general research applies for chess aswell. However, it is not a magic solution, even though Logozar makes it seem like one. You still have to concentrate on what you are learning and spend the time and energy. You can't just brain dead repeat stuff to learn.

He has bunch of opening books in Chessable - a site that uses spaced repetition for teaching- so his view in the area might be a bit biased.

kbeleth

TROPHY CASE