Author: Miguel A. Ballicora
Date: 13:28:37 02/04/02
Go up one level in this thread
On February 04, 2002 at 16:08:19, Uri Blass wrote: >On February 04, 2002 at 15:37:38, David Rasmussen wrote: > >>On February 04, 2002 at 11:40:07, Miguel A. Ballicora wrote: >> >>>On February 04, 2002 at 10:38:04, David Rasmussen wrote: >>> >>>> >>>>Thanks for the link. Great article! I too am a weak chess player, and I have >>>>also recently had an insight about focusing on tactics instead of positional >>>>knowledge. I have 40 chess books or so, and of course some of them are about >>> >>>I found this kind of things too dogmatic. >>>The most important part of learning is interest and motivation. If you despise >>>going through thousands of tactical exercises with nothing in between for >>>a year most probably your are going to quit after two weeks. This is like >>>the magic diets where you have to juggle your day around the diet. >>>As always, improvement is an individual effort and depends very much on the >>>individual. That's where the importance of the teacher comes, NOT TO EXPLAIN >>>WHY Ba4 is better than Bxc6 in the Ruy Lopez. >>>Tactics will be a key for a player, but might not be for another. There >>>hundreds of details that are important and some of them are not even related >>>to chess (like attention etc.). In general, tactics are very important >>>particularly at that level, but it is not wise to separate it from everything >>>else. >>>Tactical exercises are good, but it is never good to be 100% of the training. >>> >>>Ah! do not forget to play real OTB chess, but not too much. 60-80 slow paced >>>(anything that last more than 3 hours) games a year, select some and analyze >>>them to death WITHOUT A COMPUTER, show it to a stronger player or a friend. >>>Share analysis... Then, use your computer. Keep a notebook with everything... >>> >>>Regards, >>>Miguel >>> >> >>I know what you mean, and I generally agree. I too find the article dogmatic, >>but that doesn't matter, IMO. Sometimes that's needed to fight another (older) >>dogma. The articles is even wrong at some points: It is not necesarily better to >>be able to look 5 moves with "no positional knowledge (not even material?)", >>than to look 4 moves with Grandmaster level positional knowledge. In chess >>programming terms: There are a lot of evaluation terms that makes up for search >>depth: If you have a passed pawn on the 6th rank supported by your king in an >>endgame, with positional knowledge, you will know with a 0-ply search that this >>is strong, whereas it takes a 3-ply search with "no knowledge" to see this. > > >I agree that it is not exactly true that 5 plies is always better than 4 plies >but 5 plies with understanding of only material and pieces square table may be >practically better than 4 plies of one of most programs. No program has an eval of "GM level positional knowledge" so the comparison is not good. Better experiment would be a program with no knowledge reaching 5 plies against a GM in a bullet game with an increment equal to physically make a move. Almost without thinking. Miguel > >I believe that for programs 5 plies with relatively simple evaluation can be >better than 4 plies with the best evaluation function. > >The fact that for evaluating passed pawns and some other things it may be wrong >does not prove that for the full game 5 plies is not better than 4 plies. > >I believe that the main improvement at the low level can be achieved by tactics. >knowing positional things,opening theory and endgames can be important for >relatively good players but not for the rating of weak players. > >If I decide that improving as fast as possible is important for me then I think >that the best plan is to use most of the training time for tactics but I will >also use some time to learn positional things but it is only because I am >relatively good player. > >I believe that only masters should use most of their time for positional >things,opening theory,endgames and I also suspect that it is not the case for >all the masters but only for masters that are relatively good in tactics. > >Uri
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