Author: stuart taylor
Date: 04:21:22 07/12/02
Go up one level in this thread
On July 12, 2002 at 06:43:47, Omid David wrote: >On July 11, 2002 at 18:24:55, John Reynolds wrote: > >> >> >> It has been said that a player must play and beat Masters to become a >>Master. If that statement is true, can I become master strength by simply >>playing computers alone without any Human interaction? There is a player that I >>know, who was unrated and never played in any tournaments, all this guy did was >>play strong chess computers (standalone), anyway when this guy played in his >>first tournament he came out with a 2265 rating after 15 rated games!!. Maybe he >>had extrodinary talent, or perhaps playing against Programs can make one very >>strong? > >As someone who has played competitive chess for 15 years, and is a >computer-chess programmer for a few years I can only advise you "Forget about >computers!". The best way to improve your chess skills is the classical way of >reading chess books, and participating in tournaments (not online!). Computers >can also help in improving your tactical skill, but they won't have any >contribution in improving your positional skill. To improve your positional >understanding skills, you'd better read commented games played by Botvinik, >Smyslov, Capablanca, etc. And don't jump into computer analysis of Kasparov's >games! I might disagree. Why? Because when you go in for great attacking play against a computer program, with me that usaually means manuevering around to get an attack around the King area, and then you might start to realize that the computer might be having an attack ready on the opposite wing effectively neutralizing (in not worse) any benefit from any king side attack. Even if your building up on the K-side would have given you a legitimate attack, which might also be very unusual, nevertheless, from the Q-side or somewhere else you might be anihalated yourself, and quite quickly too. Eventually, you get used to thinking about both sides of the board, and THAT you learn better from playing against a computer, than from books, wher you don't get experience. NOW let me reccomend an idea of an excellent program which is not overly strong but will give you this feedback and experience. And I'm not negating countless other programs, but you might be happy to find that even the simple "Chess genius" for Palm might serve this purpose amply well! Even 1 second per move at 33 Mhz. might be enough. but certainly you can get it stronger by giving it 5 seconds per move, or even 15. ou shouldn't need much more than that (but YOU should take longer for YOUR moves).
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