chess.com Tactics Trainer - The Woodpecker Method

From the excellent book "Pump up your rating" by Axel Smith, Quality Chess 2013, Chapter 6 - The Woodpecker Method, p. 226: "For many months, I started every day with 45 minutes on chess.com, one of the Tactical Trainers that´s available on the net.

These programs comply with most of the requirements above: you have to choose a move, there is a clock with a limited time, you have to find all the moves to the end, your performance is measured with a rating, no exercise is impossible, and the webside doesn´t chat with you. ...

However, there is one big difference to the Woodpecker´s Method: the same exercises are not solved again".

I (chess.com user "Schoenbrunn") see this as a problem too. It should be possible to let chess.com select e.g. 100 exercises for me and i´m able to solve this 100 exercises again and again and again like a "Woodpecker" getting for this 100 exercises a "Woodpecker rating".

Pump up your rating is perhaps the best chess training book on the market and being chess.com the best tool for the Woodpecker Method on the net would be great for the chess.com-users and for the chess.com-company.

Best wishes

Sorry to dispel your myth about the "best chess training book" but the real problem is that the author, like his friends, didn't really improve of 400 points in a year. Check their statistics with the FIDE site, and you will realize that IM Smith just improved 35 points a year, over a period of 10 years.

The part of the book anyone strangely miss, is the endless hours with one of the best strategic GM, Ulf Andersson, who gave him and others endless hours of explanation, using his games. How many amateurs have a GM at Karpov level explaining his games? How much did they pay for Andersson?

And speaking of the "woodpecker" method, the guy mentioned as example to learn from, was making 1000 tactical positions a day (not 100, but if you go on chess tempo you will be able to select a set of tactical exercises like in the woodpecker method), and that gave him 100 elo points improvement. I don't think that is all the story, partly because at GM level the opening repertoire is very important. Secondly, because I don't know how many amateurs have the time to do 1000 tactic positions a day.

But if that was true, then what is the difference with De lamaza? It is the same identical idea. But strangely everyone attack De lamaza, but they worship this guy. It doesn't make sense.

The objective reality is that Mr. Smith, like his GMs colleagues, trained over an extended period of time, 10 years or more, played over an extended period of time, reviewed games, paid coaches like Andersson, read hundred of chess books, and then they achieved IM/GM status.

But the evidence he provides in the book is at the best anecdotal, not showing a method applicable to everyone which will sistematically improve 100 or more players over 1-2 years.

You will now have to wait and see the troll drones descend on you for saying that getting coached for 10 years is what got him his title...I have been harping about this in another thread, that you need "GM therapy" to get your chess head straight...so that you can learn to make good moves...

Anyways, putting aside the controversies ...I think what the CM was saying is what GM Rashid Ziatdinov recommends on his website, that you should practice tactics in cycles. He recommends to start small, less than hundred, and do them over and over, until they become automatic. Then increase the cycle, by increasing the set.

I think that as a training idea this has some merit, rather than just blindly plugging away at randsom tactics, hoping something will stick. The idea of rinse and repeat may prove to be more productive.

It will be good to see more refined training methods on chess.com. A future project maybe?

Dear longo2012,

Pump up your rating is a great book and it will win a lot of chess-book prizes (as first one the Chess Cafe book-of-the-year prize for 2013).

As you wrote Mr. Smith, starting from FIDE-Elo 2150, "just" improved 35 FIDE-Elo points every year over a period of 10 years and wrote simulantaneously his book... - that sounds impressive to me!

The big difference between "Rapid chess Improvement - a study plan for adult players" by Michael de la Maza, Everyman Chess 2002 and "Pump up your rating" is that De la Maza in his book only described tactical training but Smith has a lot more to offer e.g. "How to analyse your games", "How to study your openings", "How to study the endgame" etc.

Michael de la Maza wrote an important book (for "New in Chess" it is a "modern classic") but it is somewhat "one-dimensional". Smith described in his book a "system of methods to improve your chess".

Part of the Woodpecker Method is to: "Choose a number of tactical exercises, from 100-200 for the normal amateur, to 1000 for the serious professional..." - see "Pump up your rating", p. 225.

Why should chess.com try to become the best training-tool for the "Woodpecker Method"?

Because chess.com has already done 99% of the necessary work - selecting good exercises with correct solutions and a logical rating system.

Question to the chess.com staff: "Will chess.com become the best training-tool for the "Woodpecker Method"? 

Best wishes  

My way of studying tactics is that I just do the tactics here on chess.com as I am able to. This way my tactics rating is a true reflection of my tactical ability and I can see long term trends to see whether or not my tactics are improving and also how I do by each theme. I then buy tactics books to repeatedly go over the same problems (what you call the "Woodpecker Method."

I just had a look and saw an improvement of ca. 450 points in two years (which is the claim in the book, not 400 pts in one year) :

So let's see the real progress:

January 2003 - 2139

January 2004 -2182 Big improvement, which is normal for an adult studying all year long, since we don't know how many hours or books he studied. But 43 points are really good!

January 2005 - 2139 Well, Oh no what happened? Was he just lucky? He lost all the points!

January 2006 - 2093 Ops, he lost 46 points, maybe the magic training is not working, the guy is in free fall!

January 2007 - 2205, Here the magic training worked! 123 points gained. (But from 2139 are only 66, which is normal for an adult studying all year long)

January 2008 - 2458 And now the big leap, 253 points!!

January 2009 - 2391 Ops a big fall, so he was just lucky the year before, he lost 67 points!

January 2010 - 2423 WOW big improvement, he must have discovered the secret method! No, he is still down 35 points from the big leap!

January 2011 - 2451 Yes, big improvement! No he is still down 7 points. Wait, maybe in January 2008 was using Rybka? Who knows...

January 2012 - 2470 WOW, Oh yeah, this is what I'm talking about, using Rybka again. Improved of 19 points in 1 year!

January 2013 - 2485 Yeah 15 points a year, must be magical!

Now, let's stop joking, and let's make the real math.

In 2003 Smith was 2139

In 2014 is 2486

2486 - 2139 = 347

2014 - 2003 = 11

347 / 11 = 31.5 points a year, yeah he really discovered a magic training method. The Soviet School method is finally revealed!

I would've considered "pump up your rating" a serious book, if the author would have given some real data, which means:

1. The entire list of titles of books he read in 11 years

2. The names of all the coaches he had in 11 years, and how many hours a year he spent with them (and maybe also the amount of money he spent for them)

3. Who helped him with the openings, and how many hours he spent on them

4. The number of tactics, games, endgames he played each year

5. The number of hours he spent with studying partners

These are just few basic questions, which would reveal to every amateur the amount of commitment, and years someone must spend to master chess.

Then we should make a comparison with other players who reached GM status at the same time he did. And if they would come forward answering the same questions, then we would also discover what didn't work in Mr. Smith training.

He obviously worked a lot (there's nothing mystical in his book and he is actually quite honest). I find his quick progress extremely impressive.

But there is no "quick" in his progress. Since we don't know how many years he played before reaching 2100, and to reach 2400 in over 10 years doesn't seem quick either.

I would have been impressed if he would have reached 2700 in 10 years, with all the work he has done. Again, the questions which were not answered are more important, like: how many amateurs can afford Ulf Andersson as their coach, and for how many years Andersson was his coach, which exercises were given to him, and which games were explained to him. A lot of questions we will never know the answer, because the real "training" methods are not printed in books.

Yes i agree. His progress was impressive and his book is impressive!!

Regardless of what people think about the book, being able to select a set of problems in TT that you could go over repeatedly would be a very nice feature to have. I second the request.

I think Longo is partially right. There is no chess bible or book that can automatically boost your rating 400 points. If there was a book that could do that everyone would read it. Then when everyone would read it, it would make everyone better at chess (and everyone's rating would stay relatively the same). At the top level no one is going to gain 400 points every year. That is just impossible.

The rating claims of any book should be taken with a grain of salt. That doesn't mean the book itself cannot be useful, it just won't be as useful as the author claims.

Well, there's no rating claim, nor any promise in the book. Or maybe that's the way people interpret its title ?

The title is marketing, but the author never says, nor even implies : "apply my techniques and you will win 400 rating points". He just says : "this is a method that worked for me, here is what seems important in my eyes".

This may or may not interest the potential reader.

Unfortunately lies, and con men have short legs, and are caught over time.

Especially today in the Internet age, where data are easily available to everyone. Here the back cover and the lies (claims about the author raise in rating) which have been previously demonstrated for what they are, just LIES! But the chess field is full of snake oil salesmen!

Yeah, in 10 years he went from 2100 to 2400, but maybe the publisher cannot access the FIDE site.

Anyone want to buy a bridge in Brooklyn?

With 10,000 hours of "donated labor" it can be yours for the taking.

Free Shipping too, just 3 easy payments of $19.95, and a few strings attached.

At least IM Smith didn't appear in a Speedo bathing suit on the back cover of his book.

Indeed, he looks "pumped," and that matches up nicely with the League of Angels advertisements that currently appear on everyones' home page on Chess.com.

"Sex Sells," even when it comes to Chess, apparently.

So let's have fun with the Publisher's claim:

Axel Smith was 2093 in the year 2006.

But in the years from 2003 to 2006 he was 2100+

And now let's see the second claim: he is closing on the GM title.

Axel Smith is IM from 2008, yes, 6 years, and he is still closing on the GM title.

Now the next title by Axel Smith will be: How to become GM in 1 year :-)

And then in little print generally like the one made by insurances:

* unfortunately a spelling error on the cover replaced the numbers "25" with "1" and the "s" after "year" was erased. All the rest is correct.

There are a couple of pretty good programs out there for training tactics with spaced repetition.  Both Lucas Chess (comes with lots of tactics, especially Uwe Auerswald's collection) and YATT (comes with some unspecified grouping of 5500 tactics probems) use the spaced repetition training method.  I personally prefer Lucas Chess because of the variety of positions and flexibility of the training methods (and it's a beautiful program, graphically, if you want to customize it).

Of course, chesstempo.com also has the ability to use spaced reptetition to learn tactics built into the site for gold members.

Swedish GM Hans Tikkanen came up with the Woodpecker Method that's described in "Pimp Up Your Chess". The name comes from the Finnish for woodpecker... tikk tikk tikk.