The Shape of the Curve (and Training Accountability for the Week)
I've been thinking a lot lately about what my chess learning curve will look like as I try to progress to a Class-A (1800 USCF) level rating.
I've only been at it seriously for seven months, so this is all speculation. It's possible that it could be a slow, steady climb over the next few years. But I rather suspect it will more likely turn out to be a flat line—or at least a relatively flat line—for several months (or even years) before suddenly spiking upward at some unpredictable point.
This "flatline then spike" is the experience I had when learning French. I visited France for the first time after eight years of classroom study. Listening proficiency is the toughest of the four skills to develop. When I arrived for my academic year abroad, I could understand the gist of everything, but could not make out every single word. If someone asked me a question, I'd miss several words, but I still understood overall what they were asking and could answer appropriately. This continued for about three months, until one morning, as I was listening to the radio news, I suddenly realized I understood every single word the newsman said, not just the gist. The evening before, I hadn't—I'd still been in gist mode. Literally overnight, it was as if someone flipped a switch and my brain lit up like a Christmas tree.
I'm no neuroscientist, but if I had to hazard a very uneducated guess, I would suspect that all sorts of new neural connections were getting made as I went along soaking up language input. But I imagine they were all getting made in isolation from each other, and that the isolation of the connections made any progress virtually undetectable. My hunch is that eventually one last connection was made that tied all the other connections together, and in that instant, my listening proficiency spiked upward, like hooking up a bunch of processors to work together instead of independently. I can't say if my explanation is right. But what is accurate is the observable fact of my sudden, unexpected "burst" of listening proficiency.
I would not be surprised if the same thing happens in the coming years with my chess skills. Taking lessons with my coach and analyzing my games, I'm picking up tons of new ideas, new questions to ask myself while contemplating a position and planning a move. But my application is often still haphazard and inconsistent, and it may simply be that those ideas are all bouncing around independently in my head, waiting to eventually coalesce into a coherent whole, that will suddenly send my chess into that same kind of spike. Who can say? I think this idea is not far fetched, though. In fact I was inspired to write about this because I just read something similar in Viswanathan Anand's book Mind Master:
"At the Tata Steel Grandmaster Tournament in Calcutta in 1986, I missed my first Grandmaster norm by half a point, and at the Lloyd's Bank Masters Open held later that year in London, it eluded me again by half a point. I [...] scored 7.5 points out of a possible 11 at the Chess Olympiad that year in Dubai, but a norm continued to be out of reach. [...] Arbiter Steward Reuben had in an earlier conversation in London told me that it was possible that I would keep missing the norms for months and then suddenly turn into a Grandmaster almost effortlessly. I had listened to him skeptically then, but that's exactly how it happened." (p. 32)
Granted, Anand was working on a whole other level. And I'm certainly not him. But still, it's very possible that, in learning chess, the shape of one's curve might often be a long flat-line with a spike.
As always, here is my training time distribution for the week. The bulk of my time was spent on analyzing my games from the last (and disastrous) North Market Tournament. I did play a fair amount of online blitz, but since I'm not counting that as training time anymore, it does not appear in these figures.
