I think your right, I just stepped up my membership after being a free member for a long time, and i have found i've learned so much more, faster, from the videos than i do any of the mulitiple books ive read. i think it has something to do with seeing it as it is said. The instructor picking up a piece and waving it around, on the 2d board as they are talking keeps my focus much better than reading cordinates and having to imagine them played out by staring at static pictures.
Having played on and off for almost 25years and never really getting any better, and seeing other players, some of them i taught, take to the game like a duck to water, i personally think the left brained, (non creative bunch) have an easier time disassembling and reassembling positions and tactics, while im imagining "griffins" (knights that could fly) or something else super creative but of no use, my opponent has already played out all the pertinent variations in his head.
I do know from experience effort has to be focused to be productive so i think you are definetely on the right track
So, I had a sort of Chess epiphany a couple days ago. I started off playing pretty “decent” for a beginner in my opinion, so rather than playing all the time, I thought I would begin to analyze games from masters to increase my level of understanding. My mentor also suggested this (actually, he was probably the first to get me motivated to do so).
However, before that, I started watching videos on strategy, tactics, positional understanding, and pawn movements/rules. I had this sort of epiphany. All of a sudden some of the fundamental concepts of Chess seemed to clarify in my mind. I just understood and saw things I never noticed before. It’s a weird feeling , and people who have these powerful moments of clarity of thought and understanding know what its like. It’s an amazing feeling, like a great secret has been revealed to you.
Anyway, I went back to look at my games and I began "seeing" the errors I was making. They just seemed to pop up to me as being blatantly wrong. I got pretty excited, so I decided to play more experienced players at the ca. 1300 level. While I am still making mistakes, it seems to me that I have this new "intuitive" sense of what’s right and what’s wrong in a move or position. For example, if I can't see a move to make on the board, I almost always have an intuitive feeling of what is wrong and what’s right even though I may not KNOW why. I always go with my instinct in those cases and usually I end up OK. I think this is because I obviously have not even come close to fully developed my understanding of the board, but I at least have an innate feeling.
Anyway, mentally, I feel like I stepped up a level in my understanding. Being an Organic Chemist, I have a powerful ability to identify 3-D patterns, to mentally disassemble complex molecular compounds going backwards (retrosynthetic analysis is what we call it) in order to find the correct sequence of reactions going in the forward direction. For this reason, many consider synthesis to be an art in its creativity. Talk to any theoretical physicist and they will tell you the same of mathematics. This is how we develop and synthesize pharmaceutical (and in my case anti-cancer) drugs.
While I do not agree that mathematics and chess coincide strongly, other than the overt mathematics, I do believe that the reason why people who are better at math, per say, are usually better at chess has nothing to do with the capacity to do calculation. Rather, these people have either:
A. An “innate ability for mathematics” = innate ability of pattern recognition, and the requisite creativity necessary to solve complex problems from multiple angles at once.
B. People can learn this ability through continuous practice and hard work, although it may be an uphill struggle for some time. This is the reason why I absolutely disagree with the notion that people who excel at chess also do so in mathematics, and vice versa. People may be good at numbers, but may lack creativity. So, fundamentally, it may be an issue of creativity. I wonder how many people who play chess consider themselves to be creative, whether being artists, musicians, etc…
So, I originally though playing was the best way to learn. I have now changed my opinion somewhat that: in the initial stages of learning, playing is the most important. Then, the study of master’s games in order to understand theory should be next perhaps followed up with diving into the study of books. Just a thought.
Mike