@JFK-Ramsey
In a post several weeks ago, a player who also teaches on psychology and learned behavior and I were discussing the fact that his rating began to plummet once he began assimilating new or continued input in terms of concepts gained through both books and tools such as TT. He was able to remember that this concept of his rating plummeting was due to fitting the newer ideas into his already pre-existing concepts and was part of the learning curve. Later, he also found that after he had synthesized these new concepts into his play, it paid off huge, allowing him to increase in his ratings considerably.
Now I would venture to say that perhaps this may be hapening with you as it was for us to some other degree (he dropped over 300 points through his games while mine was 90) but just accept that this is a part of the learning curve and soon the concepts that you are consciously understanding now will become more ingrained into your subconscious and then your rating should climb, and even possibly, exceed beyond where you currently are.
As for disabling the rating and time controls, if it helps you to get past the stress of "gotta find the move, gotta find the move" thinking, that might be great in a sense. However, if you are a tournament player and get into similar situations, I would hope you would not expect the TD to disable the ratings system and time controls simply because the "gotta" thinking creeps in.
Dvoretsky used to set up exercises on endgames where as player went through 4 exercises with a total of 20 minutes on the clock. If the student got one right, he moved to the next while the time was still going with the aim of completing all 4 exercises in the 20 minute mark. If he got it worng, the student would have to deduct as much as 8 min from his clock for the next exercises and so on until the ideas became second nature. Once this was accomplished, the timer would drop to say 10 minutes for the same 4 positions and the pattern would stay the same: get it right, move on; get it wrong, deduct and move on. His findings were that while there was a decline at first, working under the gun forced the students to calculate accurately at faster and faster rates until the concepts were largely intuitive.
The result, a book and learning system that has been called the best manual on chess endgames ever written and also one of the most challenging to digest. The results however speak for themselves.
Hopefully my manifesto helps you to develop some good habits to absorbing, understanding and executing material and i look forward to seeing some games with you mopping up your opponents and making them want to play Zynga Slots.
Best of luck.
Over the last week, I've made blunders at a rate higher than usual. In trying to analyze my losses, more times than not, the blunders came from making a "quick" move. Since this doesn't make sense when playing turn-based chess (with 2 and 3 days for moves), I think my rashness might be traced to using the Tactical Trainer quite heavily lately. In trying to "beat the clock" I often make a move before making a blunder check or looking for a better/best move. This seems to have carried over to my actual games.
My solution is to continue using the TT but with the rating and timing turned off. I figure I will still get my training in tactics and, just as important, practice my actual game processes. Finding tactics "quickly" is probably good for OTB games but since I play exclusively turn-based, I think I'm doing the right thing.
Anyone?