Outcome of de la Maza's Seven Circles Program

Yes, or you could look for decisive games under 15 moves on Chessbase - over 750 last year (though plenty are recording errors).

Plenty of games like this.

Username "Wangtastic" is the only player I've ever seen advocating MDLM that has a rating of over about 1800.

t-ram87 wrote:  

I believe studying tactics is way easier than strategy. You are the first people i met thinking understanding strategy is easier.

 Seeing a strategy concept in your position, like the good knight versus the bad bishop is not hard to understand but hard to win. Without the proper technique you will lose or draw in won a position; happen all the time. You first must see it in your mind and make the proper plan like the good knight versus the bad bishop, there is  another concept even more difficult the opposite color bishop in the middle game,if have the right opposite color bishop it is like having an extra piece and the player who understand this will win. Strategy is easy to understand but without the proper technique hard to win a won position. Most players below expert make incorrect plans not pertainning to the pawn structure or the demands of the position. I should define it better, it is easy to understand a bad bishop versus a good knight but hard to win.  To calculate and find a win in a won position that is difficult and most player lack tactical skill.

Uhohospagehettio wrote:

Don't write something like t-ram wrote: and copy paste something i didnt write.

If you think positional understanding is easy as recognizing bad bishop vs good knight (i believe this is not even close) then tactics is easy as forks, pins, captures.

SilentKnight wrote:

@T-ram87: let me put in another way, using your method where are you in chess strength, what is your otb rating? If method doesn't bring positive results maybe not working. For me it took me three years to become expert and mine first expert rating was 2019 uscf and mine highest was 2110 uscf. I am well rounded player but I know playing experts and masters you better be good at tactics and the endgame.

As much as I respect positional strategies, whom would I rather play?

A soon-to-be improving but currentlyl rated 1000 player who just spend 3 months studying Silman's Reassess your Chess the entire time?

Or that same player who just spent 3 months doing De La Maza?

The answer would be different if instead of a 1000 rated player, we took a 1500 rated player or 2000 rated player. I think the weaker the player though, the better results you'll see with the tactics alone.

I also think tactics vs positional concepts is kind of bogus. If you study tons of tactics, you WILL pick up a lot of positional concepts like bad Bs and good Ns and open files etc., whereas if you study tons of positional games, you HAVE to pick up tactics on the way, since many of the incorrect moves are refuted solely on tactical shots, not positional concepts. 

hhnngg1 wrote:

I also think tactics vs positional concepts is kind of bogus. If you study tons of tactics, you WILL pick up a lot of positional concepts like bad Bs and good Ns and open files etc., whereas if you study tons of positional games, you HAVE to pick up tactics on the way, since many of the incorrect moves are refuted solely on tactical shots, not positional concepts.   

Well stated! Tactics does teach how to play chess, you have to place your pieces aggressively and active, do enough tactical problem you will noticed this. 

Study only Silman's Reassess Your Chess alone will not make you a better player; combine your studies with tactics and Silman "Reassess Your Chess" and your rating will climb higher. But if you don't have time tactics alone will make you a better player not strategy. 

I don't know anyone under 1800 who's actually bothered to do it.

Plenty have and ended up on 1500. You're the outlier. 

Also people don't generally like to go around bragging about putting dozens or hundreds of hours into something and failing to get results from it. Meanwhile you didn't even close to do the whole MDLM regime. 

If anything it's actually quite fascinating that people can spend that amount of time on chess with almost no improvement at all except a short term spike in blitz rating. That's why it's like blitz chess, there's no real accumulation of knowledge and training for what you must look for, only a "mentally try all moves" policy. It's like a scientist going around trying all experiments instead of only the smart ones, the house of cards will eventually collapse. 

I did the 7 circles, I simply speeded them up.  I'm pretty sure most people can manage more than 60 puzzles a week too...

The vast majority of chess players spend thousands, if not tens of thousands of hours without any significant improvement.  This is normal, and it's necessary to continue flogging chess books and "lessons".  

Wow, you are either just trying to annoy or are an actual deranged person. There is no vast conspiracy.

Every modern player who is a grandmaster or even IM has had a good trainer and read chess theory and as you put in quotation marks "lessons".  

You are the only person out of a huge amount of people who could get that rating in blitz, much better than MDLM himself. Try putting increments on your games however to avoid cheap wins on time.  

Show me one, who spent tens of thousands of time on normal ways of chess training with no significant improvement. Its very very much time, in my 22 years long chess career total time i invested in studying chess is probably around 700 hours which includes puzzle solving. I dont count half awake bullet games, and drunk blitz games of course since they only contribute negatively. Still i have less than 100 otb games with increase of 16-17 nr/elo rating every 10 game packet. In theory which tells if i would join and play every tournament i could i would gain 70-80 elo every year without any training. (That kind of playing is also counts training i know)

Hi!  I'm 2100 FIDE.  You?  

Anyone can say they are this, you should have some evidence that you are this if you're going to use it as part of your argument. We can't even see your blitz games except two 3-minute games.  

yeah I think some people exaggerate how much time they actually spend on chess study. I remember one day deciding to spend 2.5 or 3 hours looking at my Slav book and wow, those 2.5 hours were some of the slowest 2.5 hours of my life. Also so many people who buy tons of chess books, with full intentions of reading them, I think a lot of people like more the idea of chess than the actual chess itself, and I admit I am probably one of those. Posting around here and playing blitz games gets lumped into time spent on chess as well, not study unless you're doing proper analysis. So easy to say "thousands of hours" when that's often a load of hokum.

There are also other gimmicks than MDLM to waste many hours of your life with, for example some people get the idea that the secret is actually to memorize games off by heart, even without really thinking of the position. Others spend too long memorizing openings verbatum. Others swear they will get drastic improvements by playing blindfold. Others "study" by looking at what the computer says about every move (which could potentially do some good occasionally).       

Is a driver's license okay for you?  Should I post it here?  Get a grip.  

Stop with the smileys please. When you post a smiley like that you are admitting that you don't want to argue in a straightforward way, but you want to try and annoy or troll others. Just stop. Act like an adult. 

You have to understand people are skeptical of this person going around making unusual and controversial claims. People have posted evidence of FIDE ratings here before.  

Yes, but I think these were the results of a single circle, if I remember correctly, and those who gained more than 100 in 100 days would have gained over 400 points in a little more than a year.