I will take something from the fitness world.
Everything works and nothing works forever.
How to become a top-notch chess player
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Totall possible games without any deletion of moves = 10^123 moves. Took me forever to write the tree. LOL.
I just have one question... Why? Is this just a mental exercise? Or is there some real benefit to understanding the game of chess... I would like to think that there are more effective alternatives to what seems like a Pavlov's dogs approach to chess. Just my thought.
dsarkar wrote:
This posting is for beginners who yet have no insight into the good and bad moves, and are not well-versed in pins, forks, discovered attacks, skewers, etc. - not for advanced players who have already developed a sense of finding the right moves in the game. Players who can by intuition detect traps, winning combinations do not need this - but that happens after several years of playing.
There are quite a few exceptions, such as new talents. I've been playing seriously for all of one year, starting with learning the rules, and can detect traps and see winning combinations. I think a more realistic timeframe there is several months, not Several Years.
I do, however, believe that this is a good learning guide for beginners. I'm sure it works very well, teaching new players how to calculate lines in advance. Thank you for taking the time to post this, I may use it for a class sometime...
I think dsarkar's being a little misunderstood.
It seems his method is more of a way for beginners to organize their thoughts, than to learn to master this game. If so, I think it'll prove to be a useful tool.
Before I nake a move - OTB, correspondence, live online, whatever - I ask myself, "What are my options and what are the consequences (good or bad)?" Now, you can't accurately answer these questions without some tactical know-how and a general understanding of why a position is good or bad, but a beginner might find it helpful to actually write things down until they can properly visualize. This might free some needed brain cells to concentrate on tactics and strategy.
If a newbie were to combine this method with an opening repertoire and a good deal of tactics practice and endgame study, I could see how it would help.
Hey i am just a beginner and i dont get most of it!!
dsarkar wrote:
You do not get my point - you do not check EVERY possible line like a computer, but the probable lines only - that cuts it down a bit...
No, because as you repeat all the time, this is for BEGINNERS, who DON'T KNOW YET what the probable / good moves are.
You make a method for beginners who can't recognize good moves, that can only work even a tiny bit if you only look at good moves.
dsarkar wrote:
Scarblac, what you say is true. Players above beginners level do not need it, and beginner's cannot recognize good/bad moves. But they have to start somewhere - just guessing at moves won't make them advance. If they have a mnetor, coach, good books, well and good. If not, this is the next best thing.
No, having to look at all moves is the worst thing. It takes impossibly long - it cannot be done!
I think you should say, write down all the moves that look good to you (you can give them some guidelines for this, e.g. try to control the center, keep your king safe, attack his), plus definitely all checks, captures and 1-move threats.
You say you want them to start on something that is similar to what the GMs do - well they don't start considering all moves and then leave out the unimportant ones, they look at what the important ones are. The other way around.
dsarkar wrote: How does what you say accounts for the brilliancies - do they crop up if GMs do not scan every possible 1st move, even unlikely moves?
Yes. They don't start checking every possible move to see if perhaps happens to be a brilliancy, that takes too long.
Instead, they see that they can mate the king if only they could remove piece X (for instance), then they search for ways to do that. OR, the brilliancy has a standard pattern (like most), they recognize the pattern and look at the move to see if the pattern works.
It's the difference between just trying everything, and reasoning to work out / recognizing which things you need to look at.
This thread is about becoming a "top-notch" chess player. Whats the definition of "top-notch" ?
i want my wasted brain cell back
To expand it a bit on your concept dsarker...
Every game has a 'notes' section as well as the ability to visually analyze your options via the 'Analyze' button (located right below the messages/moves/details/notes section.
I would definitely recommend these tools to someone just starting out in chess. They could jot down the options they like in the notes section, then play with them a bit in the Analyzer.
dsarkar wrote:
RazaAdeel
what you say is right - if we calculate ALL variations without deleting some...
at each ply we have to delete variations which WE think not good (we may be wrong)... This is a way to train serious beginners to think along the lines of a future GM - I still this apply this laborious process in highly complicated positions with success...
for serious people only...
if we added a spoon of water for every people who cannot give positive suggestions only negative ones, we would have a pond...
sorry I didn't read it to carefully..
k, i have to give my 2 cents into this discussion, soz to burst ur bubble but your guide sucks,fails, a disgrace, complete failiure and soz if i hurt ur feelings, but ya, lets be honest this guide fails, and worst of all you lie to the begginger by promising if they do this they will become a "top notch player"
Jul 19, 2009
0
#36
arashi_star wrote:
k, i have to give my 2 cents into this discussion, 1s things first your ratings a fricken lie, i have to say this ... you probably fail OTB and you only play 1 game at a fricken time on correspondence, also i bet you take 10 minutes a move, and then 5 minutes a move once you start getting up 6+ points, but come on.. lets do the math... its not "chess" playing 1 game at a time thinking 15 minutes a move going through all the variations, and just winning becuase you have unlimited time while ur opponent wants the actual "chess experience" by making a move 1-5 minutes a move in correspondence. and on top of all that garbage, you even admitted to using "databases" and opening books for your correspondense game, and on top of that i think you re check the book move before you even make it, so otbe honestly you cant remember all 20 variations 35 moves+ of the queen's gambit slav variation.. so ya your only a good "chess" player on correspondence becuase you totally use i have to say, 20 times more times a move than ur opponent plus using opening books/database......
cmon, you have to admit, thats just pathetic and worst of all you want to get begginers to be your minions following that pathetic system sadly you call "chess"
also, i would restate a ton more stuff bout ur crapy system to make "top notch players" but by the looks of it, most of the complete flaws to this system have already been mentioned, and just by reading this disgrace of a way to make players "top notch" i feel like writing a guide that would actually help a begginger..
soz to burst ur bubble but your guide sucks,fails, a disgrace, complete failiure
and soz if i hurt ur feelings, but ya, lets be honest this guide fails
Should someone sub1100 be criticizing how someone elses rating(no mater how they got it)
This method brings in a LOT of work to eliminate the most obvious blunders and perhaps to find some of the material winning short-term tactical shots, but does little to improve players playing strength - the ability to understand different concepts of chess and forsee positional weaknesses and key ideas for each position. He can list up all possible moves but his evaluation of them will still be lacking.
I would be suprised if it had any noticable effect in ones game.
Ability to "match a master" seems like an exaggeration.
dsarkar wrote:
BFM and user_nick,
you are both right - a beginner cannot overnight become a standard player without following a learning curve. I just present a method - it may not be the best one - where a beginner can do something without proper guidance and mentoring with LOTS of hard work - in correspondence chess only. It also helps in cultivating a thinking process (actually the proper thinking process is degenerated here into notepad, etc. like providing a man who cannot walk with a crutch - he cannot run a marathon with his crutches). Ultimately the process will have to be made mental (aka Kotov's analysis), otherwise doomed to failure.
I am a self-made chess player, who learnt only from books, and became runners-up in my first college tournament by trying to do a similar process mentally (fortunately there was linient time-limit, and I never possessed a blazing-fast brain). That is why at this age (with a slow brain) I can play only online, not OTB any more...
You seem to always defend your system no matter what. To ask someone to actually try this (meaning consider every move) would be insane even in correspondence chess. You tell the beginner to look at every single move and then you say you can cut back on what needs to be looked at eventually and you even admit that the beginner can't do this. But why then should he be considering every move not knowing how good one is? Now it's not easy to teach any beginner at chess but I think the key is simply to teach them tactics and all that good stuff like strategy and that's how they consider their moves but it's too tedious to make them look at every move and very gradually cut back on it. What's so special about that? I think everybody as they learn knows which moves to most consider; the ones that, after forming a plan (which is also learned from books) fit the needs of the position. In combinations, the ones that take advantage of a tactical theme like for example if you see you can take a pawn with your queen but then your opponent has possible discovered attacks on it attacking another piece, you only have to calculate those that discover the queen since that is the only way to punish the move. Then the player who took the pawn must find a way for the queen to do something very threatening like attack a piece or threaten mate etc. That's how you learn chess. It's not like using this method alone will help you cut back on moves since you have to read books to understand why some moves are bad and others are good so it's a waste of time to start from the beginning doing what a computer does but thousands of times slower. You say they can just analyze 1 or 2 ply, but first of all it will still take a long time if you're analyzing (blindly) everything and second it's necessary to look quite a bit deeper than that in almost all tactical situations! So I don't see what the point is in having a huge amount of moves to slowly cut back on than to not consider all those moves in the first place. Instead just work the other way around and base all your considerations on what move is good for your plan and don't consider anything else at all. That requires study, but I don't think there is any other way to become a serious player.
Well I never got a chess tutor but I just bought chess books on all stages of the game. Of course the best thing to do is research the best books on certain things (like many of silman's books were very helpful for me with strategy) so that you don't throw your money away, but like I said you need to do these things to get skills. I don't see how this method would help beginners anyways since listing tons of moves and calculating all of them is almost impossible and even if they did that still wouldn't help them out if they don't understand chess. They learn to cut down the moves from study of course, and unfortunately that's by far the best way to get better. I mean that's just the truth. Your dad probably won't be able to teach you much besisdes how to play unless he happens to be a strong player.
user_nick wrote:
Someone can start with this method and later when they learn new principles they can start eliminating "wrong moves".
For example, once you know that you should try to control center, 1. a3 will be out of question.
Telling a complete newcomer that controlling the center is good and going over opening principles and the most basic tactics will make him go from 400 (let's say this is the starting point) to like 700 in maybe an hour. Sure, he could have made this jump the hard way, but that would be painful and 700 is still very low. And that's just for finding the first move, and someone who played chess could just tell you "e4 and d4 are the best because they control the center". Wouldn't it be better to go by the basic principles than to look at every possibility and very slowly eliminate? And that's for the easiest jump. How is the beginner going to get to 1400 (out of beginner) doing that if it took him so long to get to 700?
You do not get my point - you do not check EVERY possible line like a computer, but the probable lines only - that cuts it down a bit...
So then basically you are writing down what every player(even beginner) already does. Look at what I can do and then what my opponent can respond. I don't think that is anything revolutionary or that will improve people all that much(I am not a beginner so it would not be inappropriate for me to try it anyway). Could you improve that way. Sure, but no more(and probably less) than learning some tactical patterns such as pins, forks, skewers, removal of the guard etc and positional ideas such as weak squares open files etc.