Temposchlucker: Slow down

 What have I learned from the past few posts and their comments?

There is little competition on the way to chess improvement. If guys even in 60 years don’t absorb the patterns that belong to the removal of the guard, this means that everybody who is plateauing will not overtake you anytime soon. And even the slightest progress will set you free from the crowd.

Only youngsters will be making progress faster than you. But as soon as they hit the wall, you will be catching up, no matter how slow. Nobody so far has found the holy grail of making progress after plateauing. When the competitors are plateauing too, there is no man overboard.

How many subjects like removal of the guard are there to be mastered in the area of tactics? Not so much. Somewhere between 30 and 100, I suppose. Since even grandmasters make errors in this area, I think it is save to say that nobody masters them all perfectly. The fact that 100 blitz games by GM John Nunn against a 2300 player resulted in a 88-12 score, mainly based on LPDO, shows how many progress you can make by just absorbing the essentials well.

Hence you can take your time and master them one by one. So what’s the method to absorb those skills?

Fist a bit of good advice.

• Slow down! There are only 30-100 subjects to be mastered, and nobody so far has found the holy grail to convert knowledge into skill at will. Everybody who is plateauing wastes his time with woodpecker-like methods and opening study by memorization of variations.
• Avoid complexity. You must master the simple subjects first. You will know when you are ready for more complex stuff. Nobody absorbs a subject by accident once they plateau.
• Fiddle around. The devil is in the details.
• Be especially aware of the additional punches. They make a combination work.
• Be aware of the additional punches of your opponent. They make a combination NOT work.
• Be especially aware of the duplo effect. Hitting two birds with one stone. That doesn’t only work for tactics, but for every stage of the game. Think of the Reti manoeuvre, for instance.

Ok, where do we start?

It starts with the discovery of the hidden cues. They are not really hidden, they are actually clearly visible. We just don’t look at them for some reason. The cues are surrounded by knowledge. Take for instance the removal of the guard.

What is the main principle?

There is a target that you attack. And the target is defended by a guard. When you get rid of the guard, it leaves the target undefended, so you can pick it up.

There is a whole host of actions you can undertake in order to get rid of the guard.

So there is a conceptualisation of the principle, which makes it suitable for a whole lot of similar positions, the transfer from one position to another, so to speak, and there are a bunch of methods related to it. Together this is a bundle of knowledge.

All these particles of knowledge have there own patterns.These patterns must be absorbed.

These patterns are the hidden cues. As long as they stay hidden, you have not absorbed them.

Be especially aware for calculation and reconstruction. That is a way for system 2 to hide the fact that you don’t master the skill! You must SEE it.