Prelude: Focus on the Tactics
I blogged Chess Vortex for over a week pretty intensely and completely ran myself down, getting far too little sleep for my own good. I did learn a lot from the experience and gleaned excellent comments from fellow tacticians. However, I spent about five days traveling and experienced a mental crash of sorts, manifesting itself most noticeably on 11/6/07 as a 42p/5f day (89.36%). It has taken me a few days to get back on track. I have focused on sleep primarily and on re-training my thought processes for careful problem solving. Tonight I reaped the rewards--after over 100 sessions training for accuracy and almost 15,000 problems, I finally had a perfect 100 problem session:
100p
100% @ 1394 ± 104 ; 1371
Of course I hemorrhaged a few points at the end of the session, but the last 50 problems of any session are always more difficult than the first 50, mostly because of fatigue. Moreover, tonight I was dropping points at the expense of perfection because I felt like I could get that 100p/0f.
So what's the moral of this story? Focus on solving chess problems first! Killing one's self blogging does not get chess problems solved correctly, so my new resolution is to blog only when it will not tire me for chess problem solving.
More Fun with Binomials
Because of my perfect session, I'm going to have a little fun using VassarStats to get a rough idea of what tonight's performance means in terms of my accuracy as a 1394 ± 104 Tactician:
| If I am a... | Probability of 100 Correct |
| 99.5% Tactician | 0.606 |
| 99% Tactician | 0.366 |
| 98% Tactician | 0.133 |
| 96% Tactician | 0.017 |
So this table means that there is over a 98% chance that I am at least a 96% Tactician for problems rated 1394 ± 104. I guess I can live with that.
Conclusion
Given that my focus on sleep has helped my tactical vision, it should come as no surprise that I saw a lot deeper into my problems today than I usually do. This was an intensely rewarding experience and, in my opinion, is reason enough to focus exclusively on accuracy. A lot of my point loss tonight actually came from my looking at alternative lines. Mostly, I saw the main line immediately, which is not entirely remarkable given that my problem set tonight was rated less than 1400 on average. However, most of the pleasure was in the variations--and tonight the problem of the day has its beauty buried in the notes:
Here's the solution and why I like it (start selecting text following the colon): 2...Bxg2. Now 3.Kxg2? leads to a problem-like mating net that can be difficult to see: 3...Qh2+ 4. Kf3 Qh3++.
4 comments:
Nice Problem of the day. I unfortunately missed two problems the other day. The ones I miss are almost always defensive, "choose the lesser evil of multiple options" problems, where the difference between the best and the second best lines are fairly small. From the point of view of training, however, I like these problem best since they teach mental strength -- keep looking, a better line may be hidden. This is a very important point, never to "acquiesce" in your games. If it looks like your opponent has you, spend some extra time, because if he really does, it doesn't matter anyway and you'll get a lost game, but if you keep searching really hard, maybe you'll find a way out.
Just when you think you've "seen it all" in terms of the really hard / ambiguous problems, another one always seems to pop up right when you're close to the next %age accuracy jump :).
This is true. The more you go for accuracy, the more the subtleties become important. Its rough when you spend 30 s counting pawns in your head to find out that the "best" line is +2.5 and the other is +1.75.
Also, for the problem of the day, I just noticed that the Knight can mate at e4.
Maybe there are two solutions?
2...Bxg2.
3.Kxg2? Qh2+
4. Kf3 Nd4++
Shouldn't that be 4...Ne5#
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