Time for Training
Major school examinations are just around the corner and tournaments have to give way for the time being. For those who have lost touch with schooling activities, we are having our Primary Standard 6 UPSR exam now and Secondary Form 3 PMR will follow while SPM and STPM will start in a month’s time.
What should a chess player do during this period if no travel to tournaments in foreign countries is possible?
I am not a big fan of online blitz games so naturally I do not play blitz too often. But when someone do not play for too long, that someone will be “rusty”. What should I do to at least keep myself used to tactics? Solving puzzles!!
There are currently 93 tacticians registered under the flag of Malaysia at the Chess Tactics Server compare to less than 50 accounts when I started my first puzzle almost 2 years ago.
Top 10 Malaysian Tacticians at the Chess Tactics Server. Interestingly, only 5 are active and Kwan Pin own 2 accounts here. 
The problems to solve here is not too difficult compare to other commercial softwares but here everything is free as long as you have a valid email account and of cause, a decent Internet connection.
Another good thing about the Chess Tactics Server is it actually provide the next puzzle with the nearest possible of your tactics rating which make it not too difficult / easy…
I remember someone told me before that solving puzzles of moderate difficulty is good to make a player aware of tactics and not to simply drop any pieces during an actual game. Discount rapid/blitz games, I do actually saw a lot of local FIDE rated players(above 2100 elo) left their pieces hanging during a standard time control game!! and this happened quite often. :( Probably solving 50 puzzles once every few days can help to prevent or minimize this error.
Well, I am not even rated above 2100 elo FIDE so I am not in the position to judge people. For myself, I make myself to solve 100 ~ 200 problems per session, 100 tries take 45 minutes to 1 hour for me (I think I am quite slow :P) and instead of just clicking and go over to next puzzle after failing to solve the current puzzle, I actually take my time to look at the position that I had failed to solve whether by solving them again or looking at the solution (the lazy way :P).
The initial plan is to make 500 tries per week (2,000 per month) but in real life, I guess I did only 729 a month (take 17,500 tries/24 months).
EuHong at the Chess Tactics Server.
Ok, why must be always 100 tries per session? Firstly, it will not take too long and for the first 10~30 I am actually getting used to the speed of solving and looking at a puzzle on my screen.
The latest 200 problems was solved in 2 sessions so I got lower lows on around the 20th tries (session 1) and the 30th tries (session 2).
This practice had been going on for almost 1.5 years as for the first 0.5 year, it was more on try and error way to find myself a suitable method.
Is this method effective? I can say it is effective for me as since then, my tournaments performance improved!
What say you? If you got the time and the will to improve your chess, you should give it a try and fix yourself a method of using the Chess Tactics Server that works for you…
Happy trying!
Posted in Chess Training |
One Response to “Time for Training”
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September 22nd, 2008 at 2:23 pm
hehe yes eu hong , it’s a great site to improve tactic
, i think i was 1500+ only when i was started at chess.emrald.net
another good free tactic site is chesstempo.com