Tonight at work I went through 143 problems (mainly pinning). I was mostly able to refrain from simply looking at the position and saying "the solution is Ne6", and paused long enough to identify "here is the pin, here is the decoy motif, the mating threats are here, here, and here...". The pattern recognition is coming along nicely - the three things that aid learning are repetition, repetition, and repetition.
Visualisation is improving too, I can see through the solution and the variations of nearly all the problems without too much trouble - identifying the specific threats at each move is an enormous aid to doing this.
So the 'database' is expanding, 'sight of board', and analysis skills are moving in the right direction too. This was the basic idea of doing this excercise with Fred. So far so good.
Towards the end however, I hit a couple of positions I didn't instantly recognise. Sad to say, my initial reaction was "OMG! what happens here?". Having got into the groove of projectile vomiting memorised solutions, switching gears and actually doing some work proved more difficult.
So comes the point of applying theory to practice. Rote learning of tactics undoubtedly increases the ideas one can draw upon during a game, but in a real game it is necessary to work through the motifs piece by piece, calculate the variations move by move. There is no "you to play and win" hint in a real game. "They" say an IM has an internal database of 50,000 positions, a GM has 100,000... I guess that means 98,999 to go for me. One day I'll dig out that Scientific American article about "how to be an expert in anything", written by an expert Chess player who's daughter is a WIM (iirc) - the conclusion was basically "work really hard at it". Well... duh!
Surely you didn't think I'd leave you without a pretty picture to look at today? This is the one I was pondering before I pulled up stumps at work tonight.
Reinfeld position #144White to move
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