How to Use This Blog

How should you use this blog? Well, any way you want to is the TL;DR / short version (delete according to your age group).

Comments are always welcome. Especially if your choice of move is accompanied with a description of the thought process that lead you there.

 I’m going to post on Monday and Friday each week. Each one will start with a position from one of those old Beat the Masters articles. There’ll be some wibble from me to follow and the points and a list of which Master chose which move will be at the end.

If anyone comments with their choice of move, I’ll reply with what the article had to say about it.

So, use this material however you find useful. In case of interest, here’s what I do:-

• set up the position on a real board;
• analyse without moving the pieces as deeply and thoroughly as I can manage;
• write down my thoughts as moves and ideas occur to me; 
• eventually decide on my choice and write that down along with the time I’ve taken;
• check the answers, make a note of the points I’ve scored for this question and which Masters if any made the same move;
• check the analysis against my own;
• I reflect on my thinking process (the decisions I made and how I came to them);

and at the after all of that  …

• turn on an engine to see what HIARCS has to say.

This is what I do now. It didn’t start out that way.

For the first set of positions I did nothing but think about and choose a move, writing things down and taking a note of the time I’d taken came later.  A bit further down the track I started the post-mortem (which seems to become more detailed with each set of problems).

The process continues to evolve. My current plan is to Woodpecker Method my next few sets of puzzles. I’m doing as many as I can for a couple of months - I think I should get up to somewhere between 75 and 100 - and then I’ll do them all again. The idea being to see if i can do them faster and with more accuracy.

I’m also trying to develop the reflection and analysis section into something much more detailed. I suspect that this is where the benefits truly lie. As a rough rule of thumb I reckon that the optimal time spent on the post mortem would be to double the time ’d used to choose my move in the first place.