SC Week 1/6: Woodpeckering your Simple Chess RAM
" [Simple Chess] shows you how to recognise and accumulate small, sometimes almost insignificant-looking advantages which may well have little or no short-term effect, but are permanent features of the position."
Michael Stean
Do you believe - like Ziyatdinov in GM RAM that one path to becoming a stronger of in chess is learning by heart some key games?
Do you agree with the Axel Smith’s Woodpecker Method?
For what it’s worth, I think I’m in favour of both. But it’s not worth very much. You have to come to your on view.
Memorising the games in Simple Chess could possibly help. Selecting your own group of key positions from these games to Woodpecker at a later date could possibly help.
Do you agree?
The positions from the games in the Introduction chapter that I added to my Woodpecker pile are these:-
16 b5
18 Bg5
21 a5
26 a6
27 Kg2
28 Qe2
31 Qf7
12 b4
13 h3
17 Bxb7
20 Qf3
21 g4
13 Bg5
15 c4
16 cxb5
17 a4
20 f4
A good idea to raise. The cognitive benefit from committing key positions and ideas to memory in this manner is related to "chunking" - the fact that the brain does a much better job of remembering a specific, named object/concept that is associated with a larger group/set of objects/concepts. It's more commonly done in the chess world with openings and endings - "QGD Exchange Variation" and "Lucena position" should immediately bring to mind concrete positions and associated plans if you have studied them - but it can be done with lessons learned from specific games as well. Several years ago I recall running into a specific reference about that practice in a training book, so it's out there even if not well publicized.
ReplyDeleteI think the key point is to have studied and understood (as best as possible) the static features and dynamics at play in a game, rather than relying on rote memorization, which is less than useless in terms of increasing playing strength.