Woodpecker 10(0)1 - II

Woodpeckering my way through 1001 chess puzzles in 2021

My first Woodpecker mistake of the year became obvious pretty quickly. It came about because I didn’t think through the implications of 1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players dividing the material up into thematic chapters.

So I started at the beginning, deciding the simplest method was just to work through the book in order. The plan was to get as many positions as I could under my belt for the first set and then do the rest in however many future sets proved to be necessary.

All well and good, but, like a lot of books, 1001 CEfCP dedicates each of its chapters to a separate tactical theme. In order they are Elimination of the Defence, Double Attack, Discovered Attack, Skewer, Pin, Trapping  a Piece, Promotion, Draw, Mate, Defending and Mix. I know not everybody likes knowing what type of problem they’re looking at in advance, but for reasons I’ll come back to some time, I don’t think it’s a problem per se. My mistake wasn’t not thinking about the number of problems in each chapter. 

It took a while for it to dawn on me that the first chapter having 127 positions, going through the book in order meant that approximately half of my first set of problems was going to be removal of the defender with most if not all of the rest being double attacks. 

I was going to change my method but then I realised that most of the other chapters were much smaller so my future sets would be much more varied.

So I’m going to stick with going through the book in order for the time being, but if I ever Woodpecker again, I’ll certainly put more thought into puzzle order next time.

I’ll also be more thoughtful about the difficulty of the puzzle set, but more of that next week.

PROGRESS

By the time you read this I’ll be just coming towards the end of my fourth and final week for the first cycle.

Cycle One Running total

At the end of Week One: 80 puzzles at 84% accuracy in 6 hours 21 minutes

At the end of Week Two: 109 puzzles at 81% accuracy in 11 hours 2 minutes

At the end of Week Three: 172 puzzles at 81% accuracy in 15 hours 51 minutes