Subject to change

Once again, my way (of going about) is subject to change. But this time i think i've found it. For a while I was happy with the distribution of days between playing and training, as in; Play one day, train the next, play the following and train the next, and so forth. I should refer to my "How about practice" post. Now, the kind of play i'm refering to is live play. As in the kinda games most of you Knights play at FICS or ICC. Now, you have to understand that i am quite an active turn-based player as well. Contemplating quite a lot of moves about every single day. So i was thinking, since i'm getting my play in anyway (by playing turn-based), i might as well just put a hold on playing live as well, and focus more on my training. As in my previous plan. Which was to focus on tactics training for 5 days a week, for atleast an hour a day, and weekends off, and put my theory into practice while playing turn-based (i could refer to yet another post, but there are more previous posts about this particular subject, so feel free to take a look at my archived posts to make sense of all of this).

However little (occupied by freeing up the HD by playing video games and watching movies), i still worked on the Personal Chess Trainer program. In review mode that is... Review mode holds all the positions you have allready done. In my case, it holds 360 positions i have done before, from the tactics modules. And i just finished them :)

Now, you shouldn't pay any attention to the displayed time. Yes, alltogether that was the time it took to go over those 360 positions. But i've been spreading them over the period of more then 1 and a half months or so. Anyway, i'll be going through the review once again (MORE ACTIVE this time) to really get back in shape for it (it being PCT), and then i will continue where i left off.

There will be some changes however, to how i am going to handle PCT. Changes that come forth after reading a post from Qaundoman's blog CAISSA'S CONFABULATIONS about studying tactics effectively, which i'm keeping as a note in my chess notebook (see sidebar) and considering PCT's settings.

About Qaundoman's view on studying tactics, i find that the guy really does have a point. His idea (or view of it) just kept coming back to me, and made me think about it. It really got stuck in the back of my mind. And since PCT makes it very hard not to see a solution or a hint anyway, i have decided to go about PCT the Quandoman way.

What do i mean by "since PCT makes it very hard not to see a solution or a hint"? Well, it has to do with how the program is developed. The program is developed in such a way that when you run out of time, it will show you the piece you should have moved. And i'm not talking about the solution here. I am only talking about a hint here. So, no matter what, it hands out an unasked-for hint. And the only way of not getting to see it, is to exit the program everytime you approach the timelimit. Maybe you're wondering why i make such a fuzz over seeing a hint. Well, the hint makes it easier to find the solution. That's why. But besides the program giving you unasked-for hints, it's standard settings (see images)




will show you the solution even. Sure you can check the box that says "Don't present solution when time is over", but you'll be getting the hint anyway. And the hint (as i mentioned) is enough to make you see the solution as well lot's of times, so...

Now, for quite some time i actually exited the program everytime i was nearing the time limit, and started it back up again. But it felt rather silly to go through that time and time again. So i figured, PCT will be a nice program to implement Quandoman's ideas for studying tactics. And that's what i'll do.

You can look forward (or not) to seeing me back in action in a while :)
I'll keep ya'll posted.