Improvement in terms of chess had been the dream of all tournament players, while some hired coach, some worked on their own; some go through both ways and etc. For me, I got the same old dream as everyone else. One day while surfing through the web, I came across something interesting and decided to write something about it.

A sub-culture is forming in the blogosphere ever since Michael de la Maza published his effort of self training in “Rapid Chess Improvement: a study plan for the adult player”. This people try to report their process through their blog. (blog = web log).

Their so-called training program, namely the Circles, is the program consists of mainly working through sets of tactical position for a number of times to “permanently” engrave those patterns into their brain.

Let’s us now take a deeper look at the Circles. The general idea is to study chess purely in terms of tactics. YES! Only tactics! A simple sample plan can be for example, you have a few sets of tactical positions to solve, ranging from beginner, intermediate to advance (1000 positions for each level). During the circles, you complete all beginner tactics for a number a times, say 3 times, then intermediate level for 3 times, and then finally advance level for 3 times. Adding up the number you can come to the sum of ((3 x 1000) + (3 x 1000) + (3 x 1000)) = 9000. These circles must be completed within a certain period of time, say 1 year.

The people working through this plan and report their progress on their blogs then call themselves the Knight Errant. (more on this later).

The original author, MDLM (Michael de la Maza) claims that he managed to gain almost 600 points of rating points within 2 years. The Knight Errant, temposchlucker, manage a list of rating progress at http://temposchlucker.blogspot.com/2005/05/ratingprogress-of-knights-errant.html.

The progress chart speaks for the effectiveness of the program.

By now, you must have questions on how the program actually looked like and carried out and more importantly, what is the purpose of doing something over and over? Simple, as we know, they try to permanently engrave those tactical patterns in their long term memory in order to be able to “know the move” subconsciously.

Researches show that while pondering over a position, chess amateurs spend most of their time trying to calculate all possible moves but chess masters spend most of their time trying to recall typical pattern from their memory.

Can the circle be the solution for mere amateur to burn those chess positions into their subconscious mind in order to play like a master in a short period of training hour? Let’s find out later.

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