Chess Training: the Circles - Part 2

Previous post: Part 1 

After years of chess training with the circles, players had come to some conclusion. These conclusions will help us to answer the question from Part 1 - 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 see some example of planning, execution and result.

Before moving to answer the question, let’s take a look at the plan by Blue Devil Knight and his original posts are available at his blog post of de la maza my hero and divine tragedy on horizon.

Pre-Circles

Precircle 1: 04/16/05-02/12/06

Work through the first 1500 problems (Steps 1-3) of the Tasc Chess Tutor (TCT) to build up basic chess knowledge. Worked through it in chunks of 200 problems. Every 200 problems, redid those sections in which was scored below 80% on any tests. Once got 80% in all the tests for that problem chunk, moved on to the next 200 problems. In addition, impose an 'instant redo' rule: if scored below 50% on any test, could not move on to another test until got above 50%.

I was originally going to work through all of TCT, but after 10 months I had finished Step 3, and was sick of it and wanted to move on. I probably solved 4500 problems in 10 months. In retrospect, the beginner books (see Precircle 2) are better for general chess knowledge, so I should have started withthem and postponed TCT until after the Circles. TCT focused a lot on tactics and mate, which was helpful, but after the first three steps I realized I needed more breadth in my very first formal chess training.

Precircle 2: 02/16/06-04/11/06

Continue to learn more basic knowledge by slowly reading through Wolff's The Idiot's Guide to Chess.

The Circles: Started 04/11/06

Using Convekta's Chess Tactics for Beginners (hereafter CTB).

1. Vision drills (~6 weeks)

a) Concentric squares (~2 weeks)

b) Knight sight (~2 weeks)

c) Knight flight (~2 weeks)

2. Five Circles (~20 weeks : 1000 tactical problems, each done five times!)

Circle 1: 10 weeks

Circle 2: 5 weeks

Circle 3: 2.5 weeks

Circle 4: 9 days

Circle 5: 5 days

Work 5-6 days a week, 30 to 90 minutes a day. Also, take one day a week to do no training, but just to play actual games.

CTB has 1300 problems split into 5 Stages of increasing difficulty. At each stage, you can either work through the problems sorted randomly or by tactical theme. For my circles, I am working through each stage many times, until I can do them very quickly (see the answer within a few seconds), without thinking about them. The first time through, I do 5-10 problems/day. Then 20/day. I stay at 20/day until I am doing the problems with low error (95% correct). I then double the number of problems per day until I am doing the entire stage each day. I go until I am doing the entire set of problems each day, 100% correct, with no thinking. Then I will move on to the next Phase of CTB. I also go back and repeat earlier phases periodically to make sure I still remember the problems.

Here is a typical progress report:

Sir Pino's Chess Quest

Screen Shot of “Whats Next” at Sir Pino’s Chess Quest.

Finally, a success story and post-mortem:

The original post: Graduated Knight 

The screen shot:

P/S: if you are interested on what the link in the text (IM Rashid Ziatdinov) is about, the link is available directly here: JeremySilman.com 

I hope that does.

Up next:

What is Knight Errant?