01 Sep '06 15:40>
I haven't used CT-ARTS since my hard drive crashed, but having a few minutes last week I reinstalled it. During the reinstallation, i recalled why i had come to become disallusioned about the program. Driven by de la Manza's Rapid Chess Improvement phenomenon, CT-ARt became the best selling tactics software in the history of chess. Sometimes i wondered if de la Manza and CT-ART had a secret agreement, but i decided that was a little too farfetched. However, i've never seen a book so religiously espouse a piece of independent software as an answer to chess development. Here's my problem with it. Starting the easiest group of exercises, I realized that I was doing eight queen sacs in a row! I give up my queen here, and voila, i mate him there. It got to the point where all i had to do was look for a way to throw away the queen and the solution easily followed. How many of you have had a queen sac leading to mate recently? It has never happened to me at RHP and never in tournament play. Maybe a couple of times playing club blitz. So why on earth is CT-ART putting such emphasis on it? There should be a more realistic way of exercising tactics, where you win a pawn or fork two pieces or defend against mate. That's why the web site Chess Tactics Server (http://chess.emrald.net/) is much more effective. It forces you to find little combinations at speed and competitively measures your score against hundreds of other participants. If de la Maza were still playing chess (i guess rapid chess improvement only takes you so far) he'd have to advocate this site over CT-ART any day--and you don't have to pay a thing!