Hi everyone,
I'm currently a member of the personal chess training club and I'm going through the early challenges (mate in one etc.) at the moment.
I think this will ultimately help me improve as I'm solving the problems a lot quicker now that I've done over 100 of them.
Obviously I am eager to get on and improve and maybe once I get a little better help others to do the same.
Anyway, to my question: what kind of stuff does this course go onto, and what are the experiences and opinions of people who are further on in the course or have completed it and those who teach it?
Cheers everyone,
lordgledhill
Originally posted by deeploserYup.
Mate in one is really easy when you're doing problems that are labeled mate in one. They are inherently harder to spot during game play.
Missed mate in one in OTB games twice - luckily I won them both.
Missed mate in one against me twice - in one I was looking dodgy,
the other one I was winning.:'(
Originally posted by Badwater🙂
I would suggest visiting the club forum. Send me a message if you're not sure how to get there. 🙂
I'll give it a miss this time.
Once you have the OTB experience of these things, and it does
usually take two games for it to sink in. You have grasped it.
Personal Chess Training is a free service. Our purpose is to train players to become improve their game. Subscribers to this service will play through some of the most famous positions in the history of the game. You will work through each of these problems with a human opponent, not with a computer program.
We have developed software to keep track of teachers, students, positions, games, etc. It allows everyone to work at their own pace. We set up these positions on the web server www.redhotpawn.com. You don't have to be a subscriber to redhotpawn to participate, but if you are not a paid subscriber, the number of games you are allowed to play is limited.
Some of the problems are very simple, and some are so hard that Bobby Fischer couldn't solve them. This is not a figure of speech; one of our problems was composed by Pal Benko and given to Bobby to solve in 30 minutes. He could not solve it. He tried to find another solution, a cook, that night and couldn't do that either.
The way we train you is absolutely the best way to learn. Best of all is that it's free. We have thousands of positions to work with. The problems are being rated as we work through them, and we have the software in place to create e-books of our study.
It takes discipline to study through books on the endgame. You will study hard for a while ... things will be going great ... then you run into a stumbling block, get discouraged, and abandon your study. This is nothing new; it happens to everyone. While we are not trying to discourage anyone from buying books on the endgame, we believe that playing through these problems with someone will greatly improve your understanding of the problems as well as your study skills.
Steve Lopez: Many reviewers (both professional and amateur) use the chess rating system as a convenient yardstick for determining whether or not the potential reader is ready for a Mark Dvoretsky book; I've done this myself. But upon further reflection I don't think this is an accurate way to assess his work. Over a decade ago, back when I was a (very) small-time chess book retailer, I sold a Dvoretsky book to one of my friends who was rated around 1900 USCF. He came back to me a few weeks later and admitted that he'd given up on the book somewhere around Chapter Three -- he just couldn't make head or tail of what the author was driving at. My friend was no slouch, either; he was a very bright and accomplished player with more than twenty years' experience in the game. He just couldn't seem to find the woods for the trees, at least as far as Dvoretsky's book was concerned. On the other hand, I've known players rated around 1600-1650 USCF who devour each of Dvoretsky's books with great delight and derive a world of benefit from them.
Make it your challenge to become one of the top students on this site. You can only get there by successfully playing through these positions with an instructor. The number of times you play each position does not matter because the high scores are determined by the number of problems you have solved successfully.
Another challenge is to try to discover the mistakes made by others. You will see how other students tried to solve these problems. If they solved the problems correctly you will be able to immediately learn how they did so, but if their solutions are incorrect then you can sit back and try to figure out where they went wrong. It is surprising to see how many different ways students can approach the solution to the same problem.
Many of the positions we study actually come from these grandmaster games. It's great to learn what we study and then to see how grandmasters create these position in actual games. It's one thing to know how to win (or draw) with a particular ending, but quite another to learn to see these positions in advance. It's only when you create these positions in your own games that you can truly say that you understand them.
We started this project in hopes that it would help us organize our work into a better study guide. Within three days it exploded, and we had more students trying to join than we could handle. So we invited others to teach as well.
It's all for the love of the game.
* We just added a script that allows students to submit problems from their own games.