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The heavy lifting

The heavy lifting

Only Chess

mchill
Cryptic

Behind the scenes

Joined
27 Jun 16
Moves
3283
Clock
17 Jul 22
1 edit

There's no getting around it, you have to do the heavy lifting if you want to improve. Despite occasional sniveling regarding my lack of improvement in OTB chess on these forms, I recently finished 4 repetitions of the 1st 222 tactics exercises in The Woodpecker Method book, taking the time to set up the positions on a physical board each time. After 5 months, the improvement cannot be ignored. I'm now defeating players I used to lose to most of the time and holding on for draws in positions I would normally have lost.

According to authors of The Woodpecker Method, percentage of decisive games decided by tactical mistakes for players over 1800 are over 40%, for those under 1800 that percentage rises to over 72% (see pg. 10 for details)

As I now progress to 4 repetitions of intermediate exercises, the improvement will no doubt continue. (Though my occasional sniveling may appear here in the chess forum! 😏)

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