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How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

gautamnarula.com

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Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#91

Post by spot »

Tloewald wrote: post #9

Anyone care to provide similarly practical tips for Go?

a few long intense sessions will do more for you than many single games. you need to play over and over again, ideally with a stronger player, right in a row. not once a week. do it 8 hours in a row. if you can do it several or many days in a row, that's even better.

play small games as a beginner or if you don't have time. 9x9 and 13x13 are good.

get an account on KGS and engage with the community there.

and yes read the various books. kageyama's fundamentals is great, but it really depends on your personality.

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#93

Post by vinceguidry »

has2k1 wrote: post #33
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #21

> "One big mistake is to rely heavily on computers for chess analysis. Computer analysis should be done only after you analyze the game on your own." This isn't correct information anymore, in my opinion. Chess engines have improved tenfold over the last four years (when the author says he stopped playing). The increase in the strength of chess engines has subsequently caused an increase in the "humanity" of chess en…

> "This isn't correct information anymore, in my opinion" It looks like you hastily condemned the writer as a means to justify a parallel insight. The writer is clearly not against computer analysis, even in the quote that you have extracted. It does make sense to analyse without the aide of a computer then afterwards using one. Your insight still stands.

How is that a condemnation?

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#94

Post by dfan »

birken wrote: post #5

And for those that are interested in building their interest in chess in a way that is more entertainment than education, I highly recommend watching "live commentaries", IE chess players playing against other people online while commentating it live. My personal favorite is IM Greg Shahade (aka curtains), who has hundreds of these videos online [1]. There are also a bunch on youtube from other sources, but in my opi…

Greg Shahade's videos are great. I particularly enjoy his solitaire chess games, where he attempts to guess the moves of existing games by great players of the past and present.

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#95

Post by dfan »

This is a good set of suggestions for improving in chess that obviously worked well for the author. When I saw how great his results were, though, I suspected that he must have been pretty young during his improvement phase, and sure enough, he was a teenager. Rapid chess improvement, like language acquisition, is a lot easier when you're young. So if you're an adult, don't be too disappointed if this regimen doesn't shoot you up to 1800 in a year. I know many adults who have been playing the game seriously for decades who never got there.

(Context: I have been an 1800-rated adult myself who recently got up to 2000 with a lot of hard work.)

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#96

Post by dfan »

joe_the_user wrote: post #17
Tloewald wrote: post #9

Anyone care to provide similarly practical tips for Go?

I'm not good to give quick Go learning tips but I think it's interesting that the general consensus is that Go and Chess quire significantly different "mindsets". Both are games of perfect information but it seems that the greater complexity of Go yields quantitatively different requirements for good play - in Go, people teaching generally talk about having the right attitude, avoid "greed" and similar "fuzzy" criter…

I feel like playing Go helped my chess and vice versa.

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#97

Post by vinceguidry »

thewarrior wrote: post #52
xerophtye wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here, use this: http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Well I have read that article. I do understand that true mastery can take a lifetime. The posted article gives specific chess exercises which when practiced for 3 - 5 months can produce a marked improvement. I was asking whether there any such exercises for programming.

You could try code kata (http://codekata.pragprog.com/) or koans, (just search Google for your language + 'koans') but those are really only a fun way to work on a specific, easily-tested skill, that also happens to be the very first a novice learns, that's implementation. By all means, if they help, knock yourself out.

The thing about programming is that to get better at it, you need to expand the way you think about abstraction. You have to think not just in terms of how you will maintain what you wrote, but how the end user will use it and how the domain might change.

Any novice can hack together something that will work for one specific purpose, it takes someone skilled to pull useful abstractions out from that single-use code and turn it into something flexible enough that even years from now another novice will be able to pick it back up and understand it enough to be able to reuse it.

All that is to say is, any purported exercise isn't going to get your brain thinking the way it needs to. They're only going to take you to the end of the very first step of mastery, that's in "getting the computer to do what you want it to".

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#98

Post by llimllib »

kristofferR wrote: post #62
pk2200 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stockfish (ranked #2 on the various computer rating lists) runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android. It's also free and open source! http://stockfishchess.org/ https://github.com/mcostalba/Stockfish

What's the best open source GUI for it?

As far as I was able to tell, when I was interested in chess a few months ago, there is no acceptable Mac GUI for Stockfish.

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#99

Post by TheSOB88 »

dfan wrote: post #95

This is a good set of suggestions for improving in chess that obviously worked well for the author. When I saw how great his results were, though, I suspected that he must have been pretty young during his improvement phase, and sure enough, he was a teenager. Rapid chess improvement, like language acquisition, is a lot easier when you're young. So if you're an adult, don't be too disappointed if this regimen doesn't…

In addition to the whole thing about young people learning faster, there is also the part where they have much, much more free time and less responsibilities they have to take care of. However... Did your friends do the tactics and analysis? I have a feeling that's what really helped. Brains need repetition so that thought patterns can form habits and more complex neural networks can be developed.

Re: How to Get Good at Chess, Fast

#100

Post by EdwigePelagia »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #75
EdwigePelagia wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone asks an obvious question, the interpreter of the question has two paths to choose. (a) Assume the author is very stupid and then tell him the very stupid and obvious answer. (b) Interpret the question as rhetorical. People who take (a) are the type of people who think they're smarter than everyone else, but who are actually, in fact, dumber. Usually they lack empathy, are undersocialized, and probably sh…

> When someone asks an obvious question, the interpreter of the question has two paths to choose. > (a) Assume the author is very stupid and then tell him the very stupid and obvious answer. > (b) Interpret the question as rhetorical. > People who take (a) are the type of people who think they're smarter than everyone else, but who are actually, in fact, dumber. Usually they lack empathy, are undersocialized, and pro…

It's actually a very interesting problem. It depends entirely on the person and the extent to which they are conscious of the multitudinous implications of their statements.

But really, whoever has been giving you that advice is a dunce. I expect your being seen as a jerk has a lot more to do with how you negotiate people's feeling than how you interpret their statements. The people giving you that advice probably want you to stop being a jerk but can't quite articulate what they mean.

This is actually more interesting than whatever the fuck this thread was about. Hermeneutics is funnnn.

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