Introducing the Chess Vision Trainer
Don is the Man
Congratulations to Don, who just finished the seven circles of the MDLM program! You are an inspiration to us all, oh noble knight! I aspire to join you and Chris in the exhaulted ranks of those who completed the program.
Chess Vision Trainer
In 2003 I wrote a little Flash application to help do Chess Vision training drills per MDLM. I never really used it much, but if you are in the middle of doing find-the-fork drills I hope it will prove helpful. Been wondering if you found all the possible forking squares? Well wonder no more, just click the handy Next button in the program and see for yourself.
I threw together a skeleton chess page to go along with it at fussylizard.com, so check out the Chess Vision Trainer. Feel free to drop me a line on the blog or via email and give me your feedback. Bug reports and suggestions for improvement are welcome.
Status Report
Well, it's been a rough week with all my travel and such. I'm still pretty far behind (I just finished through problem 829 when I should be done with 970 by now...5 days behind). At any rate, I'm playing catch up a bit this weekend, so I hope to make up 2-3 days.
I finished level 40 earlier today and began level 50. Here's the stats so far:
Circle 1 % Circle 2 %
---------- ----------
Level 10 96% 99%
Level 20 91% 93%
Level 30 74% 80%
Level 40 69% 74%
Level 50 67% 81% (in progress)
Level 60 55%
Level 70 60%
Level 80 57%
Level 90 55%
Still showing small improvements over last time. Hopefully the trend will continue, but I find it hard to believe that I'll be able to do levels 60-90 in the allotted time and still get a reasonable score. Time will tell, I suppose...
Update on Sunday Night
I finished through 916 tonight, so I'm four days behind (just over 100 problems). I'm slowly catching up. Level 50 is hanging at around 72%.
posted by fussylizard @ 4:35 PM
5 Comments:
Cool chess vision trainer tool.
Good %'s for Circle 2. I think you will probably be able to do the grand 1209 problem tour as written.
That's really a neat tool you programmed here! I didn't think much of those chessvision drills because I play chess for so long already. But this is a nice way to put these patterns in your brains. I'll try it and see what it brings. My compliments!
Glad ya'll like it. I skipped the board vision stuff too since I had been playing for a while, but it is surprising how hard it is to find ALL the forking squares.
Don, doing all 1209 on schedule seems next to impossible at this point, but I'm sure going to try! Even if I do well, the killer for me will be mid-April since I have an out-of-town wedding to attend (when I'll be in circle 4 or 5)...there's just no way I'll be able to stick with the plan with all the relatives wanting to catch up, etc. We'll see though...
I am somewhat surprised that my % have been better than circle 1, esp. considering I'm doing them in roughly half the time. But the #s are there, so I guess I should feel proud. :-)
Nice Flash program :) I did the chess vision drills in the program (both the preliminary and then twice a week and the morning of every tournament during the tactic circles). I think in terms of repetition it helped some, just to see alignments quicker and more automatically.
I think I did the drills differently though. I'd rotate the different pieces (rook, bishop, knight, queen) around the central king, and only place the attacking queen on squares where it couldn't be captured, and where the side with the king couldn't move so as to retain the piece. Thus I'd be putting the queen on different squares based on the piece that moved around the king. Not sure if that makes total sense, and I seem to remember de la Maza wasn't 100% clear on what to do anyway :)
Btw, your telescope and photos are incredible!
Neat applet!
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