I want to improve, but I'm busy !!!

@Toadofsky said in #10:
> Fair enough... forums are a challenging space for public discourse.
>
> Many of the points raised in this blog are quite reasonable, but many readers may still walk away unconvinced because it's difficult to persuade readers, and it's difficult to write succinctly about thinking, especially without references or data directly supporting theories. The allegory bit was amusing.
>
> Indeed, building a habit often involves with something simple and gradually ramping up the difficulty. And you're right, being aware of both mental and physical strength is useful.

There we go. I don't think we're in disagreement.

One thing people wouldn't know about me online is I am pretty much against "making people feel good" for no reason. For example, I never give away participation trophies in the events I run. I see little point in that sort of extrinsic motivation. The main goal of the articles I write is practical advice for people.

I cannot offer you data, as the 10 minute thing comes from teaching chess for 25 years and seeing thousands of people fail to get past 10 minutes of studying on their own time. Obviously, the ones that do go on to succeed.

But I can offer you very deep insight into the allegory: ryanvelez.com/2019/08/18/10000-patio-for-1500/

:-D

> It is a good idea to investigate your preferences.

isn't learning about shaping our biases... with new data. our biases is what can fuel our imagination. so you give a method to observe them. That is hard to do in fast chess. I can't do it. I hope others can do it, at any pace.. juggling with time management and the board, and themselves. Also our preferences are not intrinsically bad. As you say, perhaps in other words, or assume perhaps, is that by investigating one can start looking at rational features to associate to that feeling, as the intuition manifested in such bias is not totally irrational, it might just be floating in the air, without tools to specify why a current positoin or a foreseen possiblility of positoin would be our preference.

It could be both the position assessment or our experience of having done well in past positions that this mind's eye or current positoin reminds, us. But why did we do well then.. And exactly how similar is it. Is the difference important. So careful words I just quoted.

The subjective and probably fluctuating balance between exploring further (in unfamiliar grounds for the previous aspect, you mentioned) and "exploiting" what our feelings might say, is a constant wheel of own mental universe wheel.

So, I would keep using the word investigate, for it allows to be rational about all of self thinking about chess (including the feelings....)

@RyanVelez said in #11:
> The main goal of the articles I write is practical advice for people.
>
> I cannot offer you data, as the 10 minute thing comes from teaching chess for 25 years and seeing thousands of people fail to get past 10 minutes of studying on their own time. Obviously, the ones that do go on to succeed.

I apologize for plugging my own blog, but this is why I steal others' material when attempting to persuade:
lichess.org/@/Toadofsky/blog/long-term-goals-are-malarkey/x3f6g7lF

@Toadofsky said in #13:
> I apologize for plugging my own blog, but this is why I steal others' material when attempting to persuade:
> lichess.org/@/Toadofsky/blog/long-term-goals-are-malarkey/x3f6g7lF

Isn't chunking mate into surrogate board features sub-goalls to plan with upstream, not making your blog only looking at one aspect. Yes long term goal needs definition, and should be enough to delegate motivation to the sub-goals.

But we need the chunks, nobody has arbitrary long term ability to delay gratification. It might even be a normally distributed trait, (and even the trait of that delay might be individual context dependent function but say the trait would be be average of that). That may have been your concise blog point. But we can have long arcs and small arcs fitting well together.

And I think this blog here, is actually providing a flexible method. It even, in that ordering of issues I would have inversed, eventually talks about chunking. It seems to me that you are agreeing. with a little bit of interpretation?

@Toadofsky said in #13:
> I apologize for plugging my own blog, but this is why I steal others' material when attempting to persuade:
> lichess.org/@/Toadofsky/blog/long-term-goals-are-malarkey/x3f6g7lF

I don't follow your point. The link to you blog links to a brief article with a broken link at the bottom.

I did click on your first hyper-linked word, which brought me to a post you made where you feel lichess promotes people who give vague advice. If you read my other entries, I think you will agree my goal is to provide very clear advice.

One reason I began my blog is because of the number of blogs I see that either...

A. Offer vague advice
B. Offer half-lessons with the other half behind a pay wall
C. Their blog is really just an ad in disguise

I think I wrote that somewhere (maybe a comment? cannot remember).

I did also see you wrote a small section that said "There are no short cuts." I don't think anyone worth their salt would disagree with that.

Anyway, today is the first day I have ever spoken to you. I am grateful for you and hope you read more of what I write to offer discussion. Criticism is always fine in my opinion, and my way is not the only way for people to improve.

@dboing said in #14:
> And I think this blog here, is actually providing a flexible method. It even, in that ordering of issues I would have inversed, eventually talks about chunking. It seems to me that you are agreeing. with a little bit of interpretation?

The method is reasonable, but unfortunately I fear most readers won't find it persuasive (in the sense of the reader changing their habits after reading this).

My problem is different: at some days I am not very busy - and I play and study a lot of chess.
But this does not lead to improvement - sometimes I am thinking that I am spending too much
time with chess, and that improvement is a totally different issue.
I think I start to "unlearn" chess - and I make more mistakes than ever.
Although I am also spending time with GM games and analysing them.
Does not seem to help any more (but some years ago it did help).
Some say I should train differently (now that I am over 50 years) but I did not come across
about a "different" training method based on age.

I start to think: let's assume I did NOT play chess a certain week.
This would have lead not to improvement, but it had avoided a loss of rating points.

@RyanVelez I think a lot of the criticism you're receiving is from people who are missing the point. A lot of people don't start new habits in general - not just chess - because they're worried about the time commitment or bite off more than they can chew.

For a beginner at anything, telling them they should be practicing hours a day - especially when they're an adult with all ready busy lives is a tall ask. Or people will get really excited about starting a new activity then quickly fall off when the novelty of it fades because they can't focus X hours a day to that activity like they thought they could.

But your plan cuts to the chase. You say: "Okay, hours of study/exercise/practice a day is too much, but surely you have 10 minutes to spare, right?" Then after you've established that base of 10 minutes you slowly and incrementally improve from there. Surely you have 10 minutes to walk around the park? Surely you have 10 minutes to practice an instrument? Surely you have 10 minutes to practice chess puzzles or play a short rapid game? Then you grow from there.

Fantastic blog, thank you.

edit: also, if I understand you right, you're not saying that people shouldn't study more than 10 minutes if they so desire (maybe they really get into a study session one day and have a lot of free time) just that the 10 minutes and future increments are a commitment to the MINIMUM amount of study time in order to get people in the habit of doing something. Then if that minimum commitment gets in the way of other obligations, scale back.

@Hurluberlu2 said in #18:
> My problem is different: at some days I am not very busy - and I play and study a lot of chess.
> But this does not lead to improvement - sometimes I am thinking that I am spending too much
> time with chess, and that improvement is a totally different issue.
> I think I start to "unlearn" chess - and I make more mistakes than ever.
> Although I am also spending time with GM games and analysing them.
> Does not seem to help any more (but some years ago it did help).
> Some say I should train differently (now that I am over 50 years) but I did not come across
> about a "different" training method based on age.
>
> I start to think: let's assume I did NOT play chess a certain week.
> This would have lead not to improvement, but it had avoided a loss of rating points.

Magnus Carlson said (I believe) "Many people study, few improve." I think on this a lot, and I think it is true.

You make an excellent point though, about training methods for different ages. I am going to think on that subject. I run a weekly chess club, and people who are over 50 regularly go -- I am going to ask them some questions and see what they think.

As I am not 50+ yet, I cannot empathize with the challenges. However, I can say I study differently now than I did in my 20s.

I have one anecdote that I think is helpful. I know a guy who was 60 or so when he started this and is now in his 70s. He had a terrible temper, and would leave tournaments when he'd lose to kids. But, he kept coming back, and he eventually started to apologize for his intense behavior. Overtime, he calmed down, too, and didn't mind losing as much. During this whole process, he resented that he couldn't improve, from beginning to end. When he began, he was rated about 500, and near the end, he was rated around 1700.

He is still alive, he just kind of retired from playing. One day, after his retirement, I showed him his ratings graph. He looked at me in shock. He couldn't believe he improved, he just never thought about it. I think it put a lot into perspective for him.

I don't know what he did to improve, but I'll ask him, too.

I always tell people there is a thing call "The Curse of the Chess Player." That curse is that we all fall into one of two camps: We either think we're not good enough, or we think we play better than our rating. Those who think they play above their rating are kidding themselves. But the others, I think, are more numerous. I think most reasonable people never think they are good enough, and strive to be better.

But I agree... I really want to investigate this scenario. I'm going to do some research and write something on the subject of "Studying when you are 50+, what works and what doesn't." But it won't be my advice, since I am not 50. I'm going to try to gather together the opinions and ideas of others, and put them into something cohesive. This one will take me some time, but I'll get on it as part of my Exploring Chess series -- this is exactly the kind of thing I want to learn about.