tactic battle royale
ok, its a battle royale between two tactic giants. tal and alekhine? nope. morosevich and aronian? nope.
chess tactics server VS chess tempo!!!!
i started with the CTS and liked it, spent lots of hours with it. then one day a friend told me about chess tempo, and i tried it, it was odd, slow, different, i didn’t get into it. many months later i revisited the site, and now i like it.
but i don’t’ know which is better. CTS seems to have a bit more variety of situations, chess tempo seems to be mostly mating puzzles. chess tempo moves slow, you can take your time and look at the board, cts is timed and no matter how much i try, i can’t ignore it.
the wierd thing about chess tempo is, for some reason, even though the problems aren’t harder, it’s hard for me. i miss obvious shit, i just don’t see it.
i’ve been trying to do what Phaedrus had wrote about, and what DK had told me to do, just “sit” with the problems, talk them out, say “this pawn is pinned, the knight attacks the bishop.” and i do that, yet i have this strange blindness to the board, my mind won’t put together the pieces of the puzzle. yet on cts, i don’t have as much of a problem.
is it because the pieces look different? is it the way you move the pieces? chesstempo board and pieces are larger, which should make it easier but it seems more difficult to me.
for now i do them both, but i’m edging a bit more towards chesstempo. i wonder in a chessfight, who would win.
http://dk-transformation.blogspot.com/ said,
May 6, 2008 at 11:28 pm
i say ‘just do’ CTS carefully until you can do 90 to 95.0% at a time. some but not all persons say ‘i cannot do that’ which is why you slow down and in so doing see a decrease in rating, until you find your natural level. similarly chessTempo, which i am not expert in and have only tried as a visitor, but which cannot be all that different. i just did 2f/343s= 345 tries at 99.42% accuracy around 1350-1410 elo ,with 223 in a row correct. this is not meant to teach tactics but to EXPERIENCE scanning the board not only fast, but accurately. you can make a move which wins but is not best, and still fail the problem. sight of the board with a clock.
conversely, i much prefer CT-Art 3.0 for slow tactics, and can spend three hours on one problem. deep calculation. i have spent three days on one position, no moving pieces. this can take a chess player far. this is to teach calculation and imagination.
or, if you prefer, BDK’s beloved CTB which i am sure is just as well for some chess players and might be just the ticket.
so, to conclude, to sit in a chair and not move around indeed. Zitzsfleich! warmest, dk
chessloser said,
May 8, 2008 at 8:16 am
wow, i feel like i’m doing something if i take 4 whole minutes on a position. i should maybe slow down more and scan more….
Wahrheit said,
May 8, 2008 at 9:14 am
Chess Tempo makes me mad every once in awhile, I like play some killer combo that wins a rook and it’s like, WRONG! -18 points and shows some 7-move combo that wins a rook AND a bishop. Heh, it’s what I need, the universe always gives us what we need, and I need accuracy and as dk said, to sit still.
I think CTS may be a little better for just staying sharp on the shorter tactics, which are much more common in real games than the 7-movers.
Liquid Egg Product said,
May 8, 2008 at 4:21 pm
There are some side-effects of CTS being timed. It seems to encourage rushing moves. Sometimes I’ll end up playing a move that looks like it leads to the tactic in an effort to get the answer within the x sec it’s “supposed” to be solvable in.
Now that’s probably more a fault with me personally. As David mentioned, maybe it’s not supposed to teach tactics, and I’m probably trying to get that when it’s really best for something else.