Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

Date: 07 Feb 2005 10:35:52
From: gromit
Subject: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

I'm on the verge of splurging on CT-ART 3.0, after trying the demo and
seeing it recommended in several places (Particularly Dan Heisman's
"Novice Nook" column and Michael de la Maza's "400 points in 400 days".
My only concern is that perhaps a lower level of tactics may be more
beneficial.

I am rated mid-1300s USCF, and am concentrating on trying to
improve my tactical vision and thought process (I'm realizing that it's
no good trying to transpose into a winning minor piece endgame if you
lose material to cheapos). I find most of the problems in Chernev and
Reinfeld's "Winning Chess: How to See Three Moves Ahead" pretty easily,
many within seconds. However, Informator's "Encyclopaedia of Chess
Middlegames" is a challenge...not undoable (several are easy) but
definitely not suitable for "spot the tactic in 30 seconds" drills.
What the ECM _is_ good for is correcting my sloppy thought process...for
many of the problems you have to calculate several defenses to your main
move (i.e. the lines aren't as clearly forcing).

I've been entering ECM into Chessbase, but it's a slow process, so a
software solution is appealing. My questions:

1. Would you think that it's better to test basic tactics rapidly, to
improve how quickly they can be recognized, or to do harder tactics more
slowly, so that I practice an organized thought process (i.e. get out of
the habit of playing what Heisman calls "hope chess" and consider all my
opponent's threats and possible replies)?

2. Based on your opinion on the above question, what book or software
do you recommend?

3. How does CT-ART 3.0 compare to Informator's ECM for difficulty? I
could save $26 and spend the time to enter ECM into the computer....

4. Convekta (the company that puts out CT-ART 3.0) also has "Chess
Tactics for Beginners" and "Chess Ttactics for Intermediate Players".
I've seen the former recommended by Heisman and others, but not a peep
about the latter. How do these compare in difficulty to Chernev &
Reinfeld, or Informator's ECM?

Date: 09 Feb 2005 09:33:31
From: mogath
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

Could you email me at [email protected]?

Just remove nojunkatall? Thanks very much.

Regards,
Jeff

Date: 09 Feb 2005 03:20:27
From: Mogath3
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

>I am rated mid-1300s USCF, and am concentrating on trying to
>improve my tactical vision and thought process (I'm realizing that it's
>no good trying to transpose into a winning minor piece endgame if you
>lose material to cheapos). I find most of the problems in Chernev and
>Reinfeld's "Winning Chess: How to See Three Moves Ahead" pretty easily,
>many within seconds. However, Informator's "Encyclopaedia of Chess
>Middlegames" is a challenge...not undoable (several are easy) but
>definitely not suitable for "spot the tactic in 30 seconds" drills.
>What the ECM _is_ good for is correcting my sloppy thought process...for
>many of the problems you have to calculate several defenses to your main
>move (i.e. the lines aren't as clearly forcing).
>

After reading through this entire thread, I find that nobody really addressed
how to improve your "vision". I can tell you and thats by setting up the
problem on a board. The WITHOUT moving the pieces, try and solve the problem.
Give yourself about 5-10 minutes. If you can't do it after that, PLAY THROUGH
the solution and go on to the next one. This really works. Play any long games
you play online or against your computer using a board and pieces. This is all
practice for o-t-b games.
The "Encyclopedia Of Middlegames" you mention, is that the one by Nikolai
Kroguis that was written in th 80's? If so, I am also in the process of
entering that book in to a database and making flash cards out of the positons.
If you want some help doing this drop me an email. The 879 problems that were
mentioned are the last half of the book I believe.
At any rate, set them up on a board and solve from there, you'll be amazed.

Regards,
Jeff

Date: 09 Feb 2005 07:57:52
From: gromit
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

Yes, it is the Krogius one. I'm doing the problems in the first part
for starters.

For tactical drills I've been using software instead of a real board,
but I've been using a real board for slow analysis of games.

Date: 08 Feb 2005 18:39:38
From: gromit
Subject: Thanks, everyone

Thanks for all the suggestions. I think I'll break down and get CT-ART
3.0.

I'm going to try:
-doing lots of tactics. I did Heisman's Tactics Quiz from his chesscafe
column, and although it was pretty easy I couldn't solve them nearly as
quickly as I apparently should.
-try to play 2 slow games on ICC a week. They have a g/60 tourney on
Tuesdays apparently (not really that slow, but...). It's harder now
that I live in an area with few local tournaments....
-go back to doing the study of master games as outlined by Silman in
HTRYC. I have Alekhine's Best Games, Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, and
The Test of Time already for starters.
-play slow games against Fritz, while writing out a principal variation
each move.

Date: 08 Feb 2005 09:22:35
From: Amos Soma
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

I would personally recomment CT-ART 3.0. At the lowest levels you should be
able to solve most problems and then work up from there. I have the program
and find it useful for developing my ability to see patterns in positions
that lead to good tactics.

I personally wouldn't worry too much about end-game studies until you cross
at least 1600-1700. My ICC rating is 1620 and few of my games enter the
point where fine end-game play is required. I know this will change once I
hit 1700 and higher.

"gromit" <[email protected] > wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> I'm on the verge of splurging on CT-ART 3.0, after trying the demo and
> seeing it recommended in several places (Particularly Dan Heisman's
> "Novice Nook" column and Michael de la Maza's "400 points in 400 days".
> My only concern is that perhaps a lower level of tactics may be more
> beneficial.
>
> I am rated mid-1300s USCF, and am concentrating on trying to
> improve my tactical vision and thought process (I'm realizing that it's
> no good trying to transpose into a winning minor piece endgame if you
> lose material to cheapos). I find most of the problems in Chernev and
> Reinfeld's "Winning Chess: How to See Three Moves Ahead" pretty easily,
> many within seconds. However, Informator's "Encyclopaedia of Chess
> Middlegames" is a challenge...not undoable (several are easy) but
> definitely not suitable for "spot the tactic in 30 seconds" drills.
> What the ECM _is_ good for is correcting my sloppy thought process...for
> many of the problems you have to calculate several defenses to your main
> move (i.e. the lines aren't as clearly forcing).
>
> I've been entering ECM into Chessbase, but it's a slow process, so a
> software solution is appealing. My questions:
>
> 1. Would you think that it's better to test basic tactics rapidly, to
> improve how quickly they can be recognized, or to do harder tactics more
> slowly, so that I practice an organized thought process (i.e. get out of
> the habit of playing what Heisman calls "hope chess" and consider all my
> opponent's threats and possible replies)?
>
> 2. Based on your opinion on the above question, what book or software
> do you recommend?
>
> 3. How does CT-ART 3.0 compare to Informator's ECM for difficulty? I
> could save $26 and spend the time to enter ECM into the computer....
>
> 4. Convekta (the company that puts out CT-ART 3.0) also has "Chess
> Tactics for Beginners" and "Chess Ttactics for Intermediate Players".
> I've seen the former recommended by Heisman and others, but not a peep
> about the latter. How do these compare in difficulty to Chernev &
> Reinfeld, or Informator's ECM?
>

Date: 08 Feb 2005 09:07:15
From: Neil Schemenauer
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

gromit <[email protected] > wrote:
> 4. Convekta (the company that puts out CT-ART 3.0) also has "Chess
> Tactics for Beginners" and "Chess Ttactics for Intermediate Players".
> I've seen the former recommended by Heisman and others, but not a peep
> about the latter. How do these compare in difficulty to Chernev &
> Reinfeld, or Informator's ECM?

Hello,

I have both CT-ART 3.0 and Chess Tactics for Beginners. I'm a
novice player (perhaps around 1250 on ICC). I suspect the problems
that come with Chess Tactics for Beginners may be a little too easy
for you. I would suggest starting with CT-ART and see how it goes.

Something I've just started to do is to go through all my games and
look for blunders. You can use Crafty's annotate command to help,
e.g.:

annotate neil-white.pgn w 5-40 2 4

Almost every one of my games contains one or more of these blunders.
From the Crafty output I generate a set of problems, one for each
position where I a made a poor move. My hope is that learning to
solve these problems will improve the weakest aspects of my game.
For each position, my goal is not to find the very best move, just
an okay move.

Neil

Date: 08 Feb 2005 02:54:43
From: IglooLegend
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

gromit Wrote:
>
> 4. Convekta (the company that puts out CT-ART 3.0) also has "Chess
> Tactics for Beginners" and "Chess Ttactics for Intermediate Players".
> I've seen the former recommended by Heisman and others, but not a peep
> about the latter.

Here's a link to a review of "Chess Tactics for Intermediate Players
(A Pdf File) from the ChessCafe.com Archives:

http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review453.pd

--
IglooLegend

Date: 08 Feb 2005 00:20:50
From: Danny
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

I have George Renko's Intensive Chess Tactics Training CD, which has a stand
alone chessbase type reader. I think it costs around 20-30 bucks and is
certainly worth it. It covers both beginner (pins, forks, skewers, etc.)
and more advanced tactics (deflection and interposition ideas). I am not
familiar with CT-Art so cannot comment on it.

Danny Hardesty

Date: 07 Feb 2005 20:19:10
From: Chet Marino
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

The CT-art program has the ability to sort the problems by difficulty
which is a nice feature.
Chessbase has the Intensive Course Tactics and Killer Moves by George
Renko - all of these programs are excellent. The interface and
graphics are better in the Chessbase program. You might also want to
consider the Chess Mentor program which is also excellent, they have a
course or two on tactics, one written by Silman...

and On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:20:50 GMT, "Danny" <[email protected] >
wrote:

>I have George Renko's Intensive Chess Tactics Training CD, which has a stand
>alone chessbase type reader. I think it costs around 20-30 bucks and is
>certainly worth it. It covers both beginner (pins, forks, skewers, etc.)
>and more advanced tactics (deflection and interposition ideas). I am not
>familiar with CT-Art so cannot comment on it.
>
>Danny Hardesty
>
>

Chet ino
Westminster, CO

Date: 07 Feb 2005 23:29:17
From: Henri H. Arsenault
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

Date: 09 Feb 2005 14:18:54
From: Ron
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

Does anyone know if CT-ART will work on a Mac running Virtual PC?

Date: 10 Feb 2005 12:39:30
From: Henri Arsenault
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

In article <[email protected] >, Ron
<[email protected] > wrote:

> Does anyone know if CT-ART will work on a Mac running Virtual PC?

It runs just fine on My G5 with VP7.

Henri

Date: 07 Feb 2005 19:52:56
From: Mike Ogush
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 10:35:52 -0500, gromit <[email protected] >
wrote:

>I'm on the verge of splurging on CT-ART 3.0, after trying the demo and
>seeing it recommended in several places (Particularly Dan Heisman's
>"Novice Nook" column and Michael de la Maza's "400 points in 400 days".
>My only concern is that perhaps a lower level of tactics may be more
>beneficial.
>
> I am rated mid-1300s USCF, and am concentrating on trying to
>improve my tactical vision and thought process (I'm realizing that it's
>no good trying to transpose into a winning minor piece endgame if you
>lose material to cheapos). I find most of the problems in Chernev and
>Reinfeld's "Winning Chess: How to See Three Moves Ahead" pretty easily,
>many within seconds. However, Informator's "Encyclopaedia of Chess
>Middlegames" is a challenge...not undoable (several are easy) but
>definitely not suitable for "spot the tactic in 30 seconds" drills.
>What the ECM _is_ good for is correcting my sloppy thought process...for
>many of the problems you have to calculate several defenses to your main
>move (i.e. the lines aren't as clearly forcing).
>
>I've been entering ECM into Chessbase, but it's a slow process, so a
>software solution is appealing. My questions:
>
>1. Would you think that it's better to test basic tactics rapidly, to
>improve how quickly they can be recognized, or to do harder tactics more
>slowly, so that I practice an organized thought process (i.e. get out of
>the habit of playing what Heisman calls "hope chess" and consider all my
>opponent's threats and possible replies)?

I think that you want a recommendation for choosing among three
alternatives:
1. Drill on simple tactics until you can recognize them almost
instantly.
2. Practice and organized thought process. [At the very least
practice recognitio of your opponents threats.
3. Slowly study more complex tactical positions.

Without having seen any of your games I would recommend that you
emphasize 1 and 2 first.

When I have looked over games of players having your rating I find
that the loser most often gets into difficulties by either
a) not noticing what their opponent was threatening after their
move or
b) not being familiar enough with basic tactical patterns.

After you get stronger, studying more complex tactics would be
appropriate.

>
>2. Based on your opinion on the above question, what book or software
>do you recommend?
>

For basic tactical patterns, get a copy of John Bain's Chess Tactics
for Students and make flash cards out of the positions in the book,
leaving off any hints that Bain gives. Then drill yourself on with
the flash cards until it takes only a few seconds to recognize any of
the tactics. If you want an on-line copy of this book (in .cbh format)
you can find one on the DB books site:
http://www.gambitchess.com/semi/db1.htm.
However, in order to get most of the DB books you need to add one to
the collection - see the site for details.

For some good exercises for recognizing threats check out Heisman's
recent book: "Looking for Trouble".

What you should probably also do is play some practice games against
an opponent, who is equal or stronger than you and write down all of
your opponent's threats after each move, then discuss with your
opponent to see if you missed anything that they saw. I would also
have a strong chess program (Fritz, crafty, ...) analyze the games to
see if it could find additional tactics.

>3. How does CT-ART 3.0 compare to Informator's ECM for difficulty? I
>could save $26 and spend the time to enter ECM into the computer....
>

I think that the difficulty level for CT-ART 3.0 is approximately the
same for ECM (1400-2400 Elo). There are some advantages to CT-ART:
1.It gives a difficulty score (in terms of Elo rating for each
exercise)
2. When you run it in testing mode it will give you a tactical
rating score based on your perfromance on the timed exercises.
3.If there are multiple (side) variations for a given positon, there

are usually "side" exercises for these variations as well.
You'll have to decide for yourself if these are worth the money.

If you do decide to create a copy of ECM on-line, you can save
yourself some time and download "tp.zip" from Ossimitz' page of
tactics databases: http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~gossimit/c/tactic.htm.
This database has 879 of the positions from ECM.

You may also want to look at the other databases at this site. The
databases have over 13,000 positions; although there is probably a
certain amount of duplication among them.

>4. Convekta (the company that puts out CT-ART 3.0) also has "Chess
>Tactics for Beginners" and "Chess Ttactics for Intermediate Players".
>I've seen the former recommended by Heisman and others, but not a peep
>about the latter. How do these compare in difficulty to Chernev &
>Reinfeld, or Informator's ECM?
>

I haven't seen Chess Tactics for Intermediate Players, but I have read
on the net that the author is Sergey Ivaschenko who wrote a book
Manual of Chess Combinations Volume 2, which I do have. Both works
have about the same number of problems (1170 vs. 1188) and are both
targeted for Elo 1600 to 2200 so I assume the CD is based on the book.
The book seems to live up to its degree of difficulty rating.

Mike Ogush
USCF 1853

Date: 07 Feb 2005 11:11:37
From:
Subject: Re: Tactics drills: CT-ART 3.0 vs. some alternatives

Hi,

You have certainly got it right when you say that you want to learn
tactics. for someone who is rated below 1300, tactics is the place to
start.

have you looked at www.jeremysilman.com for puzzles and problems
involving tactics? its ceertainly useful. I have found "Art of attack"
to be a great book too. its probably at a higher level, but if you read
it two or three times (one time a month) your game will improve.

Make move routines. follow a ritual before you make a move. I'm not
sure if racing against a clock will help you in chess. you need to
first have your basics in place and then look to sharpen it by racing
against time. do a lot of engings too. books like winning chess endings
is good for you too. I will wait for software based practice till you
cross 1600. if you work on your end game, work on your attacking skills
and reduce your mistakes, you will be able to reach 1600 in 2 or 3
months ... i did it, you can do it too.

good luck