👨‍🏫 Data Before Meaning, Conceptualization and Rating Part 6 (Insight)

0:00Welcome to Chess Visualization with Aidan Rainer. I'm Aidan and on Fridays we deep dive into a particular insight about visualization, conceptualization, and the adult chess brain to aid and improvement and enjoyment of the game. For more insights like these, you can find my backlog of articles at don't-move-until-you-see.it. Enjoy! This episode is part 6 of the ongoing conceptualization and rating series. It's quite a lot of preamble to get to this point and I definitely recommend you go back and look at the last several inside episodes on the Fridays to get yourself caught up with everything that's happened in this series so far. But make sure to listen to the aside because it covers a mistake that I made with the first couple of parts that will help those make a bit more sense in context of the rest of it.

1:02Part 6 is coming to you now. Hi, it's Aidan. If 1200 is the most common rating for a new coaching student to reach out to me, then 1800 is a close second. To be pushing up and through that 1700 to 2000 space requires a big jump in conceptualization strength and clarity. In this area, you're now playing against opponents who are more likely than not to punish lapses in your awareness or any messy thinking. All of the things we've discussed in the previous couple parts about the position in front of us and dormant ideas still apply. But the big difference when hitting this level is the intense clarity that calculations now demand. Often deep or branching calculations tracking large transformations in the position. To navigate this rating range, you need to correctly assess all the ways the moves you're calculating change the position. Then accurately evaluate at the end if the resulting position is good for you or not evaluation is its own topic.

2:06So keep the focus on the first bit here today. You need serious attention to detail and serious flexibility of thought. Missed details will crush you. Frames will break you. To illustrate what I mean, here's a story from a tournament game of one of my coaching students in this rating range. They were playing white and since they had a strong attack against the black g7 pawn. Their goal was to get that pawn out of the way and overwhelm the king. So they calculated it out. They found a pathway through everything looked good until they noticed their opponent could play Bishop F6 protecting the g7 pawn again. It screwed up the whole plan. My student couldn't find a way to deal with it so they gave up on that line and played a quiet a move instead. Reviewing the game afterward, he saw that he should have gone for his original line. It was the best line by a mile. But to spot why the line worked required a level of detail and flexibility he couldn't muster in the moment.

3:12Because Bishop F6 did mess up his plan, his entire attack on g7 no longer worked. He was correct about that. But the Bishop moving to F6 also meant it was no longer on the e7 square. And that meant the pawn on c5 would become undefended. And that meant that his queen could take it with a fork on the black rook and knight winning him a piece. You can see the similarity between this story and the one from part five. My student fell victim to a frame over his thinking. The amount of information we need to process as we calculate through a complex middle game is staggering to help us filter out what's important from what's not we often become slaves to the point. We enter into a line usually with some point. It could be an attack on the g7 pawn or to open up a file whatever. As we push deeper into that line and the pressure on our seven slots of working memory ramps up the point becomes a filter.

4:15We start to see details that obviously relate to the point and ignore or missed details that don't this happens at all levels of the game. But it really bites us as we're trying to push to and through 1800. The margins for error get a lot smaller the close you get to 2000 and one ignored detail one incorrectly filtered point can be the difference between an accurate calculation and a missed opportunity. The answer is to develop a much lighter relationship with the point. Commit to data before meaning. We'll make the clearest most flexible calculations if the following things are true. Your working memory can handle the information without overloading. You have a running log in your mind of the dormant ideas and alignments present in the position. On each move you're aware of the four things all of the ways that a move changes the position and how they interact with the dormant ideas.

5:16If you're not familiar with the four things I'll put an article in the show notes where you can look that up. It's highly worth checking out if that's not a familiar term to you. And you maintain a fluid light attachment to the point always ready in case other ideas open up instead. To improve in this area takes a full commitment across all of your chest study. This isn't something you can do a few exercise about never think about otherwise and actually see improvement on. Eventually you get so good at it that you don't even notice you doing it from master level player the four things are just the move. Alignments and other dormant ideas adjust the position. They pick up those details and every move under enough pressure even they will slip sometimes they're human to 99% of the time they're aware of all that stuff. That should be our aim to we probably won't get to 99% consistency anytime soon but even small improvements here can make a big difference in your charge for 1800 or 2000.

6:20We must understand that our brain wants to filter a lot of that detail out frame our thinking down and that we won't notice in the moment when it's occurred. Whenever you see a piece move or consider moving a piece ask what it actually does before accepting your brain's assessment of what it means. Don't jump to thinking about your response or their response or your goal slow it down gather the data then decide on meaning. To start your journey towards this here's a few places to begin. First practice the four things with composed mate and two studies now the four things are might as well actually give a quick rundown of the four things here four things are the four things that change with every move. That is that is square empties that a piece leaves that a square fills and that a piece arrives all four of those things affect the position in different ways. Composed mate and two exercises rock because there are fantastic error feedback loop for our recognition of the four things you absolutely have to be aware of all four of them on every move if you're going to find the mate in two.

7:31My personal favorite place to get them is the excellent rewire your chest brain by Cyrus like the waller highly recommend this one I'll put a link in the show notes to that. To do some intense calculation practice I'm a big fan of isolate and intensify as an approach to learning and improvement if you want to get good at the four things and remaining flexible in your in game calculations then practice them with higher difficulty calculations where all of those things really really matter. Finding good fodder for this is tricky but there's some excellent stuff in remesh rb's improve your chest calculation book I use the exercises in that book regularly with coaching students from this rating range they force exactly the awareness and flexibility that were after that link to that in the show notes to. And three use find the blender exercises and analyze games blindfolded at the mention of find the blender exercises I can feel all the don't move members shuddering through the screen find the blender is a blindfold exercise style on the site and every now and then on the podcast that runs you through a series of moves from the starting position.

8:42Somewhere in that sequence one of the players will make a blender and their opponent will not punish them for your job is to spot the blender and find the punishment and they are hard. But they also train exactly the kind of awareness we need for this level handling sequences of moves for things dormant ideas keeping flexibility of thought there's no where you'll solve some of the harder ones if you're framing too hard. If you don't have access to the site you can get a similar experience by analyzing games blindfolded either record yourself reading the moves of a game if you're familiar with this podcast which you obviously are then kind of already know how to do that and what you should be aiming for or read a pg n taking pains to understand every move track the dormant ideas and try to analyze the game in the way you might analyze a game you could see. If all of that seems to hard just focus in on this podcast and really really work on understanding each of those positions as you go that's going to do a lot of the work.

9:46Now progress through this rating range is slow the patient with yourself as you train the honest with yourself as you review your games and hang in there you've got this here's to the journey. you