@mkubecek said in #46:
> IMHO it's much more thanks to the much easier availability of the study material and (online) practice than thanks to the gamification you praise. A friends recommends me a great book about middlegame strategy? Five minutes later I can read a sample and in few more minutes, I can have it in my reader. Someone refers to a specific game from 1984 Karpov - Kasparov match? Within few seconds I can go through it. I have a free evening and feel like playing a practice game against someone approximately my level? No problem. When I played back in the 80's, it was a completely different world.
I didn't say gamification was why people improved faster... I said traditional methods can be (and have been) improved, and as a result players improve faster nowadays. Gamification is one of many factors, but its main benefit is not improvement speed (although it helps a bit), it's to sustain interest / prevent more people from giving up.
I think the improvement speed has a lot to do with content availability, as you said yourself, including the fact that it's now incredibly easy to hear or read chess analysis by all the best players in the world. And one of the main factors for all that is... online courses. You also don't have to set every position by hand like when using a paper book and although using a real board has some real benefits, the online speed of the learning process is a game changer.
I dsagree with your thoughts about "Training should be fun".
I really just started to train myself via solitaire chess. Solitaire chess and trying to analyze and calculate in and of itself may not necessarily fun. But fun to me is learning. i have found concepts and techniques playing through games, and to me that certainly is fun and enjoyable.
Although some forms of training aren't what I would call fun. They can still provide enjoyment via self-discovery.
@kusoge said in #51:
> Gamification is one of many factors, but its main benefit is not improvement speed (although it helps a bit), it's to sustain interest / prevent more people from giving up.
While I agree that it's a benefit, I suspect that it's also part of the problem. First, while making a game out of some parts of the training makes it easier to maintain focus on them, it will also make it even harder to force oneself to spend time also on the areas which are not fun and not so easy to gamify. Second, for a lot of people - and especially those who "need" gamification as an incentive - the "game score" itself becomes the priority and goal, rather than actual progress. Just check the lichess forum history how many people ask "how to reach 1800/2000/2200/... rating" (or even "how to reach 2000 bullet") and compare it to how many ask "how to improve my positional sense (or endgames or whatever). Or how angry/desperate many users are when they lose 10 points of rating because of (often deemed) cheating or vis maior and learn that they are not going to get it refunded.
An interesting blogpost about the spreading trend of gamification:
https://lichess.org/@/SayChessClassical/blog/are-online-chess-players-trapped-pigeons/JPMnLrTC
> You also don't have to set every position by hand like when using a paper book and although using a real board has some real benefits, the online speed of the learning process is a game changer.
I also thought that using a lichess study to assist me with going through the variants would be extremely helpful (mostly thanks to much easier "reset" back to mainline) but I'm not so sure any more. Somehow shifting the pieces on a physical board makes the stuff stick better. At least for me, it may be different for others.
so i think that you are very right but when i got a chess book by Levy Rozman he did get stronger.
but i thing its cos he played a lot ;)
i played for 4 years and i have a elo of 1401
and im ok with training hard
(thanks for the blog CM @HGabor)
We call it capitalism.
Yeah, it's basically capitalism. We are being advertised false hopes. Sometimes the best advice comes out of out nowhere. For me it was "don't push that pawn until you prepare it"
Great Blog
Hard work is absolutely necessary in chess and I love how you point out that it will be painful. In athletics we correct mechanics and a common response is that it feels weird or off. Training will feel hard and painful but it's a necessity.
Once again great blog
@ZavsRevenge said in #52:
> I dsagree with your thoughts about "Training should be fun".
>
> I really just started to train myself via solitaire chess. Solitaire chess and trying to analyze and calculate in and of itself may not necessarily fun. But fun to me is learning. i have found concepts and techniques playing through games, and to me that certainly is fun and enjoyable.
>
> Although some forms of training aren't what I would call fun. They can still provide enjoyment via self-discovery.
Read the article again he didn't recommend that training should be fun but he was debunking the lies titled players give
My daily training routine goes like this
3 hours studying endgame studies using Harold endgame database
3 hours chesstempo standard hard training
annotating matches played in the 19th century
This work for me, i don't need to pay a coach or buy any courses yet, only bought the endgame database for $50, everything else i need its free on the internet, we are so lucky to be alive in the 21st century.
@Amonanderlake said in #58:
> Read the article again he didn't recommend that training should be fun but he was debunking the lies titled players give
You should probably read what I was specifically replying to instead of being rude. OP said effective training isn't fun in that section. And I disagree with that.