SquirrelChess.com - Train slow, improve fast?

Train slow, improve fast?

Written by Sciurus

Friday, 10 November 2006

A recent post at J'adoube's blog and Dan Heisman's latest column at Chesscafe.com inspired me to rethink the merits of playing slow chess games. While the idea of playing slow chess to improve is not new, J'adoube argues that it is also important to take your time to analyze tactical training problems deeply. I have been thinking along similar lines since my rating at the Chess Tactics Server stopped improving. For a while, it was increasing consistently, but then it stopped moving. I believe the reason for this is that my habits changed. Until a month ago, I took each problem seriously and looked even harder at the problems I failed to solve. But then I got lazy and skipped most failed attempts without ever putting effort into understanding the solution. This points to the direction that doing thousands of tactics puzzles does not do any good without carefully analyzing the mistakes made while going through the problems. This conclusion is trivial but it seems that at least I have to constantly remind myself of that to prevent drifting into bad habits.


Photo by Harold Jarche

J'adoube also used the same arguments against playing

blitz chess. To my surprise, I found somewhat different arguments in Dan Heisman's column, who is well known for advocating slow time controls. Mr. Heisman argues that it all depends on the measure for improvement: how much one learns from playing one game or per unit playing time: Assuming that the learning effect of a fast game is only 80% of that of a slow game that takes twice as much time to play, he argues that faster time controls bring more improvement per unit time. If this would be true, then playing blitz chess would be great for people like me who cannot scrape together as much training time as they would like to.

I believe that playing fast or doing chess tactics puzzles quickly is not a bad thing per se [I have to admit that I never played much blitz chess myself, but started an experiment with myself as lab-rat playing a couple of (still relatively slow) blitz chess games on the Internet Chess Club (ICC).]. While I agree with many other people that playing slow chess games is good for improving, I am convinced that analyzing your mistakes is even more important than doing things slowly. And analyzing a game takes time, regardless how fast or slow the game was played. The errors made during blitz chess games may be more severe and easier to find even for chess beginners with limited analytic chess skills, but at the end I believe that I do not gain any time by playing more and faster games if I continue to analyze my games, which is probably the most crucial part for real long-term improvement.

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