In "A star is made", the New York Times discusses the reason, why people become good at something. The article describes results from a new study on an old topic: talent vs. practice using elite soccer players as example. The majority of "good" soccer players is born in the first three months of the year. The simple conclusion from this fact would be that the birthdate determines the chances to play professional soccer. The study by Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, however, comes to a different conclusion: Practice is more important than raw talent.

From the viewpoint of the chess beginner who wants to learn play chess, the most interesting part of the study is, that the way practice is done also matters. Training methods that give immediate feedback are considered as most effective. What is the consequence for chess training? Studying tactics by solving tactical puzzles, should be good because feedback is provided after every tactics problem. But what about playing chess? The study results make me wonder, if correspondence chess is really good for learning chess strategy. Learning strategic thinking surely requires more than just looking at one combination like in tactical problems. Playing many complete games is necessary to acquire chess strategy skills and the ability to correctly evaluate chess positions. In correspondence chess games, however, games stretch out over many weeks, giving no immediate feedback. Taking the results of above cited study seriously, playing slow over-the-board games is therefore a more efficient way to improve in chess than correspondence chess.

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written by RoostH, March 28, 2008

Based on this article, how much you play OTB and how much correspondence one? Thanks

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written by Sciurus, March 29, 2008

Well, I mostly play correspondence chess and take quite a while to make a move, as you might have noticed yourself. I played only in 4 OTB tournaments so far, but that is 4 more than I had under my belt while I wrote this post. I also play "live" chess at the Internet Chess Club.

The main reason for this is time. While I can find a couple of minutes to make a move in a correspondence game almost every game, I have a hard time to free up enough space in my schedule to play a slow (>1 hour) game. It is even worse regarding OTB tourneys, which take a whole day.

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