Sheila's Chess School

I heard an interesting podcast last week :-)

ChessDojo in itself is an interesting group project where many adults, perhaps primarily from the US, motivates each other to work on chess. The podcasts are interesting since they discuss different aspects of training and developing. The three presenters, Jesse Kraai, Kostya Kavutskiy and David Pruess rarely agrees, so we get different perspectives and arguments, which I think is very healthy.

I normally listen to all the Dojo-Talks episodes, but I was naturally extra interested when they invited a Norwegian.

In this episode they discuss with Hammer how much work new chess players need to learn. They also cover how to learn openings and how to pick openings. In my opinion, this discussion is relevant for a much larger group than mere beginners. They also discuss the dangers of learning a series of moves without understand the reason behind the moves, and the dilemma in how to divide the limited time one has for chess work.

Hammer is naturally very happy with his new opening course on Chessable, but he is also very open for the arguments that players on lower levels most often loses their games to lack of understanding in the middle game and endgames, and particularly to tactics and therefore should spend more time in those areas. At the same time, you can get the confidence needed to play an over-the-board tournament if you feel you know and opening.

Surprisingly many users through the years have disliked our strict rating policy. Despair no more:

From NOW we only rate your first attempt per day on a problem!

It means that you can try to solve it several times, but if you make more mistakes on the same problem, it does not lead to a loss of rating. However, you cannot gain any rating on that problem that day either.

Of course, if you come back another day and solve the problem correctly, you gain rating. But it's always been like that anyway ;-)

The exception is playing problems where we rate 3 attempts every day. So you can for example win rating on the same problem up to 3 times in a day or lose rating twice times and gain rating once. .

And we have changed another thing you've asked for:

If you cancel a problem without playing a move, if you close the browser or navigate to another page, you no longer lose rating.

PS!

The reason we up to now have rated every attempt is that we think that if you make several wrong attempts on a problem, it means it is harder than I thought originally, and it's rating should increase. But we cannot just increase the rating of the problem without taking away from the user because that will cause an inflation in the system.

So a consequense now will be that hard problems not will increase in rating as quickly as earlier. But we can live with that  :-)

Our database with more than 9,5 million games has been renamed to Sagabase.

Saga is the Norse goddess "who sees" - and knows everything.

I most often listen to C-Squared on the phone, but you should probably watch this particular episode on YouTube if you can. Kasparov's signature body language is worth it.

It was very interesting to to hear about the start of using engines and what he thinks about them now. I am very much on his team when he speaks about how important it is to not develop an addiction to using the engine at the same time as you must learn from it.

Caruana had an interesting experiment where Fritz 14 and Stockfish completely disagreed about a position. When not even Fritz understand a position, why should Caruana? He says "Why am I depending on the numbers that for me practically don't mean a thing."

I grew up with Kasparav as world champion and source of inspiration. If you didn't, it's an hour well spent just to get to know one of the strongest forces in chess ever.