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Chessville
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A Review of
We all want to make the most out of the precious time we devote to chess study. There are many ways that computer technology has helped the chess player, and the realm of chess study is no exception. Most people study tactics by buying a book like Reinfeld’s 1001 Winning Combinations or Seirawan’s Winning Chess Tactics, etc. While the text based information in these volumes is important and required, the actual learning only happens with the practice, i.e. staring at the exercises until you “get it”…. This will of course work, but with so much information to process in the understanding of chess concepts, it stands to reason that a program that can help organize, present, and (especially important for learning) interactively guide and correct, can be a great learning accelerator. Playing better chess is the goal, making
the most of your study time is the means of achieving that goal! The Organization of the Material To begin with, CT-Art has a collection of over 1200 tactical exercises in its library with an additional 1000 supplemental positions relating to the 1200 exercises. This is a tremendous amount of material, and the structure as well as the content is rich and complete. The exercises can be sorted by Tactical methods, Combinational Motifs, or by Grades of difficulty. To give you an idea as to how complete this material is, there are 77 different groupings of “Tactical Methods”, with an average of about 15 exercises per group.
As you can see, there are general subject headings then groupings of exercises under each sub heading, e.g. under the heading Weakness of a file, one subheading spanning exercises 107 to 169 is The back rank. The individual groupings are organized from easiest to hardest, and when you feel ready you can move from practice to test. In addition you can get a handy scan of the entire group by pictogram, allowing you to see instantly what you have done, and what is left to be done in a specific area. On the multi view below the color of the triangle is the side to play, blue numbers connote difficulty, and red numbers are my score out of 100, penalties for time and number of errors are factored.
1200 exercises is a LOT of material, being
able to find what you want is important, and the navigation utility is
excellent. The Learning Experience CT Art takes you into a logically and carefully thought out “learning sequence”. Within a group of exercises, you begin with the easiest examples, building a skill set, then move to more challenging exercises. This progression deepens the learning experience with reinforcement and repetition, leaving you with a solid understanding with which to solve the harder problems. If you make a mistake, CT-Art has a progression of help functions to bring you back to the basics and give you the keys to solving the problem (back to repetition and reinforcement!). Unlike other tactics books and programs I have experienced, the strength of this method is that it aims in a very focused way on building a specific pattern recognition set, and drives that knowledge in so it can become second nature. Here are some screenshots of this progressive technique:
After my first mistake on this exercise CT Art points
out the lines of influence within the position,
If this visual feedback is not enough, and once again I make a mistake on my next move, CT-Art takes the visual help to a much higher level by presenting you with a simpler version of the very same tactic for you to solve. Notice, CT-Art did not give you a hint, or the solution, it gave you a simpler version of the same problem to solve, driving in the pattern recognition and forcing you to deepen that knowledge by having to solve the problem yourself in its simpler form, then re-apply the solution to the harder example. This is a very powerful teaching method!! If, even on this simplified version of the
tactic, I still don’t get it, the piece to be moved then flashes, and if
even that is not enough, the software then, and only then completes the
moves for you in an animated sequence… but not in the actual tactic, only on
the simpler one... you now have to go back and actually apply this lesson
into the tactic you are working on. Counterplay and Variations Another very interesting feature of CT-Art is that frequently there are counterplay opportunities offered. This means that after just having figured out how to destroy the opponent, you are challenged to take the opposite side of the board and must now figure out how to defend from that very same position. This is a feature I found both fun and instructive. Another great feature is that you can go
from the position right into the Crafty chess engine and play out variations
directly. Rating Every teacher knows that feedback is an essential tool to encourage and evaluate the learning process. CT-Art has done a great job of this by keeping track of you as a user, and by keeping great statistics on your progress in the form of an approximate Elo rating for you. I found the rating CT Art kept for me was actually quite accurate (no… I will NOT disclose my rating here!). Also, you can get an overall scan of your progress across the entire group with a nice graphic.
At $26.00 US, roughly the cost of your average hardcover chess book, I would
say this course is quite a bargain! I have taken several tactics courses
and worked with many books on tactics (see my recent review of
303 Tricky Chess
Tactics & 303 Tricky Checkmates). I would definitely
recommend CT-Art to any serious student of the game below a rating of 2100,
and even for those above, it is probably worth it as refresher training. As
you can see from the tight organization of the material as well as the
multi-staged learning experience, you as the student can make the most out
of your study time by working with a program like this, rather than just
staring at a paper based position from a book! [Index of Convekta Ltd. Product Reviews]
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