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Prioritizing Position Study?

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Wednesday, 16 September 2015, at 5:30 p.m.

In Response To: Prioritizing Position Study? (RobertFontaine)

In principle, the procedure is simple.

1. Identify something on the edge of your understanding.

2. Work to make a permanent improvement in that area.

It sounds to me that the problem you're having with reviewing match errors is that you're not using them to achieve the two-step process above. "Going off the rails" presumably refers to your egregious errors. But you must surely make a number of sizable errors where you don't really understand what's going on. These are the positions you must focus on. Here are some suggestions.

a. Don't delude yourself into thinking that just because you can dream up an imaginary story why the bot play is correct that you "understand" the position and have learned something. I find that this tendency is a major reason why players fail to get the most out of a bot. Almost any play in any tricky position can be justified with some plausible story. Coming up with such stories is of little value on its own, because the next time a similar decision comes up, you'll be able to concoct plausible stories for all the alternatives, and you won't know which one to believe.

b. To keep yourself honest, vary the position in different ways to see if your just-so story for why the play is correct holds up under cross-examination.

c. Once you think you have found something real to learn, work hard to burn this lesson into your brain permanently. How you do this depends on your personal learning style. Maybe you need to play out the position repeatedly. Maybe you need to make flash cards and review them frequently. The method doesn't matter so long as you achieve the goal of learning something permanently. This might seem like a lot of work to achieve only a tiny improvement in your understanding, when there is so much out there to be learned. But if you don't take the time to learn things permanently, and jump from one topic to another without taking the time for permanent learning, you'll be stuck forever in the same spot.

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