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BGonline.org Forums
Lessons I haven't learned
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Lessons I haven't learned (Chase)
Date: Monday, 14 January 2013, at 10:36 p.m.
Improving your backgammon skill is a lot like learning to play a musical instrument. When you tackle a new piece of music that is at the outer edge of your level of competence, you must initially go over the piece with a lot of conscious attention to details, playing slowly and deliberately. With enough practice, you eventually master the piece, which means that it flows out of you naturally and instinctively without the need for conscious attention.
The reason I draw this analogy is to emphasize that you should expect that it will take some time for a particular lesson to sink in. Sometimes I hear or read people saying something like, "I'll never make that mistake again!" But in most cases, you will, in fact, make the same mistake again. I know this because I spend a lot of time going over old material (whether books or my own notes) and in many positions I make the exact same mistake over and over again. It really is the exact same mistake because it is exactly the same position and the same wrong play that I choose.
The process I use to learn is roughly as follows.
1. Articulate the mistake verbally. This is a big step in the battle. The more accurately and succinctly you can state your misconception, the better. An example that I have mostly, but not entirely, eliminated from my game is: I don't blitz aggressively enough and get distracted by moving my back checkers around rather than attacking on my side of the board.
2. Practice, not just once but repeatedly. This might mean playing out a position repeatedly, or it might mean collecting examples from your matches and filing them together and coming back to study them periodically. It's important to not to limit yourself to a single intensive practice session; you must also remind yourself of the lesson just around the time that it's about to disappear from your short-term memory. Not too long ago I found that I was making a lot of "inexplicable" blunders in my matches against the computer—blunders where I recognized immediately afterwards that I was making a familiar kind of error but somehow made it anyway. I worked out that one of the main problems was that I was spending too much time studying positions on paper and not playing frequently enough. So I increased my playing frequency. Then, for example, I would get into a blitz just as I was about to forget my aforementioned weakness. I would reach for a back checker, but then catch myself, and be able to correct the mistake in real time. The frequency of my "inexplicable" blunders dropped significantly.
3. Don't be afraid to overcorrect. Let's say that I figure out that I tend to undervalue priming plays. One approach is to make a slight adjustment to my play and hope that that's good enough. By and large, I find that this tends to be less effective than making a large adjustment, even if the adjustment overshoots. By overshooting, you put both upper and lower bounds on the issue and can then zero in effectively on the right balance point. If you just make small adjustments then you may never get there, and you won't know even if you do get there.
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