Quite simply my tactics suck. I can see the one or two movers fairly well, but anything more complicated than that leaves me staring into the tactical abyss, groping around in the dark searching for a guiding light. Something has to be done if I’m ever going to move my way up the ladder.

Looking around at how others have gone about studying tactics, I’ve decided to give the ‘Seven Circles‘ method a go. It works on the basis of repetition to repeatedly hammer the concepts into your head and many have had excellent results using this method. There is nothing to say it will work wonders for me, but it looks as good a method as any.

The idea is to work through a set tactical problems slowly, a few each day. Once completed, repeat them, but do twice as many each day in half the time. By the 7th circle they will all be done really quickly in one day.

The first few circles teaches you to understand the tactical concepts in each problem by spending plenty of time working them out. In the last few circles a very short solving time is used and relies largely on your pattern recognition to solve them.

I’ve actually been working on the circles for nearly 4 weeks now but wanted to see if I could stick them before posting about them here. I’m using CT-Art Levels 10 through to 60 to give me a set of 1039 problems with the first circle of 64 days. I’m averaging 18 problems a day, slightly ahead of the required 16/day for the first circle.

The last 2 or 3 circles are certain to be hell, but if I can get through them all I should have completed them just before the new season starts. Whether I can flex my newly toned tactical muscle in OTB play remains to be seen.

This entry was posted by Dave on Sunday, 25th May 2008 at 8:56 am and is filed under Chess Improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.