Future content (General)

by malcolm, Sunday, March 26, 2006, 13:48 (7203 days ago) @ Tony Kosten

? The 'prices' thread seems to be moving slightly off subject so I thought I
? would start a new one!
? What would subscribers like to see in the future:
? More strategy, more endgames, more opening explanation?
? More complete games, more puzzles, or something else entirely?
? Incidentally, Alexandria Kosteniuk offered an annotated game of hers each
? month - would you like to see this?

What is it that makes some players, better than others ? When I have discussed games I played with better players it seems to me to be 3 areas - and these are where the content should go:
1) Calculation - what you work out at the board: tactics / ability to calculate variations - keep the tactical exercises. Better players are better at tactics.
2) Knowledge - mainly what you know about openings and endings. I like the idea of learning endings interactively. Openings is more difficult because we don't all play the same ones. Better players know which endings are won/lost and I have to work it out.
3) judgement / intuition. I have sometimes used up lots of time looking at variations in order to decide if I should play a move or not and after the game I find that the higher graded player I was playing didn't really analyse it much at all and just made a judgement based on intuition. e.g. I felt I had enough compensation for the exchange. Any ideas how we improve our judgement of a position ?

One thing you can do on a web site that you can't do with a book, is for students to be able to ask questions if they don't understand - a forum for questions on the content would be good. I think you should concentrate on the things you can do better with a computer than with a book - the tactical execises being one example.

Also IYC could do with a more transparent problem reporting mechanism. If there was a forum where we posted bugs with the site then you could see if someone else had already reported the same problem, and it was being worked on.