Future content (General)

by juggernaut, Thursday, April 13, 2006, 01:12 (6946 days ago) @ malcolm

? ? 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.

A per point number three, judgement /intuition, I believe this to be my weakest area. To judge a move/ course of action, you have to know what your judgement of your current position is. You then have to compare how your position has changed after the move/course of action. It sounds ridiculously simple but knowing/acknowlegding/grading the positional/dynamic elements to judge the position is the tricky part in my books. Maybe more detailed focus on that would be benficial to us all. I mean with verbal explanation (e.g."exploiting the new weakness blck created on e7 avoiding the first threat on e6"), not with signs like +=/ -+ .