Teoria De La Mejora En El Ajedrez (Inglés)

Novice Nook

The Theory of Chess Improvement
Quote of the Month: Even if they were born with incredible intellectual gifts, it still required about 8,000 practice hours to realize those gifts. – Kenneth A. Kiewra Ph.D. and Thomas O’Connor Ph.D. in “Developing Young Chess Masters: What are the Best Moves,” Chess Life, May 2005. Improvement at chess and similar activities consists of addingpositives or subtracting negatives. It’s as simple as that – and yet the ramifications are enormous. This simple idea suggests the following:

Novice Nook
Dan Heisman

The Theory of Chess Improvement Definitions:
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Learning new ideas and chess patterns are examples of adding positives. Identifying your mistakes and misconceptions, and taking steps to minimize them are subtracting negatives.

Toachieve improvement, your efforts must include a balance of:
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A) theory and practice, and B) adding positives and subtracting negatives (within your theory or study).

“A” states that you must achieve some balance between theory and study and practice and play (see the Novice Nooks The Road to Carnegie Hall and An Improvement Plan.) By “some balance” I don’t necessarily mean a perfect 5050 divisionin time spent, but rather a sufficient ratio to address your study and practice needs. If you study and don’t play, you can’t apply what you are learning; and if you play but don’t study, you are likely to keep making the same mistakes repeatedly. In order for chess improvement to be effective you should first learn something, apply what you learn by playing, learn from your mistakes during play,and then repeat the process as much as possible to provide maximum effectiveness. “B” states that your theory and study time must consist of both learning new ideas and patterns, and also eradicating your mistakes and misconceptions. If you study in such a way as to mostly add positives or only subtract negatives, you will eventually get diminishing returns on your time. When you reach a“roadblock” it is usually because you have to rebalance your efforts. The above ideas are very important. For example, they help explain why you
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Novice Nook

can’t get better by just studying chess books. To improve you need both practice (slow games and some fast) and theory (adding new ideas and patterns, and identifying and minimizingmistakes). Forgoing any ingredient can cause a lack of progress, and continuing to focus on one element will result in little progress. At many points in their career, a player needs to subtract negatives in order to improve. That is why all good players either took extensive lessons or had strong chess friends to help them. Let’s consider what it means to add a positive or subtract a negative inmore detail. Adding a positive means that you learn a new principle or new pattern (opening, tactical, endgame, etc.), or read an annotated game, or possibly even discover a better way to manage your time or your thought process. Subtracting a negative means that you replace a misconception or a bad thought process with something better or more correct; for example, if you think that all pieces,on the average, are worth exactly an integer multiple of a pawn (bishops/knights=3, rooks=5, queens=9), then that is no more correct than thinking everyone in your town is exactly an integer multiple of a foot tall! Sure, those numbers are easy for a beginner to remember, but they are not at all the actual averages. So, on the average, trading a bishop and a knight for a rook and a pawn is amistake because bishops and knights are both worth slightly more than three pawns (on the average)! Or suppose you play too fast because you don’t have a good thought process, or you never realized that pacing yourself to use almost all of your time is a better way to manage your time. Then once you achieve a better thought process or attain proper pacing, you are subtracting a negative (playing...