Insanely Hard...
It has now been a little over a week since we hosted a session with GM Ramesh at The Chess Gym. It was an inspiring talk about calculation.
has written a great newsletter about some of his reflections on Ramesh’s advice to do 4 days of solving studies 3-4 hours to improve your calculation.
What Ramesh said in connection to the benefits of solving studies was that a notable challenge in improving calculation is overcoming mental barriers. Since our brain discourages us from the sustained effort it takes to calculate.
Players often encounter phases where they either give up too quickly, convince themselves prematurely that they've found the solution, or lose hope in their ability to solve the position at all.
GM Ramesh identifies these as significant hurdles to progress. I can say I have experienced all of them. He very fittingly used a gym analogy to explain his thoughts about stretching your mind and overcoming these barriers.
Say if someone is going to the gym regularly and lifting weights for many years, if you ask him, lifting weights is difficult. He will say it's not difficult, isn't it? Because he has developed the habit of going to gym regularly and initially it would have been difficult for him. But once the habit is formed.
Since he has been doing it regularly, it just becomes a routine thing, isn't it? But for someone who has not gone to the gym at all.
And we suddenly take him to a gym and ask him to lift some, let's say, 5K dumbbell. They could struggle a bit, isn't it? But for someone who is doing this regularly, he can lift 20 kilos very easily.
So you get my point. So for an untrained mind, chess is difficult.
For a mind for someone who has poor work ethics, chess is difficult, so someone who is working in the proper way and doing it regularly. I would say chess is very enjoyable.
And very challenging.
— GM Ramesh
The talk was a reminder for me to work harder and not let my mind become accustomed to doing only the easy tasks. I liked the advice Nate gave in his newsletter: “Once a week, do a hard calculation session, a little longer than what you’re comfortable with.”
Insanely Hard Mate in Two Problems
The talk also motivated me to continue with my mate on two projects from last year. The project is also all about finding the hardest problems.
I have selected 500 problems. I decided to add an extra layer of analysis with a Chess Complexity score created in the following way by Caleb Wetherell (pawnalyze.com):
“I created a dataset of FENs mapped to the loss in Win % from a GM that made a move in that position (classical OTB games only). Underlying this tool is a neural network (AI, deep learning, yada yada) that has been trained on 100,000 chess moves made by grandmasters. The model has learned to predict the complexity of a position by learning the expected change in Win % after a move is made, as measured by Stockfish 16 at depth 20.”1
This extra layer gave me one last parameter to determine the final problems for the book. Here is a page from the book:
For the final selection, I used:
- chess complexity calculation by Elocator
- nodes and time spent to find mate in two for Stockfish 16
- the search depth reached before finding mate in two
- complexity in terms of pieces present on the board
- unique checkmating final moves for White
It has taken many hours of computer analysis to reach the final selection. It will be a pretty special book in that way.
I feel pretty confident the book will be excellent calculation training material for chess players who want to challenge themself.
/Martin
https://www.pawnalyze.com/elocator
Hey Martin, glad to read that you found a good use for Elocator! And, thanks for giving my work some extra eyeballs. Cheers!