PRACTICE
And so it goes, in a never ending cycle of playing and learning.
It's necessary to note here that these stages of the cycle often overlap.
You might play in a four round weekend tournament on Saturday, analyze
the games on Sunday and discover (in combination with games you
played at the chess club over the last couple of weeks) that you need to
brush up on your minor piece endgames. So you start working through
some endgame books on your lunch break and, at home in the evening,
setting up some of these positions in your favorite chess program and
playing them against the computer. By the next weekly Wednesday chess
club meeting you're still working through the examples in your endgame
book, so “Study” and “Practice” overlap. Later, you don't get the chance
to review your chess club games until Friday, but you're still not finished
looking at minor piece endings yet, so “Study” and “Analysis” are now
overlapping.
Regardless of the potential overlap, the chess learning cycle tends to
follow the exact clockwise pattern in our previous illustration. You practice
what you know by playing games, you learn what you don't know by
analyzing your games, then you use your study time to fill those gaps in
your knowledge.
SO WHAT DOES A CHESS PROGRAM
HAVE TO DO WITH IT?
A good computer chess program, if you use it right, will help you with all
three areas of the learning cycle.
The “Practice” part is pretty self-evident: you can play chess anytime you
want without trying to find a human opponent. (There are other aspects
to this “Practice” angle, too, which we'll look at in the next chapter.) The
“Analysis” angle is potentially the single most important reason to own
a good chess program: the chess engine can analyze your games and
help you spot problems in your chess play (and, if you've done the “selfanalysis” part right, may just confirm what you've already spotted when
you went over your own games). Chess programs, depending on their
individual features, can help with various aspects of the “Study” part of
the cycle, often containing searchable databases in which you can find
hundreds of replayable sample games, along with the ability to set up a
position and have a strong chess engine analyze it, chess tree functions
to help spot problems in the early part of your game, and so on.
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