Nobody doubts that intuition in chess exists. Chess masters and trainers Franco Masetti and. and workbooks that contain numerous exercises. I successfully trained my brain to automatically trigger certain themes after seeing these positions so many times and through the course of cycling through them, I could automate the filtering process to see the relevant themes pretty quickly.1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners. For example, I might have seen a problem and immediately thought, "Okay this is a fork that's possible because of the pinned f7-pawn." Or "Yep this is that one that ends in a king-queen skewer but we need to trade minor pieces first so remember move-order carefully!" Any given tactical chess position might have many themes going on but it's up to us to find the relevant ones that actually accomplish something in the position. I think these "triggers" are one of the takeaway lessons. I certainly do have the patterns and ideas in my head though and different things would get triggered each time I saw the next problem. Can I re-create all of them on a board without looking at the book? Of course not. It's amazing that you can log in 1001 chess positions in your brain. I didn't get them all right but every one was familiar to me. In retrospect, it's very cool that I had some memory of basically every single position. I was much more diligent in the morning but as the day went on, I'd guess maybe a hundred times my eyes wandered to see the hint. I tried my best to never use the hints under each puzzle. Of the second half 509, I doubled my incorrect number to 32.
Of the first 492, I only missed 16 problems. Additionally, my speed increased as I was approaching 1001 (and 9pm!) and I missed a few I normally wouldn't have because of it. Although the first half of the book is the easier half because they're categorized by motif so that must have really helped me. I noticed that I missed quite a bit from the second half of the book which was not what I was expecting since I thought those would have been fresher in my memory. I had a few beers afterwards to unwind but even then, I remember having a hard time going to sleep. I was definitely exhausted towards the end, which was a blur to be honest. "Fresh" isn't the best word to use there actually. When I finished, I had a list of about twenty problems that I circled back to and most of them were much easier when I had a "fresh" set of eyes on them. It was pretty helpful to keep a list of problems to come back to so I wouldn't get bogged down staring at one for long periods of time. I'm aware this book is on chessable but.uh.this is how I did it, haha. It was a slog to wade through the material in this manner but I knew what I was getting into so whatever! This method helps me take my time and limit guessing.
The way I did it required looking at the puzzle, getting the solution, then checking the solutions page in another window, finding the problem number and verifying my answer. It'd be a luxury to see a single puzzle, play my move, have my accuracy tracked, and have the next problem present itself automatically. If this was an app or on a website, I'd surely be able to go a bit faster.
Going through a physical book (well, PDF) is slow. I started at 9am and finished around 8:30pm.