12/26/2005

Personal Chess Trainer

So I recieved my license code for Personal Chess Trainer today and as I have posted before I intend to use it for the circles starting on New Year's Day. The trouble is, how exactly will I work it.

Personal Chess Trainer has 6 Tactics Modules, 51 Units per module and roughly 90 (some have 60) Excercises per unit. Which gives you about 27000 excercises, using roughly 5000 unique problems. MDLM calls for 1000 problems starting with easy, ending at OMG HARD and doing them 7 times.

PCT is set up to begin at mate in 1, and move to hard, but the 27000 excercises include built in repetition. Basically repetition is built into the program but not in the full circle, repeat full circle style. Its more like.. Do 60 problems, do 60 slightly harder problems, repeat 30 of the previous 60. Which supposedly builds the patterns into your memory in time for you to make use of them when you get to the hardest problems that require you to know the patterns in order to solve them.

Anyway I think my "circles" Are going to consist of my working through all 27000 excercises PCT has to offer in its Tactics modules, in order, between now and May 7th. Well at least thats the goal. The good news is, I can do the first 300 or so in an hour as they are mostly mate in 1's that I can spot pretty easy.

Any suggestions on using this particular program? Anyone with experience with it please leave some comments.

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So.....
In order to keep pace I would need to do 2.4ish "units" or 225ish "excercises" a day, over the 127 days. However I told my wife that I would only tie up 5 days a week soo that cuts me down to 90 "problem solving days" over the course of 127 calendar days. Which puts me at 4.4 "units" per day, or 405 problems a day.

That seems really bold. In testing the PCT program before and after I licensed it I've found that by Module 1, unit 7 it took me 24 minutes to do a unit. As of Mod 1, unit 7 I'm just starting to have to think about the problems. Most of the problems prior to that are mate in 1's which are mostly trivial.

4.4 units at 24 minutes per unit would be 106 minutes a day. Although we can expect as the units get harder the time per unit will increase.

I had planned on 2hrs a day, 5 days a week. Given what I know right now I would say theres no way I make it through by May 7th. We will see. I will try to keep on schedule. As the difficulty in the excercises increases I will get back to you on my success.

2 comments:

King of the Spill said...

I don't have PCT, but I thought the demo looked good.

27000 sounds like more problems than you can shake a stick at. The one thing I wish I had done with TCT's 2600 problems is break it up more, like groups of around 500 problems, thus getting more milestones and breaks along the way. If I were doing CT-Art, which is more difficult than TCT, I probably would make the groups even smaller. That's my opinion. It seems that everyone gets REALLY sick of doing problems at some point, and having less to do to get to the end of something seems better to me.

Jeff said...

I should say thats 27000 exercises.
Its supposed to be ~5000 unique problems, with built in repetition.