thread: 2005-06-16 : Craft and Innovation
On 2005-06-18, Paul Kimmel wrote:
Vincent, the bit you wrote about the number of hours it takes to develop your craft rings true for me as well. I read the same kind of thing in Michael de la Maza's book, Rapid Chess Improvement—but his estimate was 2400 hours. Let me use de la Maza's book to make a few observations:I was a little shocked that de la Maza's program includes zero theory—no strategy, no opening study, no pawn structure analyses—nothing. His "program" is based on one very simple idea: if you practice seeing how pieces move and interact on the board, you will discover more great moves and make fewer bad moves in your games.
But by "practice" he means, "practice in a structured program designed to improve these skills". And it assumes that there is already an established body of chess knowledge out there for you to draw upon. This is really important. You can't teach yourself to play chess really well. You can only teach yourself to be a patzer.
And the purely practical exercises he suggests that will help you reach your goal are mind-numbingly, excruciatingly boring. Chess players are drawn to theory because they think it will give them a shortcut past this kind of practice. But there is no shortcut. 2400 hours of progressively more intense tactics puzzles and board vision exercises will get you there, but it will also make your eyes bleed.
And the last connection I'd draw to de la Maza's program is that it includes the element of saturation. On the last day of the program, for example, you do what you initially did in 64 days in 24 hours. But still, this is just the study plan—the same old boring stuff—and you go through it seven times in five months.
And all of this also reminds me of something I read in Don Fogg's Way of Bladesmithing: "The apprentice in a Japanese sword smithy spends the first year chopping charcoal." Discipline. Repetition. These are the things that are necessary.
To improve my craft at anything, I don't need to study theory and I don't need to innovate, I need to practice the basics until they become second nature. The question is, "What are the basics of this craft?"
