Michael De La Manza: Rapid Chess Improvement



Playing over grand master games is well and good, but this alone probably won’t catapult my rating in the 1800+ region. Somewhat by accident, I came across Michael de la Manza’s Rapid Chess Improvement. Well, first I was skimming some articles on Chesscafe.com, and suddenly I had two most promising columns on my screen, namely:

400 points in 400 Days, Part I
400 points in 400 Days, Part II

Later I read the book, which elaborates on some aspects, but if you have read the two articles above, the book will not teach you much new. But what the book or articles do is something rather unusual: attacking chess instruction and calling it unsuitable for a variety of reasons.

De La Manza's key insights are:


1) Chess knowledge is not the same as chess ability
…which is probably familiar to you if you know about “weak squares”, yet still leave pieces en prise.

2) GM instruction is sub-optimal at the class level
…fairly logical too. Top players are too remote from the needs of average players.

3) Quick fixes work at the class level
…and those quick fixes are chess vision and tactics training.

The book seems largely motivated by his frustration with chess instruction and disparaging attitudes by more experienced players who told him that he would never improve. Yet, his example alone is ample proof that maybe just the method of instruction was wrong. He himself rose from 1321 USCF to 1756 USCF in his first year, and after the second year he was at 2041 USCF. Those are substantial gains, but what Michael de la Manza considers “rapid chess improvement” is an increase in one’s rating of 200+ points per year, which is still very substantial.

Key aspects of his method are chess vision drills, i.e. simple setups on the board which should improve your ability to see skewers and forks immediately. This is a great method. I remember when I started out I viewed all pieces in isolation, and only after studying Tarrasch’s The Game of Chess and especially the section of tactics, I suddenly began to see lines and diagonals. They literally “popped out”. Needless to say, a basic knowledge of tactics went a long way of losing my patzer status.

Here are some examples of his chess vision drills:

Here you move the rook in concentric circles around the king. With every move of the rook, you ask yourself whether there is a way a white queen could be placed so that you would win the rook (without getting captured in return). Those drills might be relatively simple, but you can always do it as quickly as possible.

But once we move to the knight, the typical beginner to intermediate player might break a sweat. Try calculating the path the knight has to take from one square to another, and for added fun calculate all minimal paths:

De la Manza goes into greater detail in the drills, and in Rapid Chess Improvements he has many more suggestions how to improve your chess vision should you get bored.

Once you are done with the drills, which you should nonetheless repeat from time to time, you move on to “Seven Circles”, i.e. you get about 1,000 tactical problems, ranging from easy to difficult, and solve them seven times. The first circle should take 64 days (how many problems is this per day?), the second 32, and so on. But not only does the number of days per circle decrease, the time allotted per problem does to and goes from 10 to 5 minutes and so on.

If this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is.

I’m convinced of De la Manza’s approach, mainly because I felt that my game only improved after studying tactics, and I still lose games due to tactical oversights. But let’s see how much fun it will be to put in well over an hour a day. ;)

In any case, read Rapid Chess Improvement or the two articles I have linked above for the proverbial kick in the butt. For about a week now I have been working on tactical problems, but more on that in another posting. (De la Manza recommends a software program called CT-ART for the “Seven Circles”, but it’s only available on Windows. There are some other options, though, which I will talk about.)