Syntactic structures

I think Heisman hit it almost perfectly in his article The Big Five:

The first and most important step to becoming proficient at tactics is understanding safety and counting, followed by repetitious study of very simple problems, those involving counting and single motifs (pins, double attacks, removal of the guard, etc.). Acquisition of this skill usually requires the kind of drills suggested by Michael de la Maza in his two-part 400 Points in 400 Days article for Chess Café. The big contention I have with Michael’s method is that he suggests repetition of tactics of all levels, while I feel that concentrating on just the easiest motifs is sufficient. My reason is that many, if not most, difficult combinations contain permutations of basic motifs. Therefore learning basic tactical motifs “cold” in order to do harder problems better is similar to learning multiplication of one-digit numbers as the basis for all multiplication and even higher mathematics.

I am seeing this over and over in the complicated phase 5 problems in CTB. Without the first 4 stages, no way I'd get many of these problems.

However, there is one way I'd differ with Heisman: even though combinations involve the simpler motifs, that doesn't mean you should only study the simple motifs. While seeing the simple motifs is necessary for combinatorial play, it is not sufficient. Stretching the math analogy, if the basic elements of math were sufficient, you should be an expert at factoring prime numbers after just learning basic multiplication and division.

Now that I'm a bit stronger with the tactical alphabet, I am finding it very helpful in Stage 5 of CTB to work through more complicated combinations, as it is giving me good examples of the subtle syntax of combinations, concrete examples. And because of the new method of solving the problems, I am picking up certain tell-tale signs that a combination is possible (e.g., lots of open lines toward opponent's king, coordinated pieces, more material localized to one spot, a defending piece overloaded). Seeing a fork-in-one is a lot different than seeing a fork after deflecting the king with a Knight sacrifice. It involves harder work when considering the motifs in the tree of analysis.

I look at this as confirmatoin of the results of our previous discussion about classifying tactics, and it seems to mesh quite well with Temposchlucker's recent brainstorms, where the elementary motifs are the words, and combinations are sentences. It will be interesting to see if this helps me in games...

Here is an example of a Phase 5 CTB problem that combines three elementary motifs into a nice little combination (black to move):

All in all, CTB was the ideal choice for my Circles. The first three stages are typically fairly simple tactics. Stage 4 has a lot of very simple combinations (e.g., a deflection to set up a simple tactic such as a fork). Many Stage 5 problems combine more than two motifs. It also has longer mating nets. These are very helpful, forcing me to consider all possible checks, as lo and behold, what looks like a blunder could be the first move in a brilliant mating net. It's all about taking the time to analyze to quiescience, making sure to look at all the resources at your disposal. There is a lot less of this with 1-3 move simple tactics.

I should finish Circle 5.1 within 9 days...