Interesting criticisms of the Circles

The following is a response I emailed to a reader generous enough to send me some of his well-considered criticisms of the Circles method of tactical training (for those who don't know this method involves doing the same set of problems many times until you can do them really fast--the first time through you spend ~10 minutes/problem, and each cycle you solve them faster until you can do them really quickly without thinking).

I don't claim to have any final answers here. He brings up enough interesting, and complicated, issues that I am surely wrong on some of my points. I thought the points he made were interesting enough to merit putting them out here in the improvement blogosphere.

His concerns are in italics, my responses are in normal font.

Somewhere I read a paper that says it's better to see the same material presented in several different modalities, than to repeat the same modality. The latter helps retention, but the former results in stronger transfer. (But I cannot remember the title and authors. I should have read it aloud and traced it on my palms!) This suggests that it is better to do 7000 unique problems than Seven Circles of the same 1000.

It seems this is orthogonal to the Circles question. Different sensory modalities isn't the same as different problem sets. However, as a separate topic you probably want to see many examples of a particular tactical motif in the problem set. I discussed this a bit here in my most considered defense of the Circles against a common criticism (see the comments there too as I expand on the ideas in the main entry).

Separately, we know that there are hundreds of thousands or millions of meaningfully distinct chess patterns (after all, GMs are said to have a grasp of 100,000). This is another reason to prefer the 7000.

Yes, but 1000 is a good start, and I don't think you are narrowly memorizing just those 1000 problems as I argued in my post linked above. Also, if your goal is to learn the problems cold so you can do them effortlessly, then 7000 seems a big chunk to bite off all at once.

The spacing of repetitions should be close together at first, then further apart. Seven Circles has it backwards.

I have seen before that if your goal is to remember X, you should review it within 24 hours, so I think you have an excellent point. However, it depends on your goal. Many (such as MDLM) look at first few circles as primarily being for calculation training, not as something optimized for memory construction. However, to form memories, perhaps a modified circles program would have you do 50 a day, really quickly, and review them each day.

And besides all that, chess skill goes beyond mere memory retention, and includes a lot of uncharted higher level processes (doesn't it?). On that basis we shouldn't we be doing something else -- say, more of the Kotov/Dvoretsky/Stoyko type activity?

I think it is a combination of memory and active thinking, so both are likely necessary. And note MDLM used the first Circle or two to work on such things. The Circles don't claim to be a balanced approach to chess. They exclusively focus on tactics, to the exclusion of everything else. This is insane, and the Circles are not for everyone (I discuss who might consider doing the Circles, and how to avoid burnout, in this post).

Training beyond 4 or 5 hours in a day is counterproductive - by then the bucket is full until the training is consolidated during sleep. This argues against some of the later circles.

Is it counterproductive to practice a language more than 4 or 5 hours a day? It could likely have an "immersion" effect. Not sure what your claim is based upon. Also, if it is a concern it is easy to change the Circles so at most you only do a couple of hundred in a day.

Also, "attention" is a critical part of skill acquisition. If in the late cycles you take the approach of looking at a problem, and deciding "Yeah, I recognize the pattern...NEXT!" then I fear you may be rewiring your brain to be just as superficial. Properly done, each training position should be treated with the same level of rigor as a real game position: rough material count, tactical scan, candidate move selection, calculate, evaluate, lather, rinse, repeat, and blunder check. This point also argues against the later circles.

The goal is for a certain skill to be done automatically, without thinking. If you have ever trained at swimming or tennis you know the goal is not to eventually attend to your stroke, but to have such a good habit that you do it without thinking. At first you have to attend to how you are doing it, but eventually you do not. Indeed, once you are good enough when you attend to your stroke you do it worse.

There are certain chess skills that we should display without effort, things you should find even in the fourth game of the day in your tournament, when your mind is burnt and you can't calculate to save your life. Things you should see if you are giving a simul and have no time to think.

That previous paragraph is key, incidentally.

One such skill is you want to see basic tactics, you want them to pop out at you as vividly as your recognition machinery when you see a good friend's face in a crowd (of course in both cases you must double-check to make sure it is really him, or that the tactic is really playable).

There has to be "resistance." If you really can do Reinfeld's 1001 in a single day, perhaps it was well past time to pick up a more difficult exercise set. Now, one might contend that the speed requirement provides the resistance in this situation; well, if you go through a full thought process for each position, then perhaps one has a point. But even so, the speed requirement is artificial in this context: You develop proficiency by doing deliberate, conscientious, high-quality work, not by trying to do it fast. Speed then comes automatically.

See tennis/swimming analogy above. At first, attend, and once you are expert, you don't need to think. You just do.

Thus I would modify the approach as follows: Do a fixed number of exercises a day (or a fixed amount of time); repeat the set of exercises if they continue to be challenging, but move on otherwise. And forgoshsakes, study some strategy and endgames!

This seems perfectly reasonable. Ultimately it is an empirical question whether your technique would be better than the Circles. The chess improvement blogosphere needs a benefactor so we can do some experiments! (The most conclusive criticism, in my opinion, comes from Nunn, as I summarized here).