Wax on, wax off

 One of the roles of any chess club, or chess tournament , is to help newer players improve their chess. In earlier days, this usually involved to gift of wisdom from a more experienced player at the competition of a game. As I have noted elsewhere, this has often been replaced by a quick trip to the laptop, so see how. many centi-pawns your first choice moves lost.

However it is still possible to pick up some good training tips as events, even if some of them come out of left field. One such suggestion given to a new, but struggling player, was to watch the movie 'Karate Kid' , especially the 'wax on, wax off' scene. The intention was to demonstrate the importance making some chess concepts so ingrained, that there was no need to spend time thinking about them. Now whether this is a real thing is open to debate, but in this specific case, the advice seemed to work. Having only won a couple of games over the last 4 months of Street Chess, the player concerned not only exceeded that total, but did so by winning 3 games in a row. For a sample size of 1, it looks like an effective training method!