"Best Way To Study" Experiment - [SIGNUPS CLOSED]

How is the study going? Any news?

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Sooo… Nothing new yet?

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I’m surprised that none of the many participants have chimed in to @S_Alexander’s last two posts.

I guess the study is well underway and everyone is actively playing games and doing other activities. Is not discussing it on the forum a requirement for the ongoing study?

I believe that to be a reasonable requirement. But what about meta-discussion? Is the study even happening at all? :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m in if you’ll have me

GnomeRanger
Approx 14k (rusty)
2hrs/day
Yes

The study is over. It only lasted a month.

We are waiting for the analysis, but the recent high temperatures are apparently having an adverse effect on smurph’s brain. :slight_smile: There was a request for dan level analysts, but I’m not sure if any games have been analysed yet.

From my own point of view I found the study helpful. I spent a month doing tsumego and memorising pro games. You can find a brief summary in my profile.

For the tsumego, a mainly studied Cho Chikun’s elementary life and death problems on veterator.com site. I generally set aside about 30 mins a day for this.

For the pro games, I stuck to a Cho Chikun theme which in turn introduced me to other professionals. I had never memorised games before and was surprised how easy it was. About 60 moves in 30 minutes was my target, trying to understand the moves as best as I could as I went along. The main idea was just to pick up common shapes though.

The end result for me is that I improved from about 20k to about 17k. I was pleased with this, but it became clear that I was losing games due to a lack of understanding of the fundamentals.

After the study I decided to join the Open Study Room with the idea to play more games and have them reviewed. I also started playing on IGS and quickly reached 16k+, so I think I must have learnt something. :slight_smile:

Anyway, I gained from the study and I hope the other participants did too. I am looking forward to the results and analysis.

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Thanks for your account :slight_smile:

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Obligatory monthly bump for this thread. Maybe someone else will chime in with their story while smurph is figuring stuff out.

donkey

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Almost forgot!

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That’s it! Back to Winnipeg!

If there is some delay with the analysis, perhaps it would be worthwhile to simply release the raw data?

No, I don’t think so.

The main lesson here is that if you want ready-to-analyze data, you have to force people to enter the right things in the right fields in the right format. If I were to do a 2nd iteration, I would assemble a small team. Certainly

  • someone to create a simple website for participants to enter their data via a simple account/password system, a homebrew moodle/qualtrics
  • someone to help out with organizatorial stuff like preparing a wiki/FAQ, writing and sending out guides/memos/reminders, answering simple questions, gathering feedback etc.

I can tell you some of the descriptives, if you like. Take it as a teaser. :slight_smile:

Total signups: 54
Initial group size: Menu 15, Grind 14, Minimalist 6, Autodidact 1
Final group size: Menu 14, Grind 10, Minimalist 3, Autodidact 0
No. of people who made an effort: Menu 13, Grind 9, Minimalist 3
No. of people who studied for more than 2 weeks: Menu 9, Grind 5, Minimalist 0
No. of people who studied on 30 days: Menu 3, Grind 0, Minimalist 0

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are-we-there-yet-blog

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What I remember of my experience was mostly gaining experience playing more games. Ladder anxiety generally went down over the course of the study, but by the end I was getting burnt out and losing the will to play. I started to do shorter sessions than the beginning of the study, spending about the same time on live games but spending less on memorization and tsumego.

I started off memorizing some Lee Changho Go Seigen and Lee Sedol, then moved toward more current games. The main thing I was looking for in these games was direction of play and shape.

I improved over the course of the study from ~13k to ~11k, then stopped cold turkey at the end of the time period. Since then I’ve watched the occasional go video and more recently played against 7k CrazyStone on breaks during the work day.

Before the study I’d have been more surprised at the number of people who dropped out before 30 days, kinda surprised I made it to the end. I hope I didn’t make any formatting mistakes in the data I submitted :cold_sweat:

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I was one of the people who didn’t make it 2 weeks. In the maybe 9 days I put in, I learned a little bit about myself and the attempt to learn go online.

  1. By the time the study got underway I had some brutal days at work leading into vacation. That burned me completely out. So studying/practicing under the right conditions and in the right mindset is important.
  2. It’s significantly easier to find level-appropriate chess tactics online than level-appropriate tsumego thanks to websites like https://chesstempo.com (completely free, although I pay a modest annual fee to support the site).
  3. Struggling day after day with level-inappropriate tsumego was anti-fun.
  4. Memorizing pro games was surprisingly enjoyable and much easier than anticipated.
  5. Just studying/practicing and not playing any at all was a drag.
  6. smurph is a really cool guy. Seriously, he was a pleasure to interact with and felt like someone I wanted to support.
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Have a look at the Level Up Series/Jump Level Up! depending on your rank. I feel especially frustrated with tsumego apps. Best way are books and Level Up does a lot of things right.

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If I can spot them on YMI or similar I may do that.