They're up to issue #9 now, and the ChessVibes Training newsletter has both changed enough and become sufficiently established to justify a follow-up post to my original review.
The columns are the same: a somewhat informal game presentation by the young super-GM Anish Giri, a guess-the-move exercise by IM Merijn van Delft, a didactic section by IM Thomas Willemze on a randomly determined theme, twelve tactical puzzles, and finally a practical ending annotated by IM Robert Ris.
In my initial review I was very positive about Ris's endgame column, generally positive about Willemze's work, liked Giri's and van Delft's columns but thought much more could be done with them, and found the tactics section pretty poor - far too easy not just for me but for their target audience.
Now for an update. I'm still very positive about Ris's column, which is still, in my view, by far the strongest part of the newsletter. It wouldn't be a bad idea for Ris to collect these columns someday and turn them into a book.
Giri's columns are interesting and entertaining - he's a very good writer, player and annotator - but they still rarely have that personal, insider's perspective that was advertised for his work. So as before, I like his work, but feel that it could be even better.
Before I expressed the desire that Willemze's column be a bit more didactic, and I think this has happened: he has done a good job of making the BIG POINT clear with good examples. It's a bit dry, but useful.
Van Delft's guess-the-move column is interesting. On one level, it's a bit light: the format makes it easy for readers to zip through with reasonable success without working very hard. But having thought about it a bit, I suspect that the point isn't so much to make the readers work as it is to get them to pay attention to certain key ideas demonstrated in the game. In other words, it's a clever way to "trick" the reader so he'll learn better. If this is right, then perhaps what I thought was a slight weakness of the column may be a strength. (It would be interesting to learn what van Delft thinks about this point.)
Finally, the tactics section is much, much better than it was at first. I had suggested that the level of difficulty increase as the set of 12 puzzles progresses, and that's what they've done. One might still wonder if the tactics section could be replaced by something else, given the ubiquity of tactics books, columns, discs and online trainers, but if they're going to do it, they should do it well. At this point, they are.
Once again, I send interested readers to the newsletter's page to decide for themselves.
Update: There's a new preview here, with material from their eighth issue. Also, I should have concluded with an assessment and a "who-for?". As a commenter already noted, my attitude towards CVT is positive, but I don't want to convey the attitude that going through this material once a week counts as serious training. The material is good and club players from around 1500-1900 are likeliest to benefit, but for serious improvement one will have to engage in challenging training on a daily or near-daily basis, just as one would for a "real" sport.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 10:53AM