The Checking of Exercises
If a player is shown a move that looks heroic, but in reality turns out to be a bluff, and if, after yielding to the first impression, he will seriously believe this move, but after the bluff is revealed he will feel deeply insulted, it will take a long time for this feeling to be erased.
Emanuel Lasker
For many years now I have been compiling a card index of exercises, aimed at developing thinking skills and a mastery of the techniques needed by the practical chess player. The examples included in the card index must meet definite, quite high methodological and aesthetic standards.
Looking through chess literature: magazines, books, Informator (in particular, well annotated games and extracts), I stop at interesting and instructive episodes that occur in games or are mentioned in the notes. I think for what aim a particular episode could come in useful to me, and in which section of the card index it should be included. Then I begin a thorough checking, which in at least half of the cases forces the discovery to be discarded. But if everything is alright, the example goes into the card index, and is soon used in training sessions. There it undergoes another check, a much more strict one. Many times my pupils, in solving exercises, have discovered in them new facets, about which I did not even suspect. As a result the example had either to be removed from the card index, or be substantially redesigned.
Bartrina - Ghitescu
Olot 1974 94
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