The Woodpecker Before the Woodpecker Method

When I was growing up and starting with chess in the 1980s, there was no technology to help. It was books and humans only. I didn’t have a human to help me with my chess improvement, but luckily, I had books, lots of them.
One of them was Yakov Neishtadt’s Sahovski Praktikum. It looked like this:

In English it is known as Improve Your Chess Tactics (whereas Test Your Tactical Ability was an earlier book, but with fewer exercises). It was a huge collection (my memory was of some 1000 problems, I did some checking when writing this and found out that the number was around 760) of tactical problems, categorised by motifs (pin, elimination of defence, deflection etc.) and at some point I thought I should solve them, to improve my tactical vision and calculation.
I don’t remember how old I was, but it was in the 80s, so I must have been around 10-12 when I first solved it. I remember lying down on a bed, with my head hanging downwards from the edge, the book open on the floor and me trying to solve exercise after exercise, all in my head.
What I distinctly remember was that after solving the exercises from the book, my thinking became so fast when I was playing, immediately seeing tactics and tricks on the board. It felt as if I had obtained some sort of a super power!
What I didn’t expect was that after a while (many months, surely) the effects wore off. I stopped being so quick, or perhaps I just got used to the new level. And then, for reasons I cannot recall now, I went over the whole book again.
I found it curious that I could recognise almost all the exercises immediately. I remembered the solutions, or at least the first move of it and the whole process went more quickly. The end result was the same, much to my delight, I again gained my super power of tactical awareness and quick calculation.
It’s interesting that I did the same with the endgames. I had Reuben Fine’s Basic Chess Endings, in two tomes. I went over those two times, though with endgames the process was much slower and the gap between the work was wider – the second time I went over Fine’s books was when I noticed that my endgames were getting weaker. However, after both revisions, my confidence in my endgame play rose significantly, since I could recognise and know the theoretical endgames and could navigate the more complex ones more easily as I could orientate myself towards the positions I knew well.
I didn’t think much about this “system” I was using back then. It worked, it made me a better player and improved my play and that’s all I cared about.
Fast forward to the 21st century.
First in 2013 as a chapter, and then in 2018 as a book by GMs Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen, The Woodpecker Method came into existence. The same year the Chessable course with the same name was published. It was based on GM Hans Tikkanen’s own training method when going for the GM title.
The essence of the Woodpecker was to repeat one fixed tactical set in successively faster complete cycles until recognition becomes largely automatic. This was a more scientific and rigorous version of what I was doing as a kid, but the ultimate goal was the same – to improve pattern recognition and quick calculation.
The book and the course were a huge success and quite understandably so – if something works and brings results, it will attract people.
With technology, chess training became easier on the surface. You don’t have to turn pages or set up positions on a chess board. Add to this Chessable’s MoveTrainer, which makes it easier for you to train repetition, and all your problems are solved (pun intended) – the only thing that remains is to use your brain to calculate.
Chessable is the home of the Woodpecker, but not the only platform where one can train it. Disco Chess is another one, built specifically for the method. It handles selection, timing and tracking of your progress. It was created with the Woodpecker in mind and there you can also train openings (based on my own Youtube videos) following the same principles.
The Woodpecker works. It worked for me in the 80s, it works today with the technological tools at our disposal. All that remains is to engage the brain. And that’s fairly easy, isn’t it?