Last Tactics Position, and minor musings on learning from CTB

At the end of this post, is the last position from Chess Tactics for Beginners (CTB ).

Time-wise, and reflecting my lack of obsession regarding a speedy completion of these, I have probably taken a comfortable 9 to 12 months ( in elapsed time ) to do this, with a boost last Thursday for the last 32 examples , some of which I repeated again this morning, since a midnight finish is not the most sensible.

The final position was straightforward, and not involving any technical things such as "opposition", "queening squares" or "shoulder-charging" or the like, just a simple calculation.

I don't think my particular version of CTB exists with Convecta/ChessOK any more, as they have been ' peshka-ising'  their old CD products for some time now.

I suspect that the nearest is now this, which is a 3-part product having approximately the same number of examples to solve ( 2500 ).

CTB was one of the products that was used previously in the chess blogosphere to try to emulate the 'de la maza' tactics splurge ( see here for one example ).  

[ The 'de la Maza' info is viewed statistically here and here by the excellent Empirical Rabbit blog and his story summarised by Heisman here ). ]

Repeating standard tactics a set number of times ( often, the magic number of  7 is mentioned ) was often an initial step in the 'Knights Errant' chess improvers, with a view that such positions were retained and used as a base for further improvement. It should be noted that the target time for completion of these repetitions was generally a lot less than the year I took for one :)

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