The Woodpecker Method, Revisited
With the release of The Woodpecker Method 2: Positional Play coming up, now seems like a good time to revisit the Woodpecker Method as a technique. I haven’t seen the book yet, but good positional puzzles are always in short supply, so 1000 new examples in one book is very welcome.
As far as the technique itself, it’s led to some famous cases of rapid improvement. Hans Tikkanen, the author of the original Woodpecker Method, got three GM norms in a seven-week period after using the method. Michael de la Maza, author of Rapid Chess Improvement, gained 400 points in 400 days. More recently, Nicholas Sloan added over 500 points to his OTB rating in less than two years using the Seven Circles, de la Maza’s version of the Woodpecker.
So, is the Woodpecker Method the key to chess improvement?
What is the Woodpecker Method
Let’s rewind a bit and first define the Woodpecker Method. Tikkanen’s idea was to do the same set of tactical puzzles repeatedly, going faster each time. His original schedule was extremely aggressive, culminating in doing the full problem set in a single day. In fact, the program was so aggressive that it would be very difficult for someone with a full-time job or other typical time commitments to pull off, so others have taken the overall idea but scaled back the specific targets.
For our purposes, let’s define the Woodpecker Method as any training plan that involves doing the same problem set repeatedly at decreasing intervals.
Refining the Definition
It should come as no surprise that doing a lot of tactics intensively would lead to chess improvement. But in chess we always have to consider opportunity cost: is it better than all the other ways we could be training? To prove that the Woodpecker Method is the optimal training method, it would be necessary to prove it’s better than playing, analyzing, playing over master games, studying endgames, etc. This is obviously impossible, so it’s better to narrow in on what makes the Woodpecker Method unique. The defining feature of the system is doing the same problems repeatedly. That leads to a more tractable question: is it better to solve the same tactics repeatedly, or solve a steady stream of new tactics?
My intuitive answer would be that the new tactics seem better. It’s very unlikely that I will see the exact position from my problem set in a real game. What will determine whether I win or lose real games will for the most part be my ability to make good decisions in new positions. Therefore, it seems like it would make more sense to focus on solving new positions in training.
Pattern recognition
The most common justification for the Woodpecker Method is that by doing the same positions over and over, you reinforce the patterns. But if you think about it, this is really another argument in favor of new positions.
Let’s accept the premise that underlying any specific position are more general patterns that occur in many positions. If I do the same problems over and over, I run the risk of simply memorizing those positions, rather than picking up on the underlying patterns, which is what I really want. In machine learning and AI this is called overfitting. If I want to learn the underlying patterns it would be better to see the same pattern played out in a variety of positions.
I might have a different take if someone studied the patterns that occur most often in games and crafted a problem set to exemplify them. But as far as I know, none of the Woodpecker adjacent books claim to have done this. The authors of the original Woodpecker Method are quite explicit that there was no effort to select any particular kind of position. It’s just a generic set of tactics.
Advantages
So the main argument in favor of the Woodpecker Method doesn’t really hold up. Nonetheless, the impressive results remain.
Whenever I see a person or system that seems to succeed in spite of obvious deficiencies, I remind myself to look for their strengths. It’s sort of like if you’re playing a 2300 who plays the opening like a beginner, you know they’re probably good at the middlegame and/or endgame.
And upon further inspection, the Woodpecker Method has several very important strengths:
It offers a plausible theory of chess improvement. As we’ve seen, this theory has some holes in it, but at least there’s a story about what you’re going to do, and how it’s going to improve your chess. With many chess books and training methods, there is no explicit theory at all.
The programming is detailed and specific. You know exactly what you’re going to do on each day. In contrast, if your plan is, “Play games and do some puzzles,” whenever you sit down to work on chess it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do. Figuring out the program on the fly adds a lot of cognitive overhead.
It has a defined beginning and end. It’s difficult to stay committed to a program with no end point. What if you miss a day?
By doing the same problems repeatedly, you quickly see tangible improvement. If you do all new puzzles, your ability to solve will probably increase slowly, maybe too slowly to even observe in the short term. In contrast, every cycle through the same problem set will probably yield very noticeable improvement. I’d argue this is largely due to memorizing the specific positions, but nonetheless, tangible progress feels good.
If you think about the four problems the Woodpecker Method solves – no theory of improvement, vague programming, no end point, lack of tangible progress – they all have one thing in common: they all make it much likelier that you will quit.
And this is what I believe is the real secret sauce of the Woodpecker Method: it makes it more likely that you’ll keep going.
Conclusion
I still have not heard a compelling case for why doing the same puzzles repeatedly would be better than doing new puzzles. On the other hand, I also don’t see any huge problem with repeating the same puzzles. If nothing else, it’s convenient for both authors and improvers. As a coach or author, finding new positions is one of the most time-consuming things, so it’s nice if you can get multiple uses out of them; and as an improver, you get more bang for your buck if you can do multiple passes on the same book or course.
Ultimately, the best tactics are the ones you’ll actually do. I suspect the real value of the Woodpecker Method is that it tricks you into doing tactics consistently over a period of time. And that’s a good thing!
Proponents of the de la Maza/Woodpecker method often refer to the successful application of spaced repetition in foreign language learning. There are two big differences though between chess tactics and foreign languages:
1. To become conversational in a foreign language, one needs to learn about 2000-3000 words (and a few relatively well defined grammatical rules how to convert these words to their different forms). If I know "love", I can quite easily create "loves", "loved", "loving", "lovingly", etc. And the cost of making a mistake (e.g. using "love" instead of "loves", or "loving" instead "lovingly") is negligible.
On the other hand chess tactics is potentially an infinite set of positions. Infinity is much more than 2000-3000. Even if you have two very similar chess positions, a small nuance may decide if a Greek Gift Sacrifice works, or not, in a specific position. And unlike in language learning there are no rules how to convert a tactical position into another already known tactical position. One simply needs to calculate it for each concrete position. The cost of ignoring a nuance may decide the game.
However, spaced repetition might work very well for opening study: given that a typical repertoire on Chessable has 100-500 lines, and line would have around 12 moves at average, it means 1200-6000 moves. If we deduct moves that are shared between two opening lines, we could really reduce it to 500-2000 moves to be memorised. This is even less than the number of words to become conversational. This is something one can actually memorise. There is a potential trap though: as soon as one reaches a position that is similar but not same as another that you learnt, one needs to switch on thinking again.
2. But my far bigger concern with the Woodpecker method is a very different one: in spaced repetition applied to language learning, the intervals between repeating a specific word are increasing, at least if you can still remember the word. You are expected to see a repetition of the learnt word when you are close to forgetting it. I believe it is similarly implemented in Chessable: you first get to repeat a learnt line just after a few hours after learning it, but then the intervals are increasing.
However the de la Maza/Woodpecker method proposes something completely reverse! Decreasing intervals! Intuitively this makes no sense to me at all. I would be curious if there is any scientific research backing this idea? (There have been 40 years of research backing the idea of increasing intervals for language learning.)
Personally I did try the de la Maza/Woodpecker method several times over the last 14 years, the last time for 5 months between September 2023 and January 2024. I have spent between 16 and 23 hours each of these months. It did not improve my tactical skills, neither as measured by chesstempo or lichess, nor in my real OTB games. Before, in the previous years, 3 months long (or longer streaks) of solving tactics (but not in the Woodpecker way) used to boost my rating temporarily by 50-100 points. Of course, this is only a single data point. It would be great if someone organised a proper scientific study of effectiveness of spending XX hours using the Woodpecker method over Y months versus spending the same XX hours over the same Y months but without repetitions...
I've always been a little skeptical of this method as well, but I wonder if it's actually similar to learning opening theory. When I study openings, I could pick new variations each time I study (because I might encounter them someday), but I'll end up not learning any of the variations well at all. Is learning tactics similar? I sometimes encounter the same puzzle on Chess Tempo, often a decade or so after I solved it the first time. In the vast majority of cases I get the same problems right a second time, or I miss them a second time - it's much more unusual that they flip from missed to solved or solved to missed.
The hypothesis I'm coming to here is that my tactical practice on Chess Tempo is more about developing stamina and practicing what it's like to play tournament chess. The Woodpecker Method might involve more learning of new tactical patterns. I should probably give it a try.