22.33 Hours of "The Woodpecker Method"

Week 2 Update

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My second week of working through the Woodpecker Method is complete. If you want to check out the update from week 1 you can read that here:

13.5 Hours of "The Woodpecker Method"

I wasn’t able to do as much training this second week due to some traveling going on. However, I did get to train for almost 8 hours continuing to work through the puzzles in the intermediate chapters. Here’s the details of week 2 (November 4-8)

November 4: Worked through 74 puzzles (intermediate section) in 152 minutes
November 5: Worked through 50 puzzles (intermediate section) in 100 minutes
November 6: Traveled (no woodpecker training)
November 7: Worked through 80 puzzles (intermediate section) in 137 minutes
November 8: Worked through 80 puzzles (intermediate section) in 138 minutes

Combined with last week, I have now solved 910 puzzles within 22.33 hours. Just like last week, I also drilled openings on Chessable and played blitz games on Chess.com. Last week I had gotten my anonymous account’s blitz rating to 2625 and this week I was able to get it up to 2705 before unfortunately dropping back down like a rock. Blitz is incredibly streaky!

Here’s a couple of tactics from my blitz games this week. If you want to try solving the positions below just make sure you don’t read the captions first:

I found 1…dxe4 2. Nxe4 f5 3. Nxd6+ Qxd6 4. Qg3 Qxd4+ in 4 seconds

I found 1…Bg5 2. Rxg5 hxg5 in 3 seconds

I found 1…Ncxb4 in 5 seconds

I found 1…Nc3 2. bxc6 Nxe4+ 3. Ke3 Nxc5 in 5 seconds

I found/remembered 1…Qxb2 2. Nb5 Ne4! 3. Ne2 Qxb5 in 7 seconds

There’s actually a very interesting story with the last puzzle here. The same exact position was reached in a game between GM Andrew Tang and GM Sam Shankland in the 2023 US Championship:

Sam had decided to play the variation I recommend against the London System in my “Benko Blueprint: From Theory to Practice” Chessable course:

Unfortunately he wasn’t able to figure out over the board why 5. c3?? is a blunder (and I hadn’t cover it in my course either) and played 5…g6 which doesn’t punish the mistake (the game was drawn much later). I had been watching the game a year ago, saw why 5. c3 was a blunder and a year later I was able to punish it in a blitz game. Unfortunately the random online blitz game doesn’t matter near as much as a US Championship game does!

I’m continuing to enjoy the Woodpecker training and looking forward to finishing the full book early next week. After I finish the first cycle then I’ll probably do some testing of things and see if I’m able to get new personal records on puzzle rush, puzzle battle, play blitz on my main Chess.com account and other tests I can try out. After that, I’ll continue with the second cycle of the book and go from there!

If you want to solve along with me during the livestreams, I will be doing them each weekday (Monday through Friday) starting at 10am Eastern Time: https://www.youtube.com/@DaltonPerrine/streams. I’m still in the first cycle but will eventually get to cycles 2, 3, etc. with the ultimate goal of solving all 1,128 puzzles in one day.

I’ll be back next week with the week 3 update!

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