33.5 Hours of "The Woodpecker Method"
Week 3 Update
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My third week of working through the Woodpecker Method is complete! If you want to check out the update from week 2 you can read that here:
The biggest news of the week is that I have finally finished the entire book/course and have completed cycle 1! Here’s a screenshot of a chart I’ve used to track my progress:
Ultimately, I correctly solved 79.6% (898/1128) of the puzzles. Splitting it up between the three difficulty levels, I scored 99% (198/200) in the easy section (with one mouseslip), 80.4% (632/786) in the intermediate section and 48% (68/142) in the advanced section.
I started off hot, being able to complete all 200 easy puzzles in the very first stream then the intermediate puzzles got a little bit trickier and finally the advanced puzzles honestly kicked my butt harder than I had expected. I’m not really sure if the advanced puzzles have a lot of benefit in terms of the “pattern recognition” side of things but they were very good for deeper calculation training.
I have now solved all 1,128 puzzles in a little over 33.5 hours. I’m looking forward to testing my improvement from the first cycle on Monday when I’ll be doing lots of puzzle rush, puzzle battle, rated puzzles, playing blitz, etc. on my main Chess.com account to see what improvement has been made. After that, I’ll get to starting cycle #2 on Tuesday. It took me 14 days to complete the book in cycle 1 and now I have to complete the book a second time within 7 days for cycle #2. It will be easier to do since I have already solved all the puzzles and now we’ll see how the pattern recognition side of things improves.
If you want to solve along with me during the livestreams, I am doing them each weekday (Monday through Friday) starting at 10am Eastern Time: https://www.youtube.com/@DaltonPerrine/streams. I’ll be starting cycle #2 on Tuesday then progressing to cycles 3, 4, etc. with the ultimate goal of solving all 1,128 puzzles in one day.
I’ll be back next week with the week 4 update!
![Table of Contents [Start Here]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f371ff-f03d-4dd1-b553-6dbf1423b4ac_1024x847.jpeg)
I really enjoy reading this type of experiment report, thanks Dalton. At this point how do you like the experience of such a structured workout regimen?