Bringing it all together

J.CHRIS.ALST

I have been fool proofing for a few weeks now. The gains have been steady, and I am at the point where I can typically complete a game at least close to the target time while getting all the questions correct. Obviously, the goal is to finish below the target time with all questions correct every time, but I'm simply monitoring my progress. Last night I did the games section for PT 32 and scored a -9 in 35 minutes. Surprisingly, that's progress for me. I fool proofed each game by itself this morning, and will review the section again until i nail the thing with no problems.

Today, a little frustrated with my performance from the night before, I decided to try another LG section from PT 10. (Might not be the smartest method, cramming 8 games in 2 days, idk) This time, I did each game by itself. If I skipped a question and went on to the next game, I would write the time down on my paper, restart my watch, then move on to the next game. By the end of it, I had 3 minutes do do the three questions I skipped. The entire section took me 36 minutes of actual work (it took me 4 minutes to finsih the last 3), and I only missed 1 question. So, in reality maybe I would have gotten -2, or even -3. But that is much better than -9... I understand variability in section difficulty can have an impact, perhaps I would have scored a little worse on an overall harder section. Despite this, it is obvious that I struggle with bearing the weight of having to do all 4 games in 35 minutes as opposed to 1 game in 8 minutes. When I do one game at a time, I feel like I am in control. When I try to do all 4, I feel like a rag doll that has strings pulling on it from all different directions.

Is the hardest part bringing the sections together? I don't really know what to make of this. Should I try doing two games from a section, master that, then three from a section, master that, then do a full section?

Any suggestions as to what I should try?

(My goal is to have -2 on LG at most, preferably -1 or -0)

Alex

So, for logic games what helped me was to really take my time reviewing games. I'm not sure how helpful it is to do a ton of games in a short amount of time if you're not reviewing and going back to the games that gave you trouble. I like to take my time BR'ing the games before I watch JY's explanations and to really breakdown and consider the mechanics of each game while evaluating my performance on said game. I like to draw out all possible worlds and see if a split would have made things go faster. I study the rules to make sure I made all the correct inferences, and answered the questions in a smart, efficient way. By studying the games this way it's made it really easy to see game breaking inferences and to sort of get a good feel for prioritizing certain rules over others when you need to brute force/try out answer choices. LG is so much about strategy once you have the requisite skills locked down.

The second thing I would recommend is having a solid strategy. It's all about developing good practices so you can not only solve each game as efficiently and error free as possible, but also so you can more easily analyze where you're going wrong. If you approach each game differently, improving (and knowing where you need to improve) can be a much harder task.

Lastly, and this goes without saying, you need to do everything to make sure your diagramming skills and ability to make inferences is impeccable. I've found that I do best on sections when I can get through the easier games very fast and full of confidence. That only happens when you can employ everything you've learn from the LG part of the CC without hesitation. For example, you need to quickly be able to read conditional chains and know when rules are spent, when they trigger, etc.

If those things aren't 100% on lock for you, I would start there.

Bringing the games together into one section is a skill that takes time. I spent a lot of time doing single games and drilling by type before I jumped into doing full sections. I think it ultimately helped a great deal to be going -0/-1 on single games before doing full sections. But definitely do them weekly or bi-weekly so you get used to them. Also, consider skipping around the games and doing the ones you find easiest first. That confidence can carry you a long way on hard(er) ones.

Seeking Perfection

@"J.CHRIS.ALST" said:
I have been fool proofing for a few weeks now. The gains have been steady, and I am at the point where I can typically complete a game at least close to the target time while getting all the questions correct. Obviously, the goal is to finish below the target time with all questions correct every time, but I'm simply monitoring my progress. Last night I did the games section for PT 32 and scored a -9 in 35 minutes. Surprisingly, that's progress for me. I fool proofed each game by itself this morning, and will review the section again until i nail the thing with no problems.

Today, a little frustrated with my performance from the night before, I decided to try another LG section from PT 10. (Might not be the smartest method, cramming 8 games in 2 days, idk) This time, I did each game by itself. If I skipped a question and went on to the next game, I would write the time down on my paper, restart my watch, then move on to the next game. By the end of it, I had 3 minutes do do the three questions I skipped. The entire section took me 36 minutes of actual work (it took me 4 minutes to finsih the last 3), and I only missed 1 question. So, in reality maybe I would have gotten -2, or even -3. But that is much better than -9... I understand variability in section difficulty can have an impact, perhaps I would have scored a little worse on an overall harder section. Despite this, it is obvious that I struggle with bearing the weight of having to do all 4 games in 35 minutes as opposed to 1 game in 8 minutes. When I do one game at a time, I feel like I am in control. When I try to do all 4, I feel like a rag doll that has strings pulling on it from all different directions.

Is the hardest part bringing the sections together? I don't really know what to make of this. Should I try doing two games from a section, master that, then three from a section, master that, then do a full section?

Any suggestions as to what I should try?

(My goal is to have -2 on LG at most, preferably -1 or -0)

I would recommend foolproofing them in whole sections. It is better as far as a time estimate than an individual goal time. Additionally, it lets you get more practice in doing all four tests back to back.

The hardest part for me was being able to do all the games in the required time regardless of what types they threw at me. That said it wasn't so much any psychological difficulty of doing them together so much as the increased risk of getting a hard game or a game that was hard for me somewhere in the 4. The only way to get past it is to get really good at all the game types.