Joshe

@integral Nevermind, I see what you were saying. I was assuming e6 was obvious after Kxh7. If you made a move other than that, the position would be better for black. Nice puzzle!

Not true after Rxh7. Look at the eval bar on the left. Black to move here: Nothing black can do other than take the rook, the bishop, or try to check the king. Probably best is to take the rook. But if they do that, there's no way to prevent e5 pawn promotion without taking the bishop as well.

I was just going over possible continuations. No matter the continuation, black can't win if white plays: a8 -> a7 -> h7. Is that not the solution?

I know how to win but not sure if it's optimal. Rook to a7 then a8, then take black rook on h7. Black only has 2 options if not in check. 1. Recapture white rook on h7 2. Trade b2 rook for white bishop and after a1 pawn recaptures rook, black king recaptures rook on h7, which liquidates everything but pawns. White promotes faster with option 1, which looks like this: But black can take the long way around losing with option 2. After liquidation, it looks like this: What am I missing?

A sequence that "is winning" or forced checkmate?

In that case, you'd recapture rook which would lead to white getting a passed pawn.

Rook a8 check -> a7 check -> take black rook w/ check -> black king recaptures on h7 -> push e5 pawn. Black can't catch it before promotion.

Same here. You might like the Stafford gambit for black.

I was never optimistic. As if they'd allow the release of evidence that implicates them in crimes people find most disgusting. Trump can't allow it to be known he's a tweedo because it would be his end. Which is why they'd stop at nothing to prevent this.

This guy has a good idea: Rather than doing random daily puzzles, stick to a set of roughly 100–300 tactical motif puzzles and use spaced-repetition software like Anki to drill them until they become second nature. Eventually, the patterns just show up without conscious processing, like magic. Pattern-recognition takes much longer if just keep doing random puzzles.

The position is probably close to equal if you move rook to e3 because black just moves pawn to d5, not only defending the knight but cutting off white's bishop mobility. You have to take night first then rook e3. Queen can't retreat and protect rook on e8, so you gobble up the cookie and make the chicken run to h7. Then black is down a rook and black's bishop can't come out without losing the other rook and the f7 pawn is weak and the entire position for black has collapsed. Could also calculate the line knight takes knight, sac the bishop on f7 check, queen h5 check. Stopping there because too much calculation but could be something there. Probably not. Black could just decline the sac.

That's only because you know that when you're presented with puzzles like "black to move and win" the solution is almost always counter-intuitive, otherwise it wouldn't make for a good puzzle. So you relied on a heuristic that doesn't exist in real games. Not so easy to find when the clock is ticking and you don't know you have mate in 2.

Fear is a model of expected harm. The model only updates when experience contradicts the model. Trying to use cognition for major updates doesn't work. To remove fear, you have to make it non-existent by not feeding the signal. This is solved by having aims other than removing the fear or "fixing yourself". You can't remove your fear if your objective is to remove fear, because that would be to amplify the very signal you want to eliminate. If fear isn't the main character, it doesn't get fed the attention that keeps it alive. You have to be interested in something beyond yourself. The nervous system learns that the thing isn't dangerous by noticing you're not treating it as dangerous.

Nice profile pic 😉. Those eyes are doing something!

You should definitely seek out leverage and identify threats, but only while in an operable structure. If your goal is financial freedom and you're looking for leverage or protection outside anything you’re actually doing, you're delaying contact with the only thing that can teach you. I spent 15 years doing this and am much further behind than I'd like. I was supposed to be free by now, but I'm not. I've paid for these insights. Learn from my mistakes. Example, I have high self-efficacy, can figure most things out and have a cognitive edge over most people, so I always assumed I would easily acquire financial freedom because how hard could it be competing with average people? "If these fools can do it, so can I!" I had all these ideas about how all I had to do was learn how to build websites, digital products, learn SEO, online marketing, and it's off to the races. I thought that I'd out-maneuver or out-SEO everyone because I would find the leverage they'd miss and I'd put in more work than them. I was happy and complacent in the loop of collecting knowledge and theory without testing it, because I thought I was stockpiling leverage. I had knowledge and ideas, but no true operational knowledge. No matter how many articles I read, it was all too vague. I didn't know what advice was right because I wasn't testing any of it. It was only about 10 years later when I actually made a website and tried to compete in the real-world that I found out all my ideas about how easy it was going to be was all bullshit. If you had 24/7 exclusive access to the best business mind on the planet for a whole year, he couldn't guide you to financial freedom because the bottleneck is not access to intelligence, wisdom, or advice - it's access to feedback. Only seek leverage for your near-term problems - don't stockpile. This one principle takes people with very little development from rags to riches all the time. When it comes to making money, intelligence doesn't compound the way we all think it does.