How Do Puzzles Improve Your Chess Game?

Hi guys!

Today, I will be covering how puzzles help us in chess games! Let's get started!

1. Improves Your Tactical Vision

Puzzles allow you to see many easy tactics. By practicing to find these tactics, you will be able to find them easily in games. You will be able to spot tactics such as double attacks, pins, back rank weaknesses, overloading, and many more. Can you spot the white pieces weakness?

2. Trains Your Imagination

Solving puzzles can help build on those basic skills and patterns that you might see. By training, you can find hidden tactical ideas and build onto them in your own way such as setting up clever traps that your opponent might never have seen coming.

3. Keeps Your Mind Sharp

When you take a break from chess, the comeback is definitely the most difficult part. Even if it's not a long break (ex. a week), it can be enough to throw you off your good chess habits. Your mind can get lazy if you aren't training. However, if you solve a few puzzles a day, you can keep the memory of chess in your brain and keep your mind working. 

4. Learning New Patterns

Some of this might get a little repetitive but solving puzzles can give you new ideas that you might not seen before. Like an exchange sacrifice, for example. It might not come easy to a player who has never seen anything like it before but if you have the basic understanding of it, you can eventually learn how to incorporate it into your games.

5. Learning to Recognize Patterns

Chess is all about patterns. If you've solved some puzzles for a while, you can see that at some point, the solution will just "hit" you. Your mind will be able to recognize different patterns that you've been training at so you can spot the tactical ideas instantly. 

6. Improving Your Positional Play

That's right. Puzzles don't just help you with being tactical, they can help your positional play. There are some puzzles which are called Positional Puzzles. They force you to make decisions in the puzzle that might look like a normal position, just like in a game. It trains your brain to make a move and find a suitable plan. 

7. Tests Your Knowledge

Puzzles can help by testing you in different situations. Like mentioned before, there are positional and tactical puzzles. Both can help you in different situations in your games. This way, you can test your knowledge and see what you learned. 

Review

So, to review, puzzles can improve your tactical vision, train your imagination, keep your mind sharp, learn new patterns, learn to recognize those patterns, improve your positional play, and test your knowledge. So get out there chess nerds and always practice your puzzles. At least chess.com gives you 3 free puzzles a day. Go utilize them. If you are craving more puzzles, I will be taking some of the puzzle that come up for me and putting them below. 

Thank you so much for reviewing my blog! Go practice those puzzles!

~ @Alv25123