Working on Tactics Below 2000 Elo

Hi all,

Back today with a post about tactics.

As always, when I make recommendations to beginners, I need to state the usual caveats:

1. I am no GM. I only share ideas and semi-wisdom I acquired through my chess journey over the past four years. If my pieces of advice contradict those of a GM, you should probably ignore me.
2. I play online and mostly rapid games. My suggestions are best suited for someone who wants to improve his rating on chess.com. If you are an OTB purist or simply have OTB ambitions, I am not sure I am your guy, but hey, you may find something interesting!

With that out of the way, I can go back to it.

In an early post, I wrote about the tactic fallacy, i.e., the false conclusion people often made from a correct premise: "since tactics decide most beginner's games, you should only study tactics." Among other things, I pointed out that studying any aspects of chess tends to help you with your tactical acuity. Nonetheless, I do believe studying only tactics is very useful, of course, and this is probably true at all but super-GM level. With that in mind, I want to share now a small collection of tips, recommendations, and ideas I gathered through my own elo journey, based on what helped me improved and what I would do differently if I could start again.

Spider-sense vs. depth and precision

I think we can break down your tactical requirement for real games into two parts:

1. Guessing that there may be a tactic to calculate (spider-sense)
2. Being able to calculate it precisely.

More than true, this distinction is useful because each part requires slightly different training. For both, playing games and solving tactics is key, but not precisely in the same way.

To learn to "spot" tactics and develop your spider-sense, you will need to see a lot of puzzles many times. This means you should prioritize number over quality. While learning to calculate, you need to avoid guessing and make sure you are 100% right before checking the solution or clicking your move.

In other words, if you spend 10 min per tactic, you will drill your precision and calculating abilities, but you will see only six tactical patterns per hour. If you half guess and spend 30 seconds to one minute per problem, you will see 60 to 120 an hour, which will help you with your spider-sense.

Different trainers for different objective

I have tried many tactical trainers, from chess.com's main one to chess.com's puzzle rush, to that of other websites and even some books. My favorite one is the basic chess.com tracial trainer, but I believe this preference is a natural consequence of my objective: becoming a good rapid player.

Chess.com's tactic trainer reward you more if you find the solution quickly. You have an incentive to guess the best move instead of being sure of yourself. Some will say it's a bad incentive. They will claim that you need to learn to calculate precisely. This is definitively true if your objective is OTB classical fide rating, but not so much if you want to become good at blitz and rapid online. Indeed, solving tactics in less than one minute is what you will need to do most of the time in a 10-minute game.

The intuition is simple. On top of the spider-sense/depth tradeoff described above, the choice of a tactical trainer depends on the timer you want to play on. If you want to play blitz, drilling 10m tactics will probably be less useful than a good old puzzle rush.

Depending on your objective, I would recommend:

• OTB classical: books tactics, and tactical trainer with no time-incentive.
• Rapid or blitz: chess.com's tactical trainer
• Bullet: chess.com's 3 or 5m puzzle rush

I'll add that:

1. Even if your goal is OTB, you should probably do some quick tactics like chess.com's trainer to drill your spider-sense.
2. Every tactical training will be at least a little bit useful for all objectives.

I'll also add that if you want the chess equivalent of a 45m full-body workout, the survival mode in the puzzle rush is a good go-to. You will start with an easy puzzle for the spider-sense and end up with some very complex ones and the incentive to very slowly triple-check your calculation before making your move.

Few, and often

Now that we answered "how," we can ask: "how much?"

Here I don't believe that "as much as possible" is the best idea.

The brain is a funny and lazy creature. It wants to minimize effort, not maximize learning (at least mine doesn't). Whenever I tried to do 30min of tactics or more every day, I ended up "getting in tactics mode." Something in my mind switched, and instead of doing chess, I was doing tactics. I always felt my brain was developing bad heuristics, useful to solve tactics in the training set-up, but which didn't improve my true tactic level in the long run.

I improved more when I did small sessions (up to 30min) and only one to three times a week.

I would also recommend that you wash down each tactic session with one quick blitz game. Just to switch back your brain from "tactic mode" and to remember that chess is more than solving puzzles.

Give it time

Drilling tactics does not guarantee improvement, at least not right now. When you learn a new opening variation, it may not be very useful for your chess. Still, at least you will see concrete results almost automatically: spend one hour learning a line, and you will know that line better with probability 1.

Conversely, you can spend a week or a month doing tactics and, just like with your elo in general, see no improvement whatsoever.

That's completely normal but also a bit demoralizing. It's hard to keep working on something with no guarantee of success and no short-term measured improvements.

The main things to do in my experience is:

1. Do not give up and,
2. do not overwork.

The latter is a classic training mistake. When you want to improve, and you don't, a natural impulse is to double or triple your training hours. I did that a few times, and it never helped.

I think tactics drill is about reaching the right balance between stimulating the brain with new patterns and giving it time to absorb them.

Just like with working out, you need rest days to let the pattern thinks in.

The slump after the bump and before the jump

Whenever I did too many tactics, my rapid and blitz elo dropped.

Whenever I improved in tactics, my rapid and blitz elo dropped.

This second pattern was more surprising to me, but it happened systematically every time I reached new heights on the tactic trainer. My usual pattern is as follow:

1. I drill tactics and gain 100 points on the trainer.
2. I lose 50 points on my online rapid rating.
3. Three weeks later, I gained my 50 points back.
4. Two more weeks past and I suddenly gain 50 to 100 elo.

I have no recommendation here. I just wanted to share this pattern because a) I am curious to hear if other people experienced it, and b) I just wanted to warn beginners not to panic if they experience it too.

(De)Motivation

Let's finish on a small note about motivation.

Of all the aspects of training chess, tactics can be one of the most demotivating. It's not as fun as playing (at least to me), nor is it as immediately rewarding as learning new strategic concepts or learning a new opening. On top of that, you will mechanically end up at a level where you fail to solve roughly half of the puzzle you see. 

So I just wanted to share a few stuff that helped me get motivated to do my tactics:

1. Challenge yourself to solve x amount of tactics per day and count how many days you can keep it going.
2. Save your favorite tactics in a folder somewhere. Having a smoothly growing collection of beautiful moves will compensate for the very sporadic way you will actually improve.
3. Share and discuss with a friend. If you are lucky enough to share your hobby, sending tactics to each other is extremely fun.
4. Be proud of your tactic rating. You should be proud of any of your chess achievements. If you are better than your former self, you are a great chess player in my book. Your tactical "elo" should be no exception. I know this elo is quite inflated here. My 2800 high score on tactics clearly doesn't mean I can challenge Magnus. But the fact that I was once at 1000 on this scale shows the progress I made, and that is all that matters!

That's it for today. These are most of the tricks, tips, concepts, and training routines that helped me improve over the last four years. I hope they can help you too.

I have a few more pieces of advice in mind, but since the post is already a bit long, I'll keep them for another day.

Until next time, happy learning!