Break Through Chess Tactics Plateaus

Have you ever spent lots of time solving chess puzzles and felt like it did nothing to improve your rating past a certain point? There is actually a relatively simple fix to this problem. Instead of solving puzzles that will never occur in your games or composed chess studies, focus on repeatedly solving puzzles with patterns that occur in your games.

For better or worse, spatial awareness is basically fixed, and there's nothing that can be done to improve it past a certain point. But how can someone improve in chess then? The answer is simple. Just practice key patterns so recognizing them becomes automatic and takes less brainpower. Now let's look at some examples!

Takeaways from this game:

1. Knowledge of patterns helped me spot an unusual g-pawn push and rook sacrifice in under 3 minutes. It can easily take me 10 minutes to solve puzzles with patterns I haven't seen before.
2. Even though I played this game much better than usual, I wasn't suddenly able to visualize better. I simply recognized familiar landmarks.

Now, for the other side of the coin...

This was a study composed by Fritz Giegold. I found it impressive, but I doubt it will ever occur in my games. Takeaways:

1. This was a checkmate in 2 moves, but I found this much more challenging than the mate in 7 from my earlier game.
2. This is difficult to solve because there is no frame of reference for the solution
3. Solving these studies is generally a waste of time because natural calculation abilities are fixed, and can only be improved by drilling common patterns

Ok, I've made my point, but how do we apply it to chess training? For starters, any basic chess tactics book with all the key patterns (pin, fork, etc.) is great. After that, a lot of players struggle because there is no clear next step. I believe the most effective next step is to start compiling your own pattern database. This means any time you solve a tactic that you want to be able to recall automatically, simply add it to your Chess.com saved analysis as shown below.

Then go review it periodically here:

If you are really ambitious, you could turn your saved analysis into a custom Chessable course and have it automatically schedule review sessions, but that is a subject for a future post...

I hope this helps break through your chess tactics plateau. Feel free to check out the other instructional posts on my profile for more improvement advice!