Puzzles

Puzzles ... Always recommended to the chess improver.  Do puzzles!  Do more!  

Which is all well and good, but when I started doing them I had no idea what was I doing.  Turns out the goal is to make the best move.  So after scouring the internet for tips and strategies on how to do low and intermediate level puzzles, I put together the following checklist for my puzzling:

1. Am I black or white?

2.  Scan the board.  What pieces do I have; what pieces does my opponent have; who is winning?  If I'm losing it's far more likely I need to get a checkmate or escape a mate.  If I'm ahead the puzzle is more likely to be about a capture.

3. Check all the ways I can check their king, starting with using my Queen, then my Rooks, then my Bishops and Knights, then Pawns.  If there is a check, what would happen next?  If this seems to result in a checkmate its the solution.  Or if there's a check that doesn't get instantly rebutted, then it's a great candidate move for the solution.

4. If the checks are unsure or unclear, the next thing to consider are all the captures you could make.  Go through their pieces in value order: Can you capture their Queen?  If not, what about their Rooks?  And so on.  And again, if you find a possible capture, ask what happens next?  If there's no good checks, then then the next most likely solution is a good capture of a valuable piece or a trade where you come out on top in material.

5.  If checks or captures don't reveal anything clear, then the next things to look at in order are: Pawn Promotions; Forks; Pins/Skewers; and Discovered Attacks.  If one of those presents itself as a good move, then they're a candidate solution.

6.  Something you can do after thinking through the puzzle is to make a note of what tactic led to the solution - was it a fork, a backrank check, a pin, a capture etc.  Hopefully, this will increase your tactical knowledge and pattern recognition.  You may also find that you struggle with seeing a particular type of threat or tactic and then you'll know to do more work on that maneuver.  

And that's about it.  Let's see if I can break my current 1300 puzzle rating cap ...