What if I told you that practice doesn't make you perfect?

I often hear that online tactics training is a savior of chess ambitions. People build castles in the air about how they play a dozen blitz games and solve a couple of puzzles each day. And if you stop them for a second and ask them where they wanted to be in five years, most of them will say Chess Grandmaster!

I wrote this blog post not to poke fun at audacious adult improvers but to widen their horizon about chess training ideas to make the most of their limited time.

Most Overlooked Areas in Chess Improvement:

Intuition Vs Logical decision making:

The best place to start your progress at making better decisions is by learning how the brain works. During a game, we use either our Intuition or logical comparison of moves and variations.

Intuition is like a magic box. If you give something to it, it gives something back to you. And the input we often give is chunks of ideas through our observation of a position. Or, sometimes, an interesting question.

We can also make decisions like a computer - through logical reasoning. I play this move, he makes that move, I would fight back with that funny move, etc. Advanced players would be more specific with the moves and notations.

What we are concerned about here is the process of Observation which feeds your intuition.

Spend exactly 30 seconds on the following position and then try to solve it by making the moves. You have ONLY 30 seconds in this challenge.

Stronger chess professional approach problem solving systematically. Their eyes scan the position for past patterns. This quick scan gives the right candidate moves for the player to then start calculating.

(Image above: Amateurs random gazing Vs experts looking for specific patterns. More information about the image can be found below)

(Source: Link)

Developing a professional player's sniper-like focus and pattern recognition doesn't need to take forever.

Art of Observation: 

Let's get back to our position from above. Congratulations if you solved it under 30 seconds! Here are some ideas from the position.

In our heads, we can move the pieces and no one will complain. So, let's try to pick clues from the position using the following techniques...

- Piece Alignments: A simple observation skill to develop is to look for pieces in straight line (red lines below) and knight-fork distances (orange squares). I can also add pawn-fork distance to this list but it's not applicable to this position.
- Critical points in a position: I would define it as points with the same number of Attackers and Defenders. Check the two green squares.
- Unprotect pieces/pawns: Not applicable in this position but I'll mention it anyway

- Weak King position: Black king is pretty much sitting under a leaking roof. The important dark square bishop is on a vacation and there are weak squares that white can take advantage of.

By focusing/observing on the key aspects of the position, we can minimize the time it takes to find the right hidden ideas in any given position. In the position above, white uses the alignment and knight fork distance to create a  beautiful tactical opportunity.

Training to observe positions objectively also has another hidden by-product, which is reduced blunders!

When I started writing this blog post, I realized that there's just too much to cover. So, hopefully, we'll see again in another blog post!

Book Recommendation: Here's a great book to give you company. One that touches on the very topic of Observation in chess. You can check out the free book sample here.