Blogs
All it takes is some free time

All it takes is some free time

Avatar of ProfiMath
ProfiMath
| 19

Hello!

Welcome back to the Prof's Verdict!

In one week it will be exactly four months ago that on 1st August I had a pretty bad day until it had a comeback. It started early in the morning when I missed a bus to go snowboarding while on holiday. Therefore I was somewhere just outside Queenstown, New Zealand with nothing to do and with a campervan I had to stay with. So I was broed and did lots of puzzles, I reached 1800 that day. Today I will be writing about how you can improve at puzzles and become a better chess player.

Take time

To improve at puzzle you must take your time to play the puzzles so start by setting aside some time to do puzzles. This will give you time where you have planned to not do anything else. Therefore you will have more focus on the puzzles. Planning time to be used for puzzles is one part of how you take time. The second part is by taking your time on each puzzle. If you need one second to see the easiest mate, great! But if the puzzle isn't the most obvibious mate ever it may take you half a minute, a minute, five minutes to see the move. However long it takes, take this time to try and find the right move. Trust me this will improve your puzzle accuracy a lot happy.png!

This should be your goal

Practice puzzles often

As the saying goes: "practice makes perfect" or in Dutch "oefening baart kunst". This second one takes perfect to the next level: mastery. So how will you achieve puzzle mastery? By practicing! if you don't practice often you will forget the patterns and your brain will lose the connections it made. As a consequence your results in puzzles will be inconcistent. So please practice daily or every other set time period. It's for you own good, it will help you!

Start of by getting this achievement

Practice when bored

You might think "why should I practice when I'm bored?" but this is serious. When you're bored you have free time I assume. You will also have an empty mind when you're bored. This means you'll be relaxed, take your time to do the puzzles well and most of all it will make you happy. There's no better time to do puzzles than when you're happy. Your brain will produce dopamin making you happier everytime you get the puzzle right. You will end up doing many puzzles and enjoying it. Your time will dissolve when you're bored and start to use this time for puzzles.

100+ puzzles every time you're bored

Don't do puzzles when you're frustrated

If you do puzzles when you're annoyed or frustrated listen to me urgently. Stop doing it! If you fail one puzzle, okay continue to the next puzzle but when you have 5 or more puzzles all incorrect in a row you're going to frustrated. This is the time to put the phone away or go off the puzzles tab of chess.com. At this point all dopamin you developed will be going away again which will make you annoyed. Continuing when you're frustated, if it's because of the puzzles or something in real life, is a very bad idea. You will get tilt, unavoidably. 

The dips you see here are caused by playign when frustrated. Let this be your lesson

Do puzzles for your level

To improve you must go step by step. So to finish of this blog, here are some puzzles for players from beginner level to grandmasters:

<600 rating (only if this your playing rating, if your rating for playing is higher skip these):

<1000 rating:

<1500 rating:

<2000:

<2500:

Thank you for reading this blog! I hope to see you back at the next Prof's Verdict!