Tactics Training Day 6 | 50 Puzzles
Puzzles are a great way to improve your tactical skill. They test your knowledge of patterns, combinations, and tactical fundamentals. Of course, when you're playing in a game, nobody will tell you when a position has tactics or combinations that are puzzle-like, and you have to recognize that on your own, using your knowledge of common features in positions that relate to certain tactics. Puzzles will enhance your ability to understand what tactics lie in the heart of the position, and help you to execute them. It might be a winning fork, a combination that lasts for more than ten moves and ends in material gain or checkmate, or a flashy cascade of sacrifices. They can also help you recognize when your opponent might have a way to win (or draw if that's their goal) and help you prevent it.
It's unlikely that you'll have the exact same position as in the puzzle, with the uncountable number of possible positions. But alike positions have many similar themes, for example, this could be a puzzle position where white obviously wins by 1. Re7.
However you could also have a nearly identical position in an actual game, since major piece endings are common. If you could solve that puzzle, then when you encounter the position below you'll easily find the winning move.
The position may be a bit different, but the theme is the same, forking the queen and mate on the seventh rank. And the winning move was on the same square! Both of the two positions were not unlikely to have actually happened in play, since I didn't make any crazy structures or place the pieces on crazy squares.
Class dismissed. Now onto my tactics training.
As planned, today I will be doing 50 puzzles in total. 30 rated puzzles, and 20 learning puzzles. For the rated puzzles, I will take as much time as I need to get as many of them correct as I can. With the learning puzzles, however, things will be much different. I will do easier puzzles to ingrain the basic patterns into my mind, and do them as fast as I can, blitzing through them, and I expect that I can solve almost all of them. The rating parameters will be 300-1200.
First I'll do the learning puzzles.
PUZZLES ATTEMPTED: 20
PUZZLES FAILED: 0
PUZZLES SOLVED: 20
PASS RATE: 100%
That's good. I know that I can solve the easier puzzles consistently. I need to, because if I want to do the more difficult ones basic pattern knowledge is essential. On to the rated puzzles now.
PUZZLES ATTEMPTED: 30
PUZZLES FAILED: 18
PUZZLES SOLVED: 12
PASS RATE: 40%
STARTING PUZZLES RATING: 2782
ENDING PUZZLES RATING: 2725
RATING +/- TODAY: -57
I went down for the first time! It's not surprising, though. At the end of my session I had a long fail streak that brought me down a lot of points. Shouldn't worry too much, though, because tomorrow I can climb back up again.
Here are some of the puzzles I did today! Some of these are quite difficult.
Those are the kind of puzzles I get. Most of them are rated about 2500, some are 2300 and some are almost 2800. Hope you enjoyed them!
By the way, I posted my 20th blog post a few days ago, my third day of tactics training! A milestone for me, a relatively new blogger! Let's keep on going!
Thanks for reading, and I'll be back tomorrow!
