Part IV: Hitting the Chess Gym with Tactical Training

Almost everyone knows that solving tactical puzzles are an integral part of chess training.  It's the equivalent to hitting the gym and doing cardio or weightlifting.  With sports training, the choice between cardio and weight training depends on what your goals are.  Tactical training is very similar, and I probably wasted a great deal of effort without this understanding.

Before we get into the subject of tactics I’d like to play a little game.  The object of this game is to select who you think the better chess player is between two photos:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Answers and discussion:

1. The picture on the left is Magnus Carlsen. Most of you reading this blog will know who he is.  For those who do not, he is the current World Chess Champion and arguably the greatest player in the history of chess.  To the right, is my cat, Eliza.  Even if you do not recognize either player, you are likely to automatically pick the human, because cats don’t generally play chess.
2. The picture on the left is again Magnus Carlsen. The one to the right is former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov.  Now, even if you do not know who Yuri Andropov is, it doesn’t matter.  If you recognize Magnus Carlsen, you will automatically pick him because he is likely better than anybody living or dead.  However, if you do not know who Magnus Carlsen is, you'll be at an extreme disadvantage.
3. Left is Magnus (getting the pattern?), and right is Beth Harmon, chess prodigy. Or is she?  Beth Harmon is fictional.  The one to the right is really Anya Taylor-Joy, the actress playing Beth Harmon.  Magnus is no doubt better than Anya, so Magnus wins.  Even if you recognize both pictures, you would automatically assume Magnus; however, having the picture of Beth Harmon certainly gives you a slight pause.
4. Left is GM Dommaraju Gukesh. Right is Marcel Duchamp.  It’s possible that you may recognize one or the other, but if not, you would gravitate towards the picture on the left because the kid looks like a chess prodigy.  The picture of him with a chess set certainly gives that vibe.  Marcel Duchamp famously gave up his artistic career to play chess.  Sadly, his chess playing would never approach his artistic genius.
5. For the last one, the picture on the left is American pop star Katy Perry, and the picture to the right is former professional football player, Eddie George. Both are rumored to play chess, but nothing can be substantiated.  The internet reports that Perry even has a FIDE rating of 1378; and of course, since it’s on the internet, it must be true.  The fact is, it cannot be determined who is better here; or whether or not either of them plays chess at all.  However, it may be likely that you may have guessed Katy Perry simply because she was the photo on the left.  Furthermore, research on the internet shows a link between her and chess; whereas, none exist for Eddie George.

So, what does this have to do with chess tactics???

There are a number of opinions when it comes to the best way to study tactics:

• Study simple tactics. If it takes more than a few seconds per puzzle, find easier ones.
• Study hard tactics. Work on each problem for as long as it takes to make certain your answer is correct.  The harder the better.
• Study simple tactics, but for no more than 15-20 minutes a day.
• Study a large volume of tactics, until you can go through thousands of them per day.

In order to answer this question, one must understand why study tactics at all.  To explain, I refer back to a diagram I posted on a previous blog:

Studying tactics exercises two skills in chess:  Calculation and Pattern Recognition.  Pattern recognition, also commonly referred to as "intuition", is a far more subconscious level process whereas calculation more of a conscious activity.  For example, a “first impression” is particularly a subconscious pattern-recognition process based off of a lifetime of experiences.  However, we have all learned that, however useful first impressions may be, it may be worth investing time to consciously analyze available data before any conclusions can be drawn.

So I refer back to our 5-question game:

1. This can be solved without thinking.  This is the chess equivalent:
2. Intuition (or pattern recognition) definitely points to the correct solution. However, since the photo on the right is not (generally) a recognizable figure, a conscious effort is employed to check your initial assumption.  Even if you can never identify Yuri Andropov, you can still remain confident that Magnus is the correct choice.
3. Same as #2, but there’s a trick involved. You still have to “calculate” through the tricks to make certain that your initial assumption is correct.
4. Here, your intuition derives from a different set of data.  If you have been involved in chess culture for any length of time, you would be aware of the rising generation of young Indian players.  Even if Gurkesh is not a household figure, your intuition would likely be correct.  Certainly, the photo on the left may have been any random Indian teenager posing in front of the chess set, and it’s up to the individual make the conscious effort of due diligence to check their answer.  Same is true with chess.  You will have an initial reaction to a position, and then the due diligence of calculating is required to check your conclusions.
5. For the final question, the only pattern (unless you know both these figures on a personal basis) here is that every previous question has been answered with the left picture. Consciously, you realize that there is no reason at all to assume that it must be the left picture, so further research must be done to make any sort of conclusions.  In other words, there is no real pattern here, and no tactic here to solve.

If you’re still reading, you may know where I’m going with all of this:

• If you need to improve your pattern recognition, do easy tactics. Tactics that take 5-10 seconds at most.
• If you need to improve your calculation abilities, do difficult tactics and calculate the problem all the way through before making the first move.
• If you are a novice or even a more experienced player, do more easy tactics.
• If you are more experienced, you should already have a lot of the patterns stored in your subconscious and so calculations become more important.

Why is any of this important in chess training?

This is my personal experience with tactics:  my tactics score on chess.com is currently

You can see I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on tactical puzzles.  I had no understanding that chess skill combines subconscious intuition with conscious analysis.  I would venture to say that in the second and third year of my chess “revival” I did nothing but chess.com tactics thinking that this was the path towards chess nirvana.

The problem with this is that once you get past a few dozen tactics, every new tactic becomes "difficult."  This is because chess.com will present tactics commensurate with your skill level.  At the 2500 level, it was not unusual for me to spend 10-20 minutes on a tactic.  In other words, very little pattern recognition training was happening!  This left a huge hole in my chess ability.

The result were frustrating games like this:

And more recently, this:

To this day, I would venture to say that my lack of pattern recognition is a liability in my game and is something I’m currently working on.  As a suggestion to chess.com, I would like to see a “blitz tactics” feature, where a puzzle would appear, and will fully penalize you if you miss and will half-penalize you if you fail to answer within 5 seconds.  Right now, what I do is use the "custom" puzzle feature and set the rating range.

It would be nice to have a timer, and rating points, but this works for me.  There are also a number of great books and e-books out there with a volume of tactics.  If you go that route, you’ll probably have to experiment to find a book whose tactics are easy enough for you.

As far as the number of tactics to do per day, my advice is that the younger you are, the more patterns you can absorb into your subconscious in one sitting.  The older you are, the fewer patterns you can absorb and retain (I'll talk more about this later), so a smaller volume per day makes sense.  You should train for maybe no more than 15-30 minutes.

Also, if all you do is focus on tactical training, you will miss out on the most important training exercise there is:  playing games—which is the subject of the next blog.

This article is part 4 in a 6-part series about playing and learning chess at 50+.

If you enjoyed these articles, please leave me a nice comment.  It will encourage me to add more content.  Thanks for reading.