The One Essential For Chess Improvement

As a chess teacher, I've read a lot of different systems for how to get better at chess. The one thing they all agree on is that it involves a lot of tactics. Tactics are your muscles. Muscles on their own are never enough in any sport - for example, rock-climbing sees a lot of gym-monkeys fail because they lack the technique - but you can never get good at any sport without them.

The gym-monkeys of chess are the people who focus too much on tactics. I see people with 3000+ tactics ratings who are 1600 blitz - very often, they don't know the first thing about openings. Imagine your next rating target as an overhang in rock-climbing: yes, you'll need technique, but you will need to put on muscle too. Practise puzzles relentlessly until you plateau, then address the technical issue for the plateau, then go again. I plateaued at 2000 in blitz on lichess for ages while doing tactics, then put a lot of work into openings: I then plateaued at around 2150 focusing probably too much on the opening, then recently got to 2300 by focusing on tactics again.

The below was a nice little 2800-rated puzzle which has a very important endgame-related concept in it. Leave your answer in the comments if you'd like to know the solution!