Did "Rapid Chess Improvement" by Michael de la Maza work for you?

Thank you Milliern.  You can officially be taken note of.

Boris Gelfand summed this up nicely in one of his books.  

He said that "crystilline"?  (Not sure if im spelling it correctly) memory (tactics) starts to decline as we get older.  Where the other type of memory (dont remember what its called) which controls strategy stays with us much longer.

It sounds like Gelfand was talking about the memorisation of sharp opening lines as against the more positional ones.  All the players complain about that including old men such as Giri.  I don't see where "memory" otherwise helps tactics which is about calculation. Steinitz was 60 when he played the following game http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1132699 According to elements here, his memory was no good and therefore his tactics would have been no good.  And yet he played a great original and long combination, not easy for anybody to see. The notes from the game say:  "As Steinitz demonstrated immediately afterward, there is a mate in ten moves which can only be averted by ruinous loss of material." I should add that Steinitz died 5 years later and so he would have been just about decrepit when he played that game.

Lasker at 67 did not do so bad at Moscow 1935 either as did Capablanca. A couple of young guns (Flohr, Botvinnik) finished half a point ahead of Lasker but most of them finished behind.

"... After each game look up your opening in a book (or database) and answer the question 'If I had to play this opening sequence again, where would I deviate?' In this way you slowly but surely learn opening lines and avoid all major traps. ... If you are eventually going to become a strong player you indeed will have to learn a lot of opening ideas and sequences. ..." - NM Dan Heisman in his 2010 book, A Guide to Chess Improvement

There's also a difference between a strong GM who learnt the tactical patterns as a child and someone who started in his 30s. The decline won't be the same : you don't forget what you learn early as fast.

hicetnunc, that could well be right in principle.  However, there is learning and learning.  An adult, an intelligent one at least, should have higher quality learning which means less forgetting.  As to pattern recognition, I have said elsewhere it is far from being the be all and end all of tactics.  That is my view and I have seen nothing to challenge that view.  As to petrip, if Botvinnik and Flohr were not top contenders, I don't who was at the time.

Improvement in chess is not the same for all levels. If you want to improve then take into account what you need at your level. This is an article explaining what you have to do http://chesslessonsfree.com/improvement-in-chess-according-to-elo/

Indeed. Training in mating patterns, combos, tactics is a constant thing. Difference between a younger vs an adult mind is, you know which variations to strip as superficial or extraneous conducive to the solution.

Although in practical play, the younger mind tends to be bogged down but has the energy and willingness to calculate all the way through concretely. An experienced mind will tend to go through every abstract variation, pick the one through experience that will, undoubtedly be the most viable and only then concretely calculate through.

Dan Heisman has several books that cover thought process and maybe some of his ideas might work for you.  For my son, however, we keep it very simple.  No big checklist of things to do on every move, because we know he won't remember the checklist let alone follow it.  I just tell him these things:

1.  If you find a move, look for a better one.

2.  Once you've finally decided on the move, say the move slowly to yourself, and then check it to make sure it's not a blunder.  

3.  Take your time.

As I said, we've used some of MDLM's ideas, but tailored for a kid.  We didn't try 7 circles, but more like 4 or 5, and we did them in batches of 50-100 puzzles not 1000.  Also, none of the long hours that MDLM recommends.  My son does puzzles for 30 minutes to an hour at a time.  This routine was what was recommended by his first coach.  We also started with Susan Polgar's tactics book rather than CT-ART, though we eventually moved onto CT-ART.  

This regimen was very effective for my son as well as many other kids we know.

Don't know what that number is, but I've never met an expert who wasn't either very good at pattern recognition and/or brute force calculation.  My son didn't become an expert until his TT rating crossed 2500 or 2550.  Adults can get to expert level well before that level of tactical skill because adults have other strengths, but if an adult has a true TT rating of, say, 1800, I'd be amazed if he or she were an expert over the board.

You conditioned your mind to recognize chess positions and memorize lines as a kid.  You literally created physical pathways in your brain to handle chess.  Now it remains easy for you.  If you don't condition it early, it's tough.

I remember a documentary that looked at how Susan Polgar memorized chess positions.  She was shown a middlegame position for a second or two.  She was able to reproduce it quickly and accurately.  Weaker players and, of course, non-players can't.  Doctors scanned their brains during the process and found that for Polgar the areas of the brain used to recognize people's faces was used in memorizing and recalling chess positions.  Recognizing chess positions was just as automatic and easy for her as recognizing someone's face.

yyoochess, you have no idea what you are talking about.  I did not play chess as a kid.  I saw the game on tv and looked up the moves in the encyclopedia.  I then went to school and found a kid who played chess.  We played a few games one time and that was it until I grew up.  There was no coaching or anything like that as a kid.  I did not even realise that you could buy chess books with games and analysis in them.  It was a grown up thing for me.  I am terrible at recognizing faces.  By contrast, I am brilliant at recognizing voices.  Tactical skill is a lot more complex than pattern recognition/brute force.

I misread your original comment to mean you were a chess genius as a kid.  I stand corrected on that point.  But, tell us, what else is nearly as important to tactical skill as visualization, calculation, and pattern recognition?  And why is it that there are virtually no modern grandmasters who first learned chess after their teenage years?

And that's the only fact that matters; and, actually, "virtually" can be dropped from that sentence, unless someone can adduce an example of a 20 year old who learned chess and went on to be a GM.

You show a tactical position to two players, a reasonable player and a strong player.  Make it one that is not too deep so that there is no question of visualisation or calculation depth.  I can show you several of these. The reasonable player is likely to miss the solution.  The strong player is likely to find it.  No amount of "pattern recognition" is going to change that.  The difference is that the strong player is able to penetrate the position.  That is not easy to teach and in fact I have never seen anybody teach it except in the most crude fashion.  It is something that is picked up by the strong player as he or she becomes a strong player.  Can it be taught in earnest?  I say yes although it is not easy.  I have never come across any text which tackles the issue directly.  They mostly go the traditional route like teaching forks, skewers, overloads etc. and then give you hundreds of puzzles to solve.  That is not much use in a novel complex position where there is both a lot of competing considerations and "noise" or irrelevant facts.  In such positions, players are left to their own devices.  A player can get lucky in being familiar with the position because it comes out of an opening he or she often plays.  If not, then "natural" playing strength is all that is left to the player to find the solution.  As to people learning chess as adults and becoming grandmasters, generally if people are not interested in chess at a relatively serious level as children and early teens, they are not likely to take it up as adults.  The other issue is that by the time a person is an adult, his or her way of life is generally set in terms of work and pleasure.  Hans Rees is famous for becoming a grandmaster when he was about 60, please correct somebody if I am wrong.  He was already an IM at the time but I was reading somewhere he never had enough time to have a go at getting his GM title.  It just goes to show that you are never really over the hill while you still have your faculties.

What Milliern is trying to say, there is no hope for him.  Apparently, he has never heard of the name Chigorin.

I believe what you're describing is actually pattern recognition, some of which occurs at the subconscious level.  Over the years, more and more patterns get imbedded in long-term memory and access to them becomes more and more automatic.  I believe that this mechanism is responsible for what we call "chess intuition."  

You could ask, "Doesn't intuition make you blind to non-intuitive solutions to a position?"  I'd answer, yes, to a certain extent.  A strong player, however, has usually seen many non-intuitive solutions in the past and for him the weird solutions are not as "strange" as they are for others.  Also, a strong chess intuition can more easily and quickly dismiss the "intuitive" solutions and allow the player to focus on the weird ones.

By the way, I just read through the fascinating thread you started on "Chess theory."  IMHO, what your system appears to do is verbalize and rationalize pattern recognition.  You're trying to make the subconscious conscious and it's apparently working for you.  It may not work for everyone though.

You've told us that you're good at remembering people's voices but not very good with faces.  Would you say you have a better verbal memory than visual?  If so, could that be why verbalizing the characteristics of chess positions has worked so well for you?  Could this also be why there is something missing from your OTB play that is not missing from your puzzle-solving ability?  Chess, after all, is a visual game and without the full spectrum of visual skills, perhaps some key ingredient is missing...though I don't claim to know what that missing ingredient might be in your case.

Depends on how you define "modern" grandmaster.  Chigorin played his chess in the 19th century.