Are you 600-1500 rated, and spending more time studying openings than tactics? BAD BAD BAD!

Studying openings as a beginner is not only painful but it is pretty much a waste of your time.  As you get better at tactics and chess patterns, learning openings becomes a LOT easier anyway.  It is also easier to learn positional play as you improve at tactics because you will start to understand where the pieces belong, and where they will have the most power/potential in relation to the position.

How important are Tactics?  95% of the games below the 2000 level are won simply because of tactics (calculation). It doesn't matter if you had a great opening, if you blunder a pawn a couple of moves later, your entire opening advantage is gone.  Most games can be won with merely an extra pawn or two. 

When we start out in chess, we all SUCK at tactics!  It is just the truth, there is no beginner who has ever started out being amazing at tactics, this is because first you must accumulate an arsenal of basic patterns, solidify them, and then you can begin to incorporate more complex patterns and ideas to your arsenal.  Even the advanced tactics in chess are often just combinations of simple patterns.

Most tactics, aren't that deep. If you look at a 600 level player's games, they are consistently missing tactics that are only 1/2 a move ahead.  (Undefended pieces, Mate in 1)  This is typically because the 600 player is not looking at their opponent's immediate possibilities.  Most players aren't in a habit of checking their opponent's resources after every move until they are 1200 or even higher!

Improving at tactics, is taxing on your brain.  It is not supposed to be a cake walk.  Tactics training is like going to the gym for your chess, if it is too easy, you probably aren't doing much. This is also why slow games are better for your improvement, you are straining and exhausting those mental muscles.  (I never sleep better than after an OTB chess tournament) 

How to do tactics correctly:

#1 Forget about your rating. Focusing on your tactics rating is MADDENING.  You can easily go up or down 100 points in a day but that is just temporary fluctuation and not a reflection of a 100 pt gain or loss in ability.   Rating always comes AFTER improvement in skill, and sometimes it can take a while for your rating to catch up with your skill. There is always variance in rating and your new data needs time to solidify in your brain.  I was stuck at the 1200-1400 level in tactics for almost a year.  I probably did 2000 puzzles staying around the same rating, I'll have to admit that I had lost some patience with the puzzles and I was spending less time on them, but I kept at it because I knew I was still absorbing new patterns and solidifying old ones

#2 Failed puzzles are your best friend. Correctly solving a puzzle feels GREAT, right? +15?! OH YEAH IM AWESOME, but then you fail two in a row and you are lower than when you started and then you say STUPID PUZZLES and immediately start a blitz game, forgetting about them as fast as possible (You've done it, we've all done it) STOP DOING THAT! You have to modify your own psychology on the issue.  After your initial frustration with PUZZLE FAILED, take a deep breath and open the analysis board. The entire point of tactics training is to get better at tactics, if you got every puzzle right, then you wouldn't be learning too many new things!  After each failed puzzle you MUST ANALYZE IT afterwards to gain the maximum benefit for your time.  Not analyzing your failed puzzles is like lifting weights every day, but not getting enough protein (or amino acids). When you analyze your failed puzzles, two things should happen. 1. You should try to figure out what was wrong with your move. (even more effective is to verbalize this out loud)  2. You should look at the correct answer and describe to yourself what type of tactic it is, and why do you think that you missed it.

#3 Take your time and be focused.  
Turn off the TV, put youtube on pause, go somewhere that is quiet, if possible. Don't be in a rush. When you first open a puzzle, get in a habit of looking at the entire position.  Count the material for both sides, look at the pawn structure, look at the pieces and the squares they can attack, count how many times everything is attacked and defended. Identify the weak squares.  Look for tactical themes https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-tactics--definitions-and-examples.  

Now start picking  "candidate" moves.  Get in a habit of looking at checks and captures first, as they are the most forcing and allow your opponent a minimum amount of reasonable replies.  Go through 1 option at a time, and try to refute it yourself.  Does this check do anything?  What are ALL of their possible responses? If it looks powerful yet just 1 reply can refute your move, then your move is objectively no good at all.  Try to prove to yourself that your candidate move is bad as fast as possible so you can move on to the next candidate move.  After you have looked at every available check, look at all of the possible captures you have  and apply the same critical process.  Remember when you are evaluating a candidate move capture that is not a check, your opponent doesn't have to directly respond or recapture, so they likely have 20+ legal responses and now you have to look at THEIR checks and captures, you have to look at all of them, as just 1 good response can ruin your entire idea.   After checks and captures if you still haven't found anything promising, look for THREATS, do you have a candidate move that threatens a checkmate? Do you have a move that attacks a valuable piece with a less-valuable one?  can you threaten two pieces at once? Look at the geometry of it, are the enemy king and queen connected in some way?  Same diagonal, same file, same rank, a knight fork apart? Sometimes you even have to start going through EVERY legal move to find the tactic but this is how some of the most genius tactics of all time have been found!

If you just use chess as a casual game just to mess around and pass the time, then don't even worry about tactics training!  But if you want to use chess as a hobby and a source of mental stimulation and reward, you should follow this advice. Every chess master has done thousands of puzzles. 

800-1800+ in under 5 years, how much of that was due to openings?  None!  How much was due to tactics puzzles? about 70% or more.

Is this a monolog ?!? 

it was

This was very, very helpful as I've lost 200 points in 1 day & was so frustrated & just quit but then the next day I got 150 points back. I did tactics when I was exhausted=1,000 in 1 day! Big mistake......thanks for the advice & you are right Antonio I've won all my daily games mostly with tactics. Thanks for the information....it's gonna help me Even more! Trace Or theprotege77

Stop starting the same thread with a different names over and over.

What's he selling?

A diamond membership.

Im not even selling a diamond membership haha im selling chess improvement.  I never even said chess.com has the best tactics!  maybe there is another site that ends in "tempo" that has better puzzles and they are free 

Oh you are going to get coal in your stocking this year from chess.com, Antonio.

AHH! Well um... Chess.com tactics trainer has the advantage of easy-to-use 1 click analysis after the tactic is over so you can find out what was wrong with your line, and you can explore other variations that the puzzle didn't go down.  There, now I am pleasing everyone

Exactly! On [Website, chess] I had NO CLUE what I did wrong, I played a perfectly logical move, and it's like, WRONG. Also, there, I am so bad at switching to a new tactic...

I think he wants a tactics section on chess.com.

Otherwise I have no idea why he is posting on the openings section to say ALL openings are refuted(because of human error) and let me show you some blitz games of begineers to prove it.

Or he wants a spinoff of secret chess.

I guess we'll be waiting for the examples of all these blitz games where begineers play 20 moves of an opening but lose their queen the next move. Or its a spinoff of secret chess.

So what will Antonio post? A 1000 rated playing 17 high quality moves into Najdorf and losing a rook the next move or?

Thanks. You are exactly right. 

I would like to see games of a 1000-rated player playing another 1000-rated player in the Najdorf and the unbooked-up opponent walks right into a scheme favorable to the Najdorf bookie and loses through a succession of errors that the Najdorf bookie would never be able to capitalize on had s/he not been familiar with the Najdorf.

repost?

 https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/hey-noobs-forget-openings-study-tactics-the-right-way exactly the same 1st post. Did the same with the N v. Q varient.

After 9 years here and after almost 5,000 games of online games then going from 1780 to 1250 in about 8 years I have found that I really could careless about my rating. 

Now it's about just having a good time.