Did Tactics Trainer just get harder?

I full-heartedly agree.

Thanks a lot to Jpatrick for having been one of those who used to invest their time and energy into helping to make tactics trainer better.

Seeing all of these old weeded-out bad tactics just dirtily auto-injected into tactics trainer once again is outraging. How could you do this?

I understand that about twelve thousand such jewels are now to be found in the problem set.

15K+

= 25%+

Guys, thanks for your patience and your feedback - and sorry for all the frustration. Obviously, we need to reassess how we go about this.

The new batch of problems has now been removed.

Thanks a LOT !!

I agree with RetGuvvie (and I am a programmer ;) ).  Maybe it is just a matter of beefing up the auto-approver to look for some new patterns.  I don't want to shoot my mouth off too much because there are sometimes very good reasons why things are the way they are, but it does seem that a simple Python script would catch many of these issues.  Or at least flag them for someone to check manually before adding them.

And thanks for the responses and removing the new ones for the moment.

What might be interesting would be to look at the pool of tactics as originally auto-approved on day one by the simple rules they use, and compare them to the actual pool as adjusted and tweaked by the user community over time. (Here I'm talking about the relatively stable pool of tactics that have survived hunderds or thousands of plays, prior to last weeks dump).  By examining what changes had to be made by manual intervention, it might lead to a more accurate set of rules for the auto-approval process.

Now we're getting somewhere.  Thanks.

0297839

Both pawn promotion and Rd1 results with checkmate, but only promotion is counted as correct move.

Thank you for your quick action.  It is much appreciated.

I noticed a lot of tricky ones/ones with long solve times.

One of my goals was to get to 2000 on tactics trainer.It only took about 3 yrs and over 200 hrs,but hey who's in a rush!!!!

Definitely much better now that the new batch have disappeared.  Of course, it is going to be a long climb back to where I was, but I still learned some things which is the most important thing!

Thanks for your quick response, DG. It's good to see that the admin is so attentive to site users.

Thanks.

I appreciate the tactics trainer, but stand with those who don't appreciate my mate in three not being as "correct" as the chosen mate in three.

Maybe the bad problems have been removed - but what remains is mostly far too hard for me. Weren't these designed for weak players to get better? It is particularly annoying to be failed on the first wrong move & get no more chances to try (I do know that it is like that in a real game of course!). Also play starts as soon as the board appears - I need say a minute to look at it before the moves start... I see no setting to reduce difficulty either.

If you go to Tactics Settings (http://www.chess.com/tactics/settings.html), you should be able to select Unrated mode, which will turn off the timer AND allow you to select a ratings range for the problems you are served. Hope that helps!

Thanks DeepGreene - I didn't realise that you could do that!