I think that site is pretty weak honestly. In several problems (playing 20 problems, I noticed 4-5 of them), the "solutions" aren't the best solutions and alternate solutions give you no credit.
CTS is much better, but Tactics Trainer, or Chessimo (purchasable software) are the best.
I personally prefer books for tactics though. I like my tactics to be HARD, and I'd rather do 5-10 a day in 30-60 minutes than blitz 100 of them.
The_Joy_of_Rooking wrote:
I think that site is pretty weak honestly. In several problems (playing 20 problems, I noticed 4-5 of them), the "solutions" aren't the best solutions and alternate solutions give you no credit. CTS is much better, but Tactics Trainer, or Chessimo (purchasable software) are the best. I personally prefer books for tactics though. I like my tactics to be HARD, and I'd rather do 5-10 a day in 30-60 minutes than blitz 100 of them.
Good points :) However, I was doing a comparison between chess.com's tactics trainer and chesstempo.com's. I think there isn't a whole lot of difference in terms of quality (I've played more than a couple hundred there and over a hundred here), variety (thousands and thousands of problems covering varied themes), and mechanics (tactics trainer doesn't give you credit for partial solutions either).
Given that and chesstempo's unlimited problems available for free in a day, I think chesstempo wins over tactics trainer hands down.
Well I haven't found a single error in the problems here and found 4-5 in the 15 minutes that I spent on chess tempo.
It's a shame you can't specify the positions and pinpoint where the errors are. They *have* been analyzed by a competent chess engine so it would be valuable if you can show your correct analysis over the computer's ;)
But then again if you found 4-5 errors in 15 mins, which would translate to what, 15-30 positions total then that's an error rate of about 15-33%. Statistically speaking, it wouldn't be difficult for you to spend another 15 mins and maybe find 2-3 and post it here?
I think chess.com is great; it's one of the premier chess sites out there and has a lot of cool and useful features (news, forums, articles, live and correspondence play,etc). One of the features I especially liked was the tactics trainer.
Now when I first came across chess.com and registered, the tactics trainer allowed up to 10 problems in a day, and you'll have to become a premium member to get more problems. I thought that was ok, sure I'll try it out and then maybe if it's really good (which it is) then I'd think about being a paid member (even for just the tactics trainer).
But then the 10 problems you have daily for free became just THREE problems. Is that stingy or what?
I thought this was way uncool and so I found [EDIT - another site], which was a lot similar to chess.com's tactics trainer (quality of problems, nifty UI, ratings system, stats), but the difference is you can solve an UNLIMITED number of problems in a day.
My question is -- what's the value of tactics trainer then?
I can just head over [EDIT - elsewhere] when I need to practice tactics, use it all day, get feedback on my ratings, etc etc. If I wanted to tailor my tactics regimen or get info on some advanced stats, *then* I have to be a paid member; otherwise, I'm still fine -- the unlimited chess problems is still a whole dimension of value.
PS I'm actually thinking of getting a paid membership there eventually, good value for money.