HUGE difference between tatics and game

Hello Everyone,

I was doing my daily tactic's lesson when I noticed I'm almost at my peak of 1800, yet my chess rating is decreasing to 700's. Surfing on the forums, the most common advice to people of my Elo is tactic, tactic, tactic yet i'm suffering on my chess games and my tactics are improving.

Can someone help me out and show me the way to improve my chess? 

Thank you very much!

I normally play 5 minute games, but mostly I only do tactics 

Hi, You should start playing longer games. 30 minutes at least. 1 hour is even better. And open few 24h games. What You need is having more time. Good luck!

You’ve answered your problem; you only play speed chess. If you are solely focused on improving in chess moving forward, only play rapid games of at least 15/10 (even that is too fast  for me) and no more speed chess. Great work on keeping up with your rated puzzles and continue it. Thirdly, analyze every game. Reassess once you hit 1200. 

I am only speaking from my personal experience and learned that speed kills; chess improvement that is. I did a 6 month old experiment and research on all 3 time controls of rapid, blitz and bullet. I’m sure you can guess which time control is best for improvement, growth and stability. I was even able to successfully jump right into a 1600 pool of players on another site after gaining the experience with this site.

Message me if you are further interested or have more questions. 

I hope the more advanced players or even a titled player can chime in as well.

Time per move in a game should be more than time per tactics puzzle, as in a game you do not know if there is a tactic or not, so you have to assume there is one.

People highly overestimate the effects grinding tactics have on improving at chess.

This is completely not true. There are players that have reached 2300 FIDE almost purely on tactics. You cannot overestimate the effect tactics will have on improving. The hard part is, that improvement can take years and most people here seem to want a quick fix. There is no quick fix and just doing tactics for a few months is not going to be enough. 

OP, you seem to say that studying tactics has made your game worse. It might feel like that, but it can hardly be true. However, I don't know enough about your games that I can give you more specific advice. Let me give you a few possible problems. 

1. You wrote that you mainly play 5 min chess. Maybe you're spending too much time searching for tactics in these games, leaving you with too little time to play a full game. Playing longer time controls will help you with this. 

2. Maybe you're struggling with finding normal moves. This could mean that you spend too much time on these or that you don't play normal sound moves. There are not always tactics on every chess move and you need to also be able to play sound strategic moves relatively quickly. Again, this might be because of the fast time control. For learning all about normal moves and middlegame strategy, you could try reading the book by Sillman, 'How to reassess your chess' and focus on the static advantages (space etc.). This is what I always did with my young chess pupils with good results. You could also watch video's where strong players play blitz games. See and feel what moves they play almost instantly. You'll notice it's almost always a sound, normal move, like moving a rook to an open file. 

3. Another problem you could have, based on your post, is that you fail to spot the tactics in the game itself. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, tactics is not just about doing tactics. Learning tactics is threefold.
- 1. You need to learn about the tactic. If you've never seen a discovery check, you won't see them in game. If you've never consciously learned that pinned pieces can't do their defensive duties, you might not notice that you can just take a pawn or a piece.
- 2. You need to do a lot of puzzles to get strong at pattern recognition. This will help spot a tactic faster in game. 
- 3. You need to learn how to spot tactics. It's not just looking at a position long enough until you've spot it, there are techniques you can use to spot tactics faster. You might want to learn how to use 'check, take, attack'. In chess you can attack 3 objects: it can be an unprotected or insufficiently protected piece (pawns are also possible, but when starting out you can forget about them), it can be an attack on the king (=check) or it can be a mating threat. If on every move you look for moves that give check, moves that capture pieces or moves that attack any of those objects, you'll spot tactics faster. That is because you'll notice, for a double attack for example, that you can threaten mate with the same move as with what you can also attack an unprotected piece, which means you've just found a double attack tactic. 

As you can see, there is more than one possible thing that is holding you back. Likely it's more than just one. If you want, you can always try and give more information about what you feel is hard and what is not going well, and maybe you can get even more specific advice about how to continue to improve. 

Thank you all for your answers, I appreciate every piece of advice you guys are writing here. 

With that being said, I have some new questions:

1.- Playing longer time controls seems a very good way to start improving my game, but I find difficult to keep focus on 1h games on my computers, do you guys have some personal experience when you first started playing longer time controls?

2.- When you talk about analyzing my games when I finish, what do you mean by analyze? Go through every play again? or spot my blunders and analyze better options?

Thank you!

The benefit of playing longer chess game is that you have to be constantly alert of any board chess. U need to calculate your moves, predict opponent moves, and recognize when tactical position arise during the game.

After every game, there is button to analyze your game. Spot your mistake and find better moves. You should also know the reason why the suggested move is good.

Remember that chess is 99% calculation: if I go here, he can go there, and then I can go there, etc. Solving tactics problems is not an end in itself: it helps you develop calculation skills.

Two things that I recommend in doing tactics problems. First, analyze the position to its solution before making any moves. In other words, calculate the end result. Second, ask yourself what made the tactic work. This is known as the tactical theme, such as double attack, hanging piece, fork, skewer, overloaded defender, attraction, etc. By identifying the elements in the position that made the tactic possible, you make it more likely that you will recognize such patterns in your own games.

Hope this helps. I wish you much success in your chess endeavors.

Thank you all for your answers, I did some notes and will work on my Chess.

My own answer to #1 is: the adrenaline I get from playing an opponent live-online is helps a lot to keep my focus.

For #2: Go through a couple of your most recent games, and use the engine, and see where the biggest mistakes were.  You'll find that pretty much all of them were because you missed a tactic (you either missed one yourself, or you didn't see one that your opponent had).  This is proof of the advice of "tactics tactics tactics".  Learning an opening well, or pawn-structure strategy isn't going to help a lot when you miss tactics.  (Tangent: I also look for my *first* off-book or bad move of the game, so as to familiarize myself with the openings that I am actually playing against folks)

The problem, though, is that you can't look for a tactic on every single move all the time, adn there's no one holding up a sign saying "there's a tactic here".  So, at GM @RAU4ever was saying, you need to *recognize* tactics and patterns.

Dan Heisman (award winning chess instructor) explains this idea with a great analogy: when someone asks you "what's 7x6?" do you figure it out (7+7+7+7+7+7)?  Or have you memorized that the answer is 42?  Same with tactics.

And so, he has an interesting approach. Get a book, such as Bain, Chess Tactics for Students, (each chapter is a different tactic: pins, forks, discovered attacks, remove the guard, etc.) and go through the book over and over again until you can get 85% of them in 15 seconds or less.

As for me: I started making electronic flashcards with Anki (software), and use that to practice.

Now, to tie #1 and #2 together: I *also* make flashcards of tactics I missed in my own games.  Because I had a vested interest in my game, I remember them better than a random tactic from some other game.

(Note: regular puzzles are also good, because you can practice calculation, which, of course, is very necessary -- but the primary focus should be on simpler puzzles like Bain's book, because you want to recognize them)

Really, all I'm saying is another explanation that comes to the same conclusion as most of the other folks in this thread:  practice tactics, and play games that are at least 30 minutes long, and review your games afterwards -- mostly for tactics, but also for that first bad move.

Good luck!