I know I'm supposed to learn tactics, but . . .

I want to learn tactics.  I know the simple variations of them (fork, skewer, pin, forced moves, etc.).  The lessons on chess.com here are a great entree into this.  My problem is this:

I'm presented with a chessboard in mid-game, pieces are all over the place, and the exercise says: "can you find a way to force a favorable exchange of black's queen?"

So, sometimes I see it fairly quickly, sometimes it takes me five minutes of staring, and a few times I couldn't get it at all.

My question is: if I'm having a hard time seeing the answer even when the question is telling me where to look -- how am I supposed to see it in a game when I don't even know if it exists nor which pieces?  (Does this question make sense?)  (I'm already guessing at the answer: do tons of puzzles and it will come with experience.)

Any recommendations for tactics books?  In another thread I asked about Seirawan's, and somebody else said that for his style it was too much text and not enough puzzles and recommended another one (but I forgot what he recommended).

(PS: now I remember! The other book was John Bain, Chess Tactics.  It's sort of like a student's workbook with 430 exercises/puzzles in them)

I'm having the same problem, but your guess is probably right. First you'll get better at the puzzles and then you'll start to notice when the scenarios come up in a game.

I don’t think there is much choice in the matter. If we never “see” them in a real game, it’s because we never “saw” them due to not enough tactics practice. Kind of odd to think it backwards but it helps me sometimes. My question about the importance of tactics is this, if practicing tactics is so critical to the learning process, how did any of the great masters of the past learn them? They didn’t have programs, PCs, pads, phones, chess.com, or chess-dot-anything. 

I totally agree with @Wits-end. If you are not seeing a tactic in practice, you won't be able to see them in a game. The answer is more practice

But it must be the right sort of practice. First, I think it helps to split tactics training into 2 types of practice: pattern recognition (fast thinking) and calculation (slow thinking).

For pattern recognition, something like Bain's Chess Tactics for Students is great. You do the same relatively simple exercises over and over again until you can solve them almost immediately. Repetitive drills until the patterns get burned into your brain. Puzzle Rush is good for pattern recognition, but I use it more for testing my ability rather than for learning the patterns in the first place. I also think it presents too many back rank combinations at low difficulty rather than other patterns.

Another issue with just doing rated puzzles is you get less repetition of exact positions. In the beginning I think patterns are acquired more easily by training on the same set of positions until you can solve them almost instantly. Working through a book is great for this. Or use the custom/learning puzzles feature here to just work on problems you got wrong at least once in the past. Spend some time each day retrying the puzzles you got wrong until you stop getting them wrong.

For calculation, you will be working on relatively more difficult positions. Calculating variations, visualising, looking for the best line.

They are not totally separate though. Pattern recognition helps point calculation in useful directions. See a pattern you know, but a key square is defended, so then start to calculate ways to remove the defender and so on. And at the start when you don't know any patterns, it's all calculation which is why exercises take a long time to solve at first.

My current approach:

1. Working through Bain's Chess Tactics for Students exercises on Chessable.
2. At least some daily rated puzzles here
   1. patterns and calculation
3. At least some daily puzzle rush here
   1. mostly testing patterns

And no, there is no Chessable course on the Bain book. I have the book and also a pgn of all the exercises. I used the PGN to make a private course on chessable, broken down into tactical motif and white/black to move.

Studying games (their own and published ones), asking things like "why does that move work?" and "why didn't black just take the rook?". Also, books full of tactical exercises have been around for a while. You can either solve them in your head (good for visualisation/calculation), or set the position on a real board.

try to find at least one game winning tactics in your game.  if you don't find any than after the game ends analyze the game with an engine and try to identify a key moment where you could have achieved a winning position via tactics. this way you can combine your own personal games with concrete engine analysis and eventually will be able to spot more tactics in game.

my advice would be that at first don't pay too much attention to "inaccuracies" (?!) because it is often harder to understand why they are considered subpar moves. they often are bad in the long term but not immediately punishable. for mistakes (?) there is often a tactic involved and you should find it with the computer. then when it comes to a blunder (??) you should definitely try to understand why the computer considers it so bad and the answer is usually pretty obvious. just my two cents on how to use engine to analyze your own games, which i think most would agree is a very good way to imrpove.

They had books and magazines. Here is a Tweet from Vishy about that:

https://twitter.com/vishy64theking/status/1152420186311413760?lang=en

My name is Lauren Goodkind and I'm a chess teacher based in the San Francisco bay area.  

Tactics is like riding a bike.  At first, recognizing tactic patterns is takes  lot of time.  Once you continue to do tactic puzzles, your brain should eventually easily  recognize these specific tactic patterns in real life games.   

My advice: Pay attention to what pieces are on the same line as your king and queen.  What pieces are on the same line as your opponent's king and queen?  Do this before every move.  

Consider all checks and captures and try your best to think at least one move ahead.  

   One book that I recommend for beginners is "50 Poison Pieces", which is available on Amazon.com.  Readers have to figure out why capturing an unprotected piece is a huge mistake.  

  I hope that this helps.  

think of the purpose of solving tactics puzzles as building your mental database of positions you can play by hand. you have to know the solution and why it works by heart so that next time you encounter it you don't need to solve it. you need thousands of positions in this database just to get to a decent level. i'll just say decent means very few instances of outright blunders and very long intervals between big mistakes. not that good yet but no longer consistently terrible.

the other aspect of tactics is the more difficult one. you have to incorporate looking at tactical possibilities for both sides when you are thinking about your move. pay attention to your opponent's last move and ask yourself whether this leaves something undefended that you can take advantage of by taking it or if it's a square, occupying it.

this also requires a lot of repetition and a lot of revision along the way. but it goes hand in hand with solving tactics. there's little point in being tactically strong when solving puzzles if you can't utilize that in a real game.

I think it was me who recommend Chess Tactics for Students by Bain in the other thread. Also mentioned by @JugglinDan above. Give it time and start with simple puzzles. If you cant see a solution after several minutes then the puzzle is too hard. I use the same approach as @JugglinDan with simple and hard puzzles. It took me a few months before I felt it was improving my game. In fact I set up my first tactical trap in a game yesterday, after a year of studying tactics. Usually I see them when they appear, but in this case I saw an opportunity, while calculating (it also indirectly defended a pawn by way of a tactical threat). My point is that it is a skill that strengths over time (months) with regular practice. My opponent took the pawn and is about to lose his rook to a basic fork. He was nearly 1600 rated. I was quite surprised. Obviously doesn't practice tactics.

I disagree. The answer is not practice, practice, practice. And it definitely is not true that tactics are something you should be able to learn on your own completely.

There are 3 aspects of training tactics. The first is doing a ton of them to increase pattern recognition. This is well known. If you do more combinations, you'll likely see them more quickly in a chess game. It's hard to become better if you don't study tactics (unless you're a wonderkid, like maybe the old world champions). The second one is learning which tactics there are. If you don't know what a skewer is, you might not notice that two pieces are both on the same file or diagonal and you might not find the tactic. The third one, however, is what is being overlooked very, very often. That is: how to spot tactics.

It is very important to be taught how to spot tactics in the first place. If you get taught properly, and you have a trainer with you that can ask the right questions while you are struggling to find the right answer to a puzzle, you'll find that spotting tactics becomes a whole lot easier.

The thing you want to look out for during a puzzle could be summarized as 'check, mate, attack'. You want to look at all the possible moves where you attack the king (check), threaten checkmate (mate) or where you attack an undefended piece (loose pieces drop off) or insufficiently defended piece (attack). Insufficiently defended pieces are pieces that are attacked once and defended once. Or attacked twice and defended twice. It's a threat where your opponent has to defend the piece again or he'll lose it. You should also look at moves that attack pieces of a higher value, like a knight attacking a queen. That would also fall under 'attack'. 

How would this work? Well, let's imagine a simple double attack. A double attack is a move where I attack 2 targets with 1 move and where my opponent can't defend both threats. If I go through the technique I wrote down above, I will get all kinds of different moves. If there is a double attack, I will notice that the same move comes up again. So: there might be a queen move that puts my opponent in check and that same move might also attack an undefended piece. I just found my double attack.

I strongly believe that this technique should be trained up when you start out with tactics. Tactics become more and more difficult and to understand the more difficult ones, you need to understand the basic ones too. 

In the Netherlands all of our youth players used to work with a method called the step method. I am in no way affiliated with the makers of it, but I do find it's the best tactics training out there and I've used it as a teacher for years. What happened was that the students would get a work book that has 12 puzzles per page on specific tactics or pages where multiple are mixed in to make it more difficult. After some explanation by a teacher, they'd work on the puzzles. When someone couldn't find the solution, they would ask the teacher for help. A good teacher would then help them by helping them perform the technique of finding tactics. So they'd ask questions like 'Have you looked at undefended pieces or where you can check their king?" I find that this setting was always extremely helpful to learn tactics really well. 

The good news is that you can nowadays buy it in English too. If you google 'step method chess' it'll be the first link. Step 1 is basically learning the rules of chess, so can (and should usually) be skipped, step 2 is basic tactics and it gets increasingly more difficult. For beginners that know how to move the pieces, step 2 and step 3, and a little later, step 4 are great to learn tactics. It even teaches you rudimentary endgame techniques, like key squares and opposition, and some basic principles. If you work on your own, getting both the teacher's manual and the student workbook is very advisable though. Not only are the answers in the manual, but it also contains ideas on how to teach the tactics and tips on how to ask the right questions when trying to find (or letting someone else find) the right answer to a puzzle. 

Maybe I should back up a bit. @RAU4ever has made some points that I take as given, but I realise this is not always be the case. @sholomsimon, I have presumed that you have a system or technique you follow when doing puzzles, such as Checks, Captures and Threats (CCT). So when you practice tactics you are also practising the application of your system which then also becomes a more natural/habitual part of your play (at least that was my experience). If you dont have a system, maybe the question is 'How to Solve Puzzles?', which covers topics such as CCT, forced moves, etc.

The exact opposite of this is true. Almost all chess positions are full of tactics, even endgames with few pieces. Figuring out the tactics can be very slow, except if your pattern recognition system kicks in and identifies a known pattern (in an unknown position) it is very fast.

Laszlo Polgar wrote a great book containing more than 4,000 puzzles. Start off doing 5 per day and increasing as you feel able. Seeing tactics in actual chess games does take time to be able to do but over time you will be able to do it, hopefully.

Do you mean "Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games"? 

Asking for a wishlist

There was a book I studied long ago titled (I think) The Art Of Chess Combination. It was a book that explains the ideas behind the combinations, how they arise (the WHY part), etc. I think learning that way is much better than puzzles alone. A good book teaching how to think COMBINED WITH doing puzzles is a good way.

My experience is tactics teach themselves. Once you've learned the basic motifs from a book or similar, and have a basic system such as CCT, the rest comes from looking at the ones you get wrong and understanding why. I evolved my system as the puzzles got harder. When I pick the wrong line it's often because I missed defensive resource. This feeds into my games. If I see a good line, the first question that comes is 'does my opponent have a good defense, how could they refute this idea'. That habit comes from my tactics training. I also miss Attraction tactics. They are hard to spot.

Thanks so much for you post--super helpful!

What books did Capablanca have available? Lasker said Capablanca was the only genius he knew.