Pertinent tactical motifs @1200
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Mr_eeseeks
Feb 22, 2022
0
#1
What are the most useful motifs to study at the 1200 and what are the best book recommendations for tactics at this level?
Feb 22, 2022
0
#2
Personally I have to work on:
- hanging pieces
- forks (especially on an exposed king)
- unsound counter attacks
That is @1500-1600 but more important, those are my weak spots. Simply deductible from my games.
Wouldn’t that be the best approach for you? Just look at you past games and find your weak spots.
Feb 22, 2022
0
#3
Thanks, that's a good way to approach it. The new insights feature says I need to work on Mate in 1/2 and forks so that's where I'll start.
All motifs are equally useful since they often work together sequentially to form more complicated tactics, with certain motifs manifesting because of the threat of other motifs.
But “first among equals”, I’d pick pins as the most useful, not just because of their standard offensive value, but because pinned pieces cannot defend or offend, and in that manner pins often play a large part in more complicated positional chess.
Now for my preemptive rant:
Books are no longer cost-effective for learning tactics. You would have to believe that an author can somehow hand-select a few hundred of the “very best” tactics positions to learn from, and that studying these tactics would be better than studying exponentially more that are delivered by a tactics server … the more tactics, the better.
The person who has studied 10,000 tactics as delivered by a tactics server (such as Tactics Trainer here or Chess Tempo) or Chess King apps (some with thousands of tactics, mates, or combinations) will be far better off than the person who studies only 700 of the so-called best hand-picked tactics in a book or straight-up memorizes them with something like Chessable.
But “first among equals”, I’d pick pins as the most useful, not just because of their standard offensive value, but because pinned pieces cannot defend or offend, and in that manner pins often play a large part in more complicated positional chess.
Now for my preemptive rant:
Books are no longer cost-effective for learning tactics. You would have to believe that an author can somehow hand-select a few hundred of the “very best” tactics positions to learn from, and that studying these tactics would be better than studying exponentially more that are delivered by a tactics server … the more tactics, the better.
The person who has studied 10,000 tactics as delivered by a tactics server (such as Tactics Trainer here or Chess Tempo) or Chess King apps (some with thousands of tactics, mates, or combinations) will be far better off than the person who studies only 700 of the so-called best hand-picked tactics in a book or straight-up memorizes them with something like Chessable.
Feb 25, 2022
0
#5
i've solved over 11,000 puzzles here; my average rating is over 1700 & climbing...
Get a Chessable account and Woodpecker the free OnTheAttack series, though not all at once 😁.
I sometimes decoy and unnecessarily sacrifice my pieces to skewer king and queen.Kind of reckless tbg
Feb 27, 2022
0
#8
Danny makes a great point....I love some books, but generally they're not pure tactics.
I've done >3000 puzzles now, and you can focus your efforts by choosing themes at a lower level so they stick out more and there's less noise on the board. Pattern rec grows quicker.
The Lessons here are very good...do some searching for Tactics. You'll get 5x the effectiveness of book tactics, although I still love the basics like John Bain's Chess Tactics for Beginners as a review.