Last week I was given exclusively 2000+ rated puzzles for 3 straight days. Eventually I just gave up after getting them all wrong (but being given 1 point for some reason). I had been doing rated puzzles for about a week or so and got to about 1100 rating before it inexplicably stopped given me puzzles in my range. I'd love to hear the answer to this.
Puzzles - random 2000s and Advice
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Mar 7, 2021
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#3
Some puzzles you get are ones that have a pending difficulty rating, so they have people try them at random to get a sense of how hard/easy they are. You won't get penalized for getting those wrong, which is why you get +1 if you get them wrong.
As for puzzle advice, looking for checks/captures/attacks (in that order) is a good way to find the solution for a puzzle. Examine all possible checks you can do and see if those moves lead to something good - if none do, examine all possible captures and see if one of those wins - and if neither of those do it, find any moves that create a winning threat. It's a good habit to develop as you should ideally be doing this every turn in a real game.
Puzzles -
I’ve been doing rated puzzles for a few months and my puzzle rating bounces between 800 and 600. I managed to get above 900. I’ve noticed that randomly it will test me with a 2000+ difficulty! See my screenshots below. Why is that? I seem to get more 2000s than puzzles with difficulty rating closer to my rating like a 900-1000.
Advice? - I’ve found I’m OK at identifying the mate in 1&2 and sometimes 3s puzzles. But I’m terrible at the puzzles that are not a short obvious mating sequence. For example, when the puzzle tries to get me to capture the hanging piece, or setup a fork to capture a piece, or take advantage of a pin to take a another piece, finding a discovered check or attack, or even just improve a position. (I’m sure there are other tactics I’m missing that I don’t know the names of). What advice do you have? I’ve been focusing on getting it right and not worrying about how long it takes.
I’m a methodical person, is there an order of operations I could use to improve? Like 1) check to see of you are in Check? 2) check if you have a mate in 1 or 2 3) check to see of you can fork a queen or rook and the king. 4) check to see if you can capture a hanging piece. 5) look for a discovered check. 6) is there a piece that would capture you in a position but can’t because its pined? ... something like that...
Also I wish the hints were a hint like the above topics and the solution was where to move the piece.
any other advice? I play games occasionally but get my butt kicked too badly to learn from. I need to learn more before I can keep doing that. Or some way to explain what I’m doing wrong after a game.