Giving up on Tactics

It is just getting more frustrating to see the completely ridiculous scenarios they put up. 

 

I have seen a mate in 2 be wrong because they thought I should grab a hanging piece. 

I've had my king in check on b2, I can move my king to either a2 or b1, and then my bishop on a1 is taken and I take their the bishop with my king.  I choose a2, and it wanted b1, neither of which made a difference to the outcome, king still ends up taking the bishop on a1, and there are no other pieces in play,  Also, no one in their right mind would have gone for that particular bishop swap!!

 I'm just finding too many ridiculous scenarios, making it useless as a learning tool.  I can't focus on the best chess move, I instead have to try and guess what the scenario is, which at this point, is only about 50% chance of it being the actual best chess move.

Same here, ridiculous tactics dumping quick mates to get some piece.

If you look in the analysis then most of the time the “mate” will have a refutation with the best move typically being the solution.

All this whining about the tactics trainer. Yes there are (very few) puzzles which should have alternative solutions, but unless you‘re posting the specific tactic you are complaining about, no one will take you seriously. Most likely, you are wrong and the tactics trainer is right.

I understand tactics are frustrating. However the 1st scenario just seems blatantly wrong. In the sense that chess.com would not get it so wrong. So I think its best if you post that tactic here so we could all look at it.

 

I am thinking you thought what you did led to a # in 2, but in reality it wasn't a # in 2 and hence taking the hanging piece was the best option.

do tactics in chesstempo. rarely do i hear complains from their puzzles. certaintly more subtle than "mate in x"

https://www.chess.com/tactics/40359

 

Here is an example, Qh4 or Qh5 makes zero difference to the outcome, neither move is better or worse.  Yet one is wrong, and the other is right.  This is similar to the Ka2 or Kb1 I mentioned earlier.

I'm not great at chess, so I WANT to learn and get better.  What I'm saying is that it is hard to do that when I have to be more concerned about figuring out what "tactics" wants, as opposed to the reality of the chess problem presented.

 

(to those claiming it's rare, that's two of the same problems in just two days...)

We all get to a level on the tactics and don't seem to improve and it is easy to pass the blame.  You need to go away and study some more.  Improve your vision and learn more fundamentals.  Then come back to it and go again.  Plus, as people have said already you can always go to the analysis room to see why you were wrong.  Keep at it fella they are good tactics. 

 

In my opinion it is always best to go to a book and hand write your moves and then check for the solutions. Just saying.

 Hamur

 

look again buddy - it does make a difference

Very good advice

tactics trainer is a slap in the face reminding us we need to tighten up our games

those games we win where we get a mate in four rather than 3- those are a luxury

what about those games where we need to find the forced mate in four or else we get mated?

if i am honest with myself there are only a few times where the tactic was sketchy; the rest of the times are a weaker attempt at the most forceful action

mix in those where there only tactic is realizing there is no real tactic but maybe positioning something a little better is the solution

i perform my best on tactics trainer when i realize the rating is only a range of puzzles one gets; with all the craziness that goes into accruing? the data to give a “rating” makes it’s value almost irrelevant anyways

and i have been between high twelves to mid fifteen hundred for a few months

one thing that has helped most recently- is to just scroll through some of fischers games (found an ios chess database app and his games were on it already)

there is no annotation just moves; watching how his pieces move on a virtual chessboard (just like our tactics trainer environment) and his moves look like the solutions when we scroll through a tactic to see the full sequence

he is always hammering the basics that all the veterans here keep “spamming” (it does help though)

pins and discoveries and coordination are in everygame and the pieces move so easy

so when i look at a tactic and i consider a move that just “looks” lame or it isnt forcing i keep looking

In the last 17 months, I've done 1441 tactics problems here and 2460 tactics problems at chesstempo and, while I sometimes feel the penalty for getting a problem wrong is too high or right is too low, I only recall a few problems where I and other commenters thought my solution was as good as the "correct" answer.

I would also suggest that, at your rating level, you should assume you're missing something if you think your move is as good as the "correct" solution.  You will improve better if you keep trying tactics problems AND identify the tactics used when you solve them and ask yourself why it took you so long to see them: look at the tags given by users for the solution and also slowly memorize the tactics on these pages so you'll recognize their patterns more often:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-tactics--definitions-and-examples

https://chesstempo.com/tactical-motifs.html

 chess.com tactics are the easiest (compared with other sites tactics, eg. 2500 here vs 2500 there)

Another thought: Look at my rating at chesstempo over the last 17 months. See how there are rough plateaus and valleys?  Every time I hit a valley I wondered if the site was making the problems harder or if I wasn't concentrating as well, etc.  Don't let times like that frustrate you - keep trying.  I think the valleys are mostly bad luck in getting a higher percentage of problems involving tactics I'm weaker at (I wish chess com would provide a list giving the %age of problems of each type that were correct instead of just the %age of max. points achieved - which are greatly affected by time, not correctness).  I've spent time exploring tactics I do less well on and, eventually, I hit a new high:

Just to give you an idea how hardworking  others are.

This guy did 20k tactics. 🤔

I think the core problem is the lack of directive feedback from the tactics puzzles. I want to know "what was it that I was just supposed to recognise?".  There is an assumption in some of the comments above that I should be seeing tactical patterns a move or two in advance, but I don't know the patterns well enough to have the catalogue in my head that enables that.   Sometimes it appears that the objective is to find the least-worst response in a situation or the "right" response leaves me wondering why on earth you bother doing that and understanding what the scenario was supposed to illustrate would help a lot.  Some of the time the analysis tells me why the right answer is clearly better (but not what it was), but some of the time its just that the analysis engine scores the resulting board position highly without any particular resolution and when it does that I'm still in the dark.  

I see where you're coming from on that.  Sometimes I don't know until after I get it wrong and I look at the tags for it.  Sometimes that's not too much help.  Had one puzzle that had the tags hanging piece and mate in 3.  Hanging piece was the correct one, but I wonder if mate in 3 was possible on that tactic?

 

Maybe for the lower level ones, they could be titled to help us just getting started, then ween us off of the later.

Take a look at the last tactic you did.

https://www.chess.com/tactics/89974/practice?autostart=1

You spent 4 seconds on it, and got it wrong.  Now go to it again, and use this to find the tactic.

First:  Ask yourself: "How did my opponents last move, change the position?"

Then look for Forcing Moves:

Checks.

Captures.

Threats,

 I think a blunder is not a good example of the problem I'm referring to.  Sometimes (often enough) I simply screw up and those cases are uninteresting for this discussion.  Sometimes I can see how things need to turn out and simply don't calculate well enough (moves out of order/insufficiently forcing) and practice will eventually help with that.  Sometimes however, like exchanging a queen for two rooks a few days ago, I wonder why on earth its a good idea.  The tactics exercises just present those as something to accept.  Now you could find that one and explain it to me, but that doesn't deal with the underlying problem - there will be another like that soon enough.