“Solve puzzles and become a good puzzle solver.”
I’ve been saying this for years. It is absolutely a myth all the hype puzzles are made out to represent.
The history leading up to the appearance of “Puzzle Rush” is an interesting one. One that I know very well. Prior to it’s appearance here at CC (it was invented a few years earlier by another player who had developed his own app.) solving puzzle’s was viewed and reported to be detrimental to one’s learning chess by most posters in the forums.
Then along came an enterprising and clever marketing strategy here at CC - and Puzzle Rush was born. Hyped to the gills as an improvement tool - a tool for all levels of skill with emphasis on the new player.
Solving puzzles has it’s place of course. But it is not the tool lazy coaches make it out to be. They assign copied puzzles, say solve them and their job is finished. Such activity is in reality detrimental for the new player, spending far too much time on chess positions that will never occur in their games. Such best moves happen but a few times during the course of the chess game. And when they do occur the player must understand and have developed skills that led up to the position. New players would be better served spending valuable time on other motifs.
strategy is as useless for a new or intermediate player as sleeping... so wasting any time on strategy until one is master strength is futile tbh. Look ahead and visualization+calculation is the only thing which matters till that point and chess puzzles help with that
If only tactical level is important on sub master level, every let's say 1 700 FIDE rated level player would be on the same tactical level as any other 1 700 rated player, which is far from the truth.
There are people rated 1 000 - 1 200 here with let's say 2 200 puzzle score, and my highest puzzle score is below 2 400. So if we go by that, either I should be below let's say 1 400 rapid, or someone like that should be around 1 500 at least.
Every player has different things that define their rating. In any case, tactics is very important, but it is not everything that makes your rating on sub master level.
I guess the easiest way to put it is, why do people lose at chess at different rating levels? take the games of anyone who isn't a master, they lose because they blunder something or miss a certain move... super GMs lose since they underestimate certain positions. They need strategy, we don't.
Strategy in any activity is useless until the person has strong fundamental skill. For example in FPS games any form of team coordination and strategy is useless unless u have the aim. Same for chess, if u are missing moves in variations then it doesn't matter how well you understand your position, u will lose.
That's why i think that strategy, openings or anything like that has absolutely no value in low-intermediate chess.
Yes, we lose because of tactics in many cases, but I wanted to say that tactics is not the whole story. Purely tactical mistake is just a simple out of the blue blunder. Those happens as well, especially on novice level, but any other type of tactical mistake happens for some deeper reason.
When you put some pressure on the opponent and he blunders, is it really accurate to say: "Yeah we shuffled pieces and then the game was decided by a tactical mistake and everything before was meaningless"?
In some cases this sentence might be true, but in many I don't think that it is. For instance in the game I posted earlier I tried to explain why that e6 move was more or less the deciding mistake of the game, even though the engine says black could hold afterwards. In human terms the game was that much more difficult from that point, that black lost in just a few moves.
And I have many examples in my games. In one of them, the opponent was about to lose a pawn. He could defend it in a few ways, but if he does, it is a blunder because he will lose a piece in a few moves. And that is exactly what happened. Already a slightly bad position lead to even worse blunder.
That is why I say other aspects of chess go hand in hand with tactics. Other aspects of chess will often lead to slightly better positions that will make opponent crack sooner or later.
Of course, there are opposite examples as well. You could be better for the whole game and blew it, rendering all the strategy and positional themes meaningless, but they matter in many games as well.
Finally someone's telling the truth.
I prefer real puzzles:
I believe that taking One chess puzzle, and solving it with an engine from every possible aspect, is more Fun - therefore you'll remember it better, and also more beneficial. And like in many things in life - learning several rules / concepts, is better than memorizing thousands of details. But I need to wait for a GM to say it, so, here I am waiting...