You learn new patterns.
How do chess problems help?
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I’ve been following Dan Heisman’s advice of starting by focusing on the easier tactics until I’m able to see them immediately. I’ve definitely noticed an increase in my chess ability. I would describe it sort of like this…
When you first start playing chess, it’s easy to hang pieces because even though you know how they move, it’s easy to miss that the square you moved your queen to is protected by your opponent’s knight. As you get better you stop making these mistakes because attacked/protected squares just seem to pop out at you. By practicing tactics, I notice the same thing where now tactics start to just pop out at me.
One thing I like to do is take any problems I miss and work through the solution on the board and in my head a few times until the solution pops out at me as I’m looking at the board.
As usual, hicetnunc is spot on. Grandmasters are as good as they are because they recognize a lot of patterns. They don't calculate everything all the time, they can 'feel' what's happening in the position.
How? Because they have done or seen something very similar. Through tactics and problems.
I was working my way through the Chess Tactics stuff here, and I got to thinking; "How does this improve my game?"
What I mean by this is that you KNOW there is a right answer, and it's usually fairly major. Winning a piece, mate, etc. During a game, you may or may not have this stuff even if the positions are somewhat similar.
So do chess problems, either from here or books, etc really help improve your game? If yes, then how?