Tactical brick wall

I'm having a tactical nightmare.

In so many areas of chess, you can put the hours in and reap the rewards; endgame study and openings are the classical examples. The major thing I find with these is, once you've been shown where you went wrong, you remember for a very long time because the idea behind the move becomes engrained.

My tactical training feels very different. I can bang my head against tactics trainer for hours on end and still consitently make the same mistakes over and over again. I think a lot of this is due to the 'blitz' nature of the timer attached to the trainer (a whole separate argument on why it's too short could rage on for pages but please try to stay off this topic here), but another very strong reason why I feel this is occuring is because of a lack of strucutre in how the tactics are presented to you, and more probably, how I am trying to get better at tactics.

At present, I'm trying to do aorund 100 tactical problems a day on the site. On average, I score well on problems rated up to 1800, less well on 1800-1900, and find 1900+ hard in the given time frames. After a good few months like this, I see no improvement.

Tactics trainer on this website is my main source of tactical training. I really need some help to put together a decent and structured training strategy around this resource to help me improve. Any suggestions?

Try the untimed is my suggestion, with a rating range that is challenging but not oppressive. Give each problem up to three tries before manually going through the moves. If you want some time limit (maybe a few minutes per problem), use the timer included (it will count up on each problem).

Also note that learning often comes in jumps, I have had 200 point jumps (later dropped to +100) in rating playing 960 on another site, sometimes nothing seems to be happening then things somehow just come together, I suspect this will be the case if you use the tactics trainer untimed as suggested above for some length of time (a few months or so should do it, probably no more than 6 months).

Good suggestions. Keep them coming please!

I think I will lay off the blitz for a while and dedicate more time to longer time controls (15|10 / G30) to see if that helps too.

I'm also going through 'improve your chess tactics' by Neishtadt which is very well structured.

What exactly is a Stokyo excercise? Never heard if it :0)

Is there a book - or better yet a free online resource - that goes through positions from a Stokyo perspective? Would be instructive, more so than quicker videos and articles IMO.

this is an outdated post but just to note that chees mentor might be what your looking for!

100 tactics puzzles a day?

On average I think I spend 3-5 minutes on a puzzle.  Easy ones less than a minute, difficult ones 10-15 minutes.

If you're able to do 100 tactical puzzles without spending 8-10 hours on it I think you're doing it wrong.  You must be guessing moves without learning or calculating anything.  (Or the puzzles are so easy it's meaningless.)

Also I found that taking a break from tactics and studying some strategy / endgames actually helped my tactics.  I found it easier to choose which candidate moves to immediately discard and which to calculate.

Haha, roi_g11, I didn't notice you'd said you could do 100 in a day too!

I guess some of them are very easy for you?  Or do you spend all day?

^^ This has been helping me. Which means setting tactics trainer to "unrated" so you aren't bothered by the timer.