Tactical groupings

Okie. So I've decided to up my tactics training. From none to some.

I do my training on chesstempo.

Anyone who has used this site knows that there are many options including building your own sets of tacitcal motifs.

For the last week, I've just had it on random. This is fine, and I'm sure over time I will improve. However, I'm thinking I can progress more quickly if I do sets of motifs that have some type of reasonable relationship.

So my idea is to break their motifs into 7 - 10 sets of 3 - 5 motifs each. Then cycling through the sets.

I've gone through their list of motifs and have been able to identify some that I believe have some reasonable relationship. For example, pins and unpinning.

Unfortunately, most of them don't seem so apparent. So I would like to ask for help in creating these sets.

For an exhaustive list of motifs, here is the link: http://chesstempo.com/tactical-motifs.html

Here are the motifs from that page that I would like to use:

Advanced Pawn

Attraction

blocking

capturing defender

clearance

coercion

counting

defensive move

discovered attack

distraction

double check

fork/double attack

interference

mate threat

overloading

pin

sacrafice

simplification

skewer

trapped piece

unpinning

weak back rank

x-ray

zugswang

zwischenzug

There are also 28 mate patterns. I won't list them here. But I would like to maybe choose the 8 - 10 most useful/common ones to know.

I like pizza. 

Where is passed pawn and discovered check and poisoned pawn?? :))

These are the motifs they offer. I think there are others that are similar to what you are talking about. Like Advanced Pawn and Discovered Attack. I left out a few, perhaps one of them covers poisoned pawn.

So?

So this:

So he's asking for help in organizing that list into 7-10 groupings of 3-5, and he would like the motifs to be similar to each other such as pinning and unpinning.

Okay. Those are 25 motifs. One could make 5 groups of 5 each. Difficult task.

Distraction and Attraction are very similar. IMO clearance sacs go well with these. May consider including interference too.

Desperado and defensive moves are similar in that the opponent will be threatening something and you have to understand it to make sense of the tactic.

X-rays, skewers, pin and unpin are similar.

Overloading and capturing the defender are similar.

Double checks, forks, discovered attacks.

Zugzwang and trapped piece force you to look at the opponent's options to find the right move. Think I'd add Zwischenzug in here too.

Simplification and advanced pawn have to do with endgames or at least likely to be reduced material.

Weak back rank and mate threats are similar.

Sacrifice and blocking perhaps.

Counting is so general I don't know where to put it.

He wants at least 7 groupings and he wants the tactics to be similar.

Are you going out of your way to prove you are a kid today?

Thanks lieph. That seems like a pretty reasonable set of groups. At least based on what I know about the motifs.

You've made 9. Well done leiph!

I'm sure it's not perfect, but at least it gives you something to work with :)

Yeah, I figured some of the groupings would be weak. But I think the most important thing is at least limit the variety of motifs per set so 20 - 30 puzzles a day will repeat the same motifs serveral times.

Having similar ideas is just a bonus really. 

I think there are ways to set up problems sets for mate-in-one...then mate-in-two...etc...

also...someone said the following.

Thanks. I remember that quote and couldn't find it when I went to look for it.

Anastasia's, Anderssen's, Arabian, back-rank, Blackburne's, Boden's, Cozio's, Damiano's, Greco's, Lolli's, Max Lange's, Morphy's, Opera, Pillsbury's, Reti's, epaulette, and smothered. You can also practice normal checkmating patterns, and checkmating in the middlegame. You can try splitting them into checkmate in one, two, three, etc.

Thanks. Unfortunately they don't have mates in 1, 2 3 as motifs. I did want to get something like this though.

You can try other sites for mate in x stuff.

I've been to www.chesstempo.com before. They have all sorts of interesting stuff. You can try out the endgame puzzles if you haven't yet, as they're interesting (despite not being too hard).