Tactics and analysing

For tactics training:

Firstly would you recommend chesstempo or a tactics book and if so what book?

And how long, rougly, should I spend on each puzzel?

Analying:

How do I go about analying my own games?

Is analying GM games good for improvment, if so, how should I go about this.

Or chess mentor?  After exams I have 6 weeks with lots of spare time.

I do both of the things Five and Hay16 said.

Does that make me 1/2 a fraud?

The main question was books vs chess tempo.

If anyone has any ideas I would be greatful.

Is there a reason it has to be one or the other? They both, of course, have their benefits.

Books are great for getting the knowledge, but the knowledge is useless unless it is applied and explored.

When I play 3 day/move chess I will sometimes look at most of the moves available to my oppponent.

I 've found I miss more of my opponents good responses than I miss my own good responses.

Even in 30/0 games I will sometimes look at all my pieces and just do a quick check to see where they can move to to see if anything catches my attention. This, of course, is only when there is no apparent tactic or move that follows a plan.

I think it's a good idea to look at a book first, in order to have some classification key for the tactics you see later. I think it helps to label things when you're relatively new to them.Then you can use ChessTempo to drill puzzles.

There are many choices for tactics books, for example :

• Seirawan's Winning chess tactics
• Wetschnik's UTC 2nd edition (this one is maybe best if you're over 30 as it explains patterns in a very rational/conceptual way)
• John Bain's book

About analyzing your own games :

• you want to do this first by yourself, then if possible with a strong human player, then check the conclusions with an engine if you wish
• you try to answer the questions : "what were my biggest mistakes ?", "what triggered the mistake", and "how can I avoid them in the future". You don't need to find all of them - just learning a couple of things in every long game is good enough

About analyzing master games : there are many good ways to do this - you can read many methods in SK's blog. Best is to pick a good annotated game collection and use one of the methods described there.

Addenda - just ran into this thoughtful blog post, with another bunch of good advice on analyzing your own games :

http://www.chess.com/blog/Chessmo/analyze-your-own-games

Chesstempo is great: do the tactical motifs over and over. then do tactics on after another. 

One of the great things about chess is that there is a lot of room for personal choice. Although there are a lot of 'standard' things, there are a lot of things, such as your move choice process, that boils down to what works best for you.

With the first question I mean for practise.  Are books better than online or not?

Online makes practice easier, but good books have puzzles that were chosen specifically for their instructive value.  They also don't have erroneous tags that get thrown into a set of training problems.

I say start with Bain's book.  Learn the tactical motifs.  Drill them until they are as natural as breathing.

Move on to online based training with Chess Tempo after you're done.

It depends on what you get the most benefit from.  I prefer software, while other prefer board and pieces, and others prefer books.  Whatever method you use, be consistent, and take the time to really figure out the tactic.  Be sure you fully understand why the moves were made. 

I use chesstempo more than books; if you join, chesstempo will allow you to download the tactics with which you may have difficulty. It also gives you the game where that tactic appeared and that also can be downloaded. You can then organize your tactics into pins, forks, etc. Books are ok, but you spend a great deal of time just setting up the board for a specific tactic. A pgn file is great as the work has been done for you.

Hope that helps.

kingsfavknight, I agree with you about chesstempo. Superb site. I use it every day. It's a real bargain and a great resource. 

ChessTempo is great and puts this place to shame.  Chess.com is copying a bunch of their "new features" from CT.

I'm not trying to be a jerk. but the best way to improve your chess game is to spend the money, become a diamond member, and then start out your chess training with a comprehensive plan for improvement. You can start learning everything you would ever possibly need to know about chess openings, then strategy, then study and practice tactics. Then after that the endgame. And you'll have unlimited resources and more information at your fingertips than you could ever obtain for a hundred dollars. And if your wondering, no I do not work for Chess.com. Good Luck!