Tactics Training

Yes. Thanks.

The thing with this site is that they have most things in one place but those things are inferior to things found elsewhere. Tactics trainer vs chess tempo is one; games explorer vs chessbase is another! (six million master games anyone?) So you are paying in reality just for the videos, but then you have the amazing St Louis lectures on youtube for free. So please yourselves...

np

I've heard of chessbase of course. Is this software you have to buy, or a subscription you pay for, or free? 

It's so nice having everything at one place and playing one vendor.

It's already been increased from 2 to 3 to 5

You seem to be making a common mistake of many improving chessplayers.  You're looking for the holy grail.  Stop looking and start taking some of the (good) advice you've been given.

Switch to Chess Tempo or don't switch to Chess Tempo.  Do the Bain book or do the Polgar book.  But for the love of god stop second guessing everything.

Chess Tempo is leagues better than Tactics Trainer.  They aren't even close to comparable.  It would be laughable to even try.  Anyone who has used both will straight up tell you that.  Multiple people in multiple threads have told you this. It's $4/month.  Yet you still want some perfect explanation for why you should try it despite being told by multiple people it's better.    Try it or don't try it, whatever. People who know will know and you'll still be on the forums trying to make up your mind as to what you want to do.

You've already got chess.com's platinum.  Play the tactics trainer until your brain falls out(it will)each day, and after about a week or so, you should see 'where you are'.  Then, you can try just doing a dozen or so a day, inbetween games.  It's a GREAT warmup.

What i like about the tactics trainer on chess.com is that they are timed.  It helps simulate thinking under pressure during a game.

A post by IM David Pruess on a chess forum relating to how chess players respond to advice (good or bad): 

Thought you mind find it interesting...(Dan H added bold for the parts related to The Four Homeworks)

"As a teacher, my impression is that there is precious little advice the student actually wants to hear. Almost anything about how you need to work to improve is disregarded.

For example people write in to Jeremy Silman's column and ask him how to become a master. He'll list many things including "playing over 10 000 games" (I forget the exact number). Rather than starting to look over games, they'll reply in the comments section that he's lying, making it up.

"You should analyze your own games: losses and draws particularly." So, I've been doing this program "your games analyzed" for over 20 weeks now, in which a chess.com member has the opportunity to select any game of theirs and show it to me, and i'll go over it, ask about their thought process, and give my comments and feedback on the game. I believe I have seen 1 loss and 1 draw submitted out of ~25 games.

"Don't use computer engines until you are over 2400." but you see, a computer can "analyze" a game in a few minutes without any effort from the player-- who cares if they won't learn A SINGLE THING? and it's cheaper to ask a computer what you did wrong than hiring a master-- never mind that after the computer affixes a ? (or two) to one of your moves and provides an alternative, you'll be none the wiser as to why your move is not best, why the suggestion is better, what principle(s) is in operation, why you made the mistake you made, or what you'd have to do to produce the computer's move in a future game.

or when i give players in the 1000-1800 range advice on improving their tactics, viz: 10-15 min per day of solving simple tactical puzzles. the goal is to increase your store of basic patterns, not to work on your visualization, deep calculation. remember that is your goal. you are not trying to prove that you can solve every problem. if you don't solve a problem within 1 minute, stop. it's probably a new pattern or you would have gotten it by now. (with private students i'll take the time to demonstrate this to them: show them through examples that they can find a 3-4 move problem in 10 seconds if they know the pattern, and that they can fail to find a mate in 2 for 10 minutes if they don't know the pattern). look at the answer, and now go over the answer 3 more times in your head to help the pattern take hold. your brain can probably take on 2-3 new patterns between sleeping, so you should stop once you've been stumped by 2 or 3 problems (usually will take about 10-15 min). there is no point in doing more than that in one day. and any day you miss, you can't make up for. a semi-random estimate on my part is that you need about 2000 of these patterns to become a master. so you need to do this for 2 years or more.

i would guess that less than 1 in 100 of the people i have given this advice to have followed it to the letter. if they enjoy it, they'll waste their time doing it for 1.5 hours in a day, choosing to ignore that it's not helping them [after 15 min]. or some with ego issues will insist on trying to solve every single position (if only they linked their ego to their self-discipline ).

i could go on and on. from my experience, there are exactly two kinds of advice players *do* like to get:

- "you don't need to do x." Love, love, love, love that!! eg: "you don't actually need to memorize openings to be a master;" or "you don't need to calculate in positions like this, you can just move your pieces towards the best squares;" or "you don't need to study the endgame until your games are balanced enough to reach a lot of even endgames." people really drink that stuff up. sort of related is #2

- "see, this principle explains the entire position." provided the principle was well-explained, people love this too. well, on the one hand, powerful principles can often be pure gold; but i can't help but jadedly suspect that part of it may be that it is another pass for playing without working. playing according to principles is so much easier than employing painstaking analysis.

but anyway, chess is supposed to be fun, so have fun. you don't need to calculate if you don't like to. you don't need to revisit your losses if they are painful. you all have my not-even-one-iota-of-sarcasm-or-irony blessing to keep playing as you do. it's even fine with me if you ask me for advice and then ignore it as long as we all have fun in the process.

besides, people with an extremely strong desire to improve (in any field) pretty much all do put in serious work, and take pains to make sure they incorporate messages they are instinctively resistant to into their thoughts. when other masters tell me: "david, you aren't going to like hearing this, but here's what i think your problem is," i perk up. but currently i'm not doing the work to take advantage of that advice. i just enjoy playing"

@Silent: Just to confirm, it seems you cannot articulate what is better about CT. That's a pretty long message without the informatino I requested. Just tell me in a few sentences what is better about CT, if you are able. I'm not doubting you (well, I'm starting to), but I would like an answer please. You can make problems sets with CT and not with TT. Is that the only thing that is better? I've tried CT (not extensively). I only have one questions. WHY is it better than TT? Give me the exact reasons please.

Who is this guy asking me to increase the daily puzzles for non-paying members? LOL. OK. I'll get right on that. Oh boy.

 @Chiken_Monster ,

Sorry sir, you misread my words. I was not 'asking' by any mean. It's just a mere request. And certainly it your own prerogative whether you want to increase the number or not. Many thanks for your kind words, I presume headed for me. Best regards

Don't call me sir. Refer to me as Chicken_Monster.

I am not employed by chess.com. I suggest you contact chess.com via the appropriate channels if you want them to consider your request for more puzzles.

Read post #14 in this thread.  Lots of good reasons there.

Benedictine certainly made some interesting points, and went into a decent amount of detail. I'm wondering if the timer is a good thing, though. I honestly don't know enough about teaching and learning tactics to know.

Senchean and others, what do you think about the various issues about which Benedictine posted?

Also, why would chess.com not implement these features if they are desirable?

Yes this is a good and valid point. However, the timing system here is based on the average time a problem is solved and this is a big issue. This wouldn't be a problem in itself if the average chess.com user looked at each puzzle carefully, considered opponent's threats and checks before considering valid looking candidates and calculating those lines to the end and only then making a move. But I do not hold faith that the average chess.com user does this and so the timings do not match each problem. And of course as mentioned previously the pool of problems here are inferior anyway to that of chesstempo and in other tactics software.

For practising timed problems to stimulate time pressure in a real OTB I use I use chesstempo's mixed mode!! As I said before this is just a real gem. Mixed mode is firstly a mix of attacking and defensive problems. This is gold dust in itself in my opinion because, believe it or not, in chess your opponent's can also move and make threats of their own! With this discovery the astute student therefore spends time on defensive problems too and not just on 99% attacking, 1% defensive as on tactics trainer...

With mixed mode you get I think it is 5 minutes to consider the board and make your move without this affecting your rating score. 5 minutes is a realistic amount of time that you could invest in a standard OTB situation. So when I am working in this mode I get a taste for time pressure but I can still properly analyse the board and I am not encouraged to lash out at the first check available without thinking.

I use various problem sets for different areas of training, but when I use mixed mode I am not solely working on tactics but I use it to also train my thought process and evaluation. Here is roughly how I use it:

1 When I start a problem I sometimes set it up to the board, maybe in 50% of cases. This is because I don't like staring at the computer screen for so long true, but also because I am trying to simulate OTB right? This might take me minute to set the board up and check I have done it correctly but this is OK.

2 I spend a few moments just weighing the position at hand. Obviously if I am in check I am going to be considering different candidates than if there is a pawn promotion or a loose king, etc.

3 I consider ALL my 'opponent's' checks, captures and threats. Every time. Even if the position seems to be a mating problem against the opponent's king. Here I am, maybe over-training, but training a healthy thought process and untraining thousands of 'attack only, check, check, check' problems I have done on TT over the last couple of years.

4 Consider candidates and calculate all lines to the end, obviously without moving the pieces.

5 When I am satisfied I have my move, I double check I haven't overlooked anything before making my move and I also try to give an evaluation of the position before moving. I keep forgetting to do this though.

6 Make my move and then check with analysis. Here is where I do my mini post mortem. I check over the lines given, compare my evaluation to the analysis lines, if I have overlooked something I want to work out what I have overlooked, depending on the situation I might explore some lines further by using the computer function, etc, etc.

Doing this each problem might take 10 minutes but I feel I come away from each of them having trained my thought process, calculation, visualisation and evaluation. And I have done with with a balanced set of quality real life problems in timed conditions. Better than tactics trainer? Yes I think so.

As I said I have custom sets for other areas of tactics training. I have a custom set of pure defensive problems. To train defence. A custom set to work more on calculation and visualisation with a 'mate in 4+' set and recently I have added a fixed 1100-1300 problem set for warm ups and to train over basic patterns as these shouldn't be neglected. I intend to go though these much more quickly than in mixed mode.

I also train visualisation in isolation but I do this simply by setting a board up to a middle game position and following the annotations in my head, NOT calculating simply working on visualising the board. I push this as far as can 5 moves, 10 moves, 15 moves to the end of the game if I can.

What Benedictine said in his last posts sounds pretty good.  And what he gave of his thought process is pretty good as well.  Although I would question whether he is over training tactics, as he himself raised.

As far as the timer issue.  The reason Tactics Trainer has a timer is to simulate time pressure in a real game.  This is done because IM Danny Rensch (who is vp of content for chess.com) feels its the best way to train tactics, and its based on the philosophy that you will play the way you train.  And even though he does have a valid point, this is flawed from a both a teaching stand point and a mechanical stand point.

Benedictine is right, when he talks about the speed of the timer on Tactics Trainer and having to unlearn all the attacking tactics.  This is the mechanical part of the problem.  When you play an over the board game you have about 90 min to 2 hrs of thinking time, depending on the time control.  (This is from the stand point of classical chess, not speed chess which is a time control of 30 min or less.)  If you are playing Online chess or Postal Chess you have even longer.  So spending 2-5 minutes looking for tactics and making sure they are right, is a normal, healthy, and correct way to play chess.  30 seconds to one minute is NOT enough time to correctly find tactics and it does not simulate over the board play, it simulates speed chess.

And this gets us into the teaching part of the problem because Tactics Trainer reinforces bad habits.  I have been working with Tactics Trainer for over a year, and even though it has helped with some things I have noticed that I do not have enough time to consider the position and make safe and correct moves.  So all it is doing is reinforcing a habitual thought process that is wrong.  So this means, by using tactics trainer in this way I am simply learning how to play bad chess.

Masters always tell beginners to SLOW DOWN!  And by giving us only 30 seconds to 1 min to find the answer to a problem that advice is being contradicted.  And when learning something, the student needs consistency because, repetition is the royal road to learning.   And if you have a contradiction in your learning process, you have conflicting goals.  If your goals conflict, you won't learn anything because working on one goal will undo the work toward the other. 

This is why a beginner playing speed chess is a bad idea, because it reinforces bad habits. We should slow down, but by playing speed chess you have to play faster, creating and reinforcing a bad habit And if you have a bad habit it will take you three times as long to learn a good habit because you have to spend so much time unlearning the incorrect way of doing things and THEN learn the correct way.

This is why I have decided to take Dan Heisman's advice and go through the Bain book.  And I have started to build my own tactical sets so I can work on different areas.  I really like this idea of going through tactical problem sets because it allows you to focus, create a lot of repetition, build pattern recognition quickly, and therefore create good habits.  ONLY after I have created a good habit,will I move on to other issues and harder problems.

This brings me to a point I wish to make about Benedictine's post.  He mentions that he is working on Evaluation, Visualization, Calculation, and thought process.  I am very glad he mentioned this because these are very different skills.  The only one he forgot was Pattern Recognition, which could be potentially classified under visualization if you stretch the meaning.

Tactical training is very good because it can exercise ALL of these skills, though I would say it only exercises evaluation in a limited way because tactics are methods to achieve strategy, and evaluation is more about analyzing to create a strategy.  And I personally feel that building Pattern Recognition of tactical motifs is the best place to start for these reasons:

• It helps you immediately recognize a tactic over the board.
• The calculation one does for a tactical motif is short, 1 to say 4 moves.  But if you don't calculate 1-4 move variations correctly, you will NOT calculate anything longer correctly.
• Pattern Recognition provides a good foundation from which to build other skills upon.  If you are able to recognize pins, and forks fairly quickly, it becomes easier to visualize, and cuts down on calculation and visualization time.
• And if you have a good foundation, you will have a good habit.

Now, with all that said, this doesn't mean that speed training is all bad.  Once you have good habits, creating the ability to execute those habits quickly is a very good thing.  Think of a habit as your technique.  If your technique is good, and you are slow, you still have good chances because you have good technique, and you can always work on your speed.  If your technique is bad, and you are fast,  you will lose, because even if you can make a move in 5 seconds, without checking everything over the board, you probably blundered.  And all you have done is reinforced bad technique.  But if you have good technique, and are fast, then you will play well, and have enough time on the clock.

So I'm not saying speed training is ALL bad, but it should only be done AFTER one has good technique, and that means forming good habits.

I know this is long, but I hope it helps and this is my perspective as a teacher.

@Chicken Monster, @Senchean,@Benedictine.

Thank you for an informative and instructive discussion. I am certainly going to follow Senchean's advice re using non timed Tactics Trainer in 100 rating steps. I will also have a more thorough look at Chess Tempo along the lines suggested by Benedictine. I am plateauing using TT (14 Nov 14: Tactics: Your rating is 990 (29388 problems over 267 hours))

Yes, thanks.

What they need to do is get those CT features (as options) into the TT on this site. They wil sell more premium memberships. Who wants to buy several chess memerships. They are probably working on it.

29, 388 problems over 267 hours?  And you are only rated at a little over 998?  My god man.  That's over 11 solid days of doing NOTHING but tactics!  So I'm going to suggest something.  You are trying WAY too hard.  Follow my advice on Tactics Trainer, but before you do that, TAKE A BREAK.  Don't do any tactics at all for a week.  Give yourself a rest.  Chances are, simply doing that will help you improve, because you can overload yourself.