Tactics

Simply put, what's the best way to improve your tactical ability? I'm currently doing tactics trainer and intentionally playing tactically sharp openings to get better at tactics, but what do you think?

the best way is using tactic trainer.

if you have a tactic trainer tactic. don't move anything until you have solved it(move 2,3,4 should be found within 1 second and come as no surprise ). think really hard. don't look at the solution.

treat tactic trainer as a chess position trainer. Try to think what you would play as if it was your turn in a online chess game.

you shouldn't care if it was a online game or tactic trainer.

you would look at the positions the same way.

Yeah what i've started doing is going onto the tactics trainer settings and putting it on 'unrated', Then i set the difficulty to much higher than my tactics rating, meaning that I have to spend several minutes on each puzzle rather than racing the clock. Seems to be a good way to improve :)

Given that your rating is higher is mine, I'm going to guess that's good advice. I'll give it a go :)