"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've had this question about the "correct" way to study tactics for a long time now, and have even tried to pose it to a few grandmaster broadcasts with no success. I'm primarily looking for input from strong (preferably 2000+ OTB) players.
Basically when working through a tactics book, how long do you spend on each problem? 30 seconds? 5 minutes? 20 minutes? Until you get it right? Do you look at the solution once you're "pretty sure" or do you have to feel very confident? Do you look at the solution at all or just go to the next problem (I used to play Go and many players advised skipping the solutions in their version of tactics)? And, when trying to set a routine for yourself - was your goal to spend x amount of time each day, or to solve y number of problems? In the past I have had issues when just a few problems takes way more time than anticipated, and it derails my study plan.
I'm mostly interested in the best way to study out of tactics books. Opinions on tactics trainer are welcome but I'm hoping we don't derail the thread criticizing the website. Even if it's great you need a subscription to do more than x problems with it per day.