Pieces taken in tactics trainer?

Hello, I'm pretty new here and am enjoying the tactics trainer quite a lot. However, every time I lose 10+ seconds counting up all the pieces ever since there was a puzzle where the correct move was just a simple trade because you were already ahead. Yesterday I installed the app on my phone and noticed it neatly showing the pieces taken undearneath the board. I'm assuming it's supposed to be that way on the website too but I'm missing something?

Thanks.

No, that's never been a feature but since it's on the mobile app maybe it's coming?  Erik has been promising/threatening an all new chess.com (Version 3) and bits and pieces of it have started to show up.  One of the staffmembers, Deepgreene, leaked some details of the new tactics trainer a while back.  The best of them was that if you get a correct solution you will never lose points again.  That's been the number one complaint about the TT in the three years I've been here.  We'll see...

Well I understand why you lose points. In theory you could take all the time in the world to get a 100% succes rate, but that's useless in a real game so it's only fair it doesn't improve your rating. It's frustrating to lose points perhaps but that's just emotional, not rational. In the mobile app you see the pieces taken just like in a live chess game on here so I thought I had a setting wrong or something. Though now you could argue that people that play with the app on a tablet or whatever have an unfair advantage over browser users, so in my opinion they should be equalized one way or the other.

Thanks for clearing it up :)

Edit: some additional thoughts. In a real game you already know whether you're up or down material. It seems very unfair to have to manually count it since it's timed.

You won't gain points if you take more than a few minutes to solve a puzzle under the proposed system, you just won't lose any.  The way it's set up now encourages a "guess and click" mentality.  The change probably won't go through anyway.  Me, I do most of my TT unrated and much of my tactics training is spent reviewing tactics courses from the Chess Mentor.  I'm just killing time anyway; I'm too bloody old to expect anything more than marginal improvement.  Guess it's better than drinking...

The outcome of a game of chess is decided by the pieces that are still on the board, not by the pieces that are gone.  You can't rely on looking at the pieces in front of your opponent to know the score.  He or she could be hiding a piece in their hands, or they could take out a handful of white and black pawns and throw them on the table at a critical moment to confuse you like Batman did to defeat Two-Face.

Yeah but when you see a tactic that wins a pawn (which sometimes is the solution), you want to be sure that you're not a pawn behind and equalize things. If you see you're behind material, as is very often the case in tactics trainer, you can stop wasting time and look for other moves.

If the app has the pieces taken showing but the browser version doesn't, one of the two is "wrong", this is just common sense. My opinion on which one is wrong is that it that the browser not showing is currently wrong as in a real game you're always aware of the material situation, as well as what I said above. Also I'm not complaining, was just asking because I found it curious and thought I was missing something :)

Also I disagree that the current way rating works is encouraging a guess and click mentality, because guessing and clicking is not optimal as you'll often get it wrong and if you feel the timer ticking down messes with you on a psychological level, just turn it off. Also, you're not really training yourself to get better if you're not sure why your move was right or wrong (perhaps if you play 1 minute lightning). But losing points to time is not the reason I created this thread as it's an entirely different issue.

BJGC - I think part of the point of TT is to help you develop skills such as assessing what pieces are on the board quickly and accurately. I think most chess players, when first looking at a position, will usually first look at the material which, really, takes all of 2 seconds to do.

It does seem odd though that they would show the captured pieces in one platform and not the other.

I agree with your disagreeal.(Is that a real word?)

BDN-

It is quite obvious from some of the comments in the TT that some people just 'guess and click' their way through the system. In fact, I'm starting to believe I would get a better rating if I did this more.

I think the negative points is a good idea. The most important thing is that you learned and understood why the tactic worked. The negative points just encourage you to do it a little faster next time.

How is this really any different than in a real game of chess? You can make a brilliant game winning move, but if it cost you so much time that you will run out of time before you can profit from your move, you still lose the game.

No doubt there are those who treat TT just like they do their chess games; only concerned with getting a better rating.

But for those who are serious about learning something, a penalty for not finding the solution fast enough is a very good element to the game.