The_Brain9
I have some friends here who swear by Chess Mentor, and although I still have some free credits on it when I got a Gold membership last year, I still haven't gotten to trying it out.
However, I hear the new Computer Workout is like Chess Mentor, and I have given it a try.
It's surprising to hear that you have pretty decent Tactics Trainer and Chess Mentor ratings but your other ratings do not match. I have spent 16.6 hours on the rated version of Tactics Trainer, and my rating on it is over 2000. However, I think I spend much more time on the unrated version of it.
I think the flaw in Tactics Trainer is that it encourages you to move the pieces prior to working out the entire combo in your head before you make your first move. Also, it encourages you to play too fast sometimes, as some of the puzzles are set for like 30 seconds max time limit. It's hard to digest the entire board and figure out what's the best course of action in 10 seconds.
The goal of studying tactics is that these simple combos are what win real games. However, I think it's important to do the problems without touching the pieces. Of course, it's easy to see that a Queen sacrifice leads to a Mate in 3 if you're allowed to make the sacrifice first and the computer tells you it's the correct move. But in a real game, you would NEVER sacrifice your Queen unless you are 100% ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have a checkmate coming up.
So in the unrated version, you can disable the timer and set a rating range. Currently, I set mine to only give me problems rated 1900-2300. My OTB performance rating is also about 1850-2000 USCF, so the tactical study has been paying off. It really surprises me that you have spent so much time studying tactics and yet your rating is rather stagnant.
Rather than focusing on total number of hours, I think it's important to do a consistent amount of problems, like 10-50 problems/day to see improvement, rather than just 5-10 hours randomly.
I'm curious to see how much time others devote to training tools here like Tactics Trainer and Chessmentor. Also, it would be interesting to see people's ratings in each compared to their rating here on chess.com.
I bought a premium membership on June 22. I have 5.4 hours on Tactics Trainer, with a rating of 1300 (high 1555). I have 10 hours logged on Chessmentor, with a rating there of 1983. My current live rating (for long) is 1320, though I am probably around 1350-1400 because I have not lost a long game in a while.
After giving this, even more questions come to mind: should I spend more time on Tactics Trainer or chessmentor? Which rating is more accurate? How many hours do you need to practice to get a rating of, say, 1500 on tactics trainer? Hopefully, we can all get an idea of this with more info.