Tactics Trainer - Emphasis on Weaknesses & Recycling unsolved Puzzles

Hi,

first of all: Thank you chess.com for the great tool you give us in the Tactics Trainer. I truly love the approach you found and I begin to value the fact that it times you when solving puzzles. Additionally, the statistics give insightful feedback and show where one's own weaknesses lie.

Precisely because the Tactics Trainer is already such a good asset, I'd like to suggest two minor supplementary extensions:

1) While the Tactics Trainer gives you feedback on the weaknesses of its user, it seems to me that it does not incorporate these into its use of the puzzle-database. Means, while I can see that I am ok with smothered mates but miserably fail e.g. at interference-themed puzzles, that does not change the actual puzzles I get to solve. Smothered mates just keep coming while I hardly see any interferences. For learning purposes it would be however great if the Tactics Trainer would put emphasis on my weaknesses and hand in themes which give me the opportunity to train on them.

I am not sure about the depth & stress this would cause on the level of programming, but such a dynamic, user-centered usage of the vast database of puzzles could be a great addition to the Tactics Trainer. As the database already exists and all the puzzles are already thematically categorized, such a feature might not need a programming revolution.

Something similar was mentioned by Kingpatzer two years ago in a longer list of suggestions:

"Problem selection based on user history, not just rating range once the sample size is large enough. If the player is scoring 85% on hanging pieces but is scoring 50% on removal of the guard, then removal of the guard should start to appear more frequently. Some level of randomness should always be present."

(Kingpatzer; http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/my-ideal-tactic-trainer)

2) Again, the statistics the Tactics Trainer gives us are great. It gives you the chance to peruse through past puzzles and see which one were failed. However, puzzles have to be manually selected to be solved again. To my mind it would be great to specifically solve those puzzles which I did not succeed in more systematically, means as a bundle, one after the other - without having to manually select each single one. As the engine already knows which puzzles I failed in, this also seems to be an additional feature which does not demand too much change to the already great Tactics Trainer.

Similar suggestions were presented in older threads, see e.g. SiDeBank's topic "Tactics Trainer Failures" (http://www.chess.com/forum/view/suggestions/tactics-trainer-failures) or once more Kingpatzer's thread "My Ideal Tactic Trainer" (http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/my-ideal-tactic-trainer).

Cheers

These are great ideas, please lend support tacticians!

agreed with all of the above , great ideas

I completely agree. It would be nice to select from the already established tags (puzzle themes) and be able to practice within those.

If that means they aren't rated, that's fine by me, but I would like to be able to practice within my areas of weakness.

You can already do this and much more at Chess Tempo, which is superior to Tactics Trainer in just about every way possible.

agreed... good ideas

this is exactly what i thought about too