HEY NOOBS! Forget Openings, Study Tactics (The right way)

Studying openings as a beginner is not only painful but it is pretty much a waste of your time.  As you get better at tactics and you absorb new chess patterns, learning openings becomes a heck of a LOT easier anyway.  It is also easier to learn positional play as you improve at tactics because you will start to understand where the pieces belong, and where they will have the most power/potential in relation to the position.

How important are Tactics?  95% of the games below the 2000 level are won simply because of tactics (calculation). It doesn't matter if you had a great opening, if you blunder a pawn a couple of moves later, your entire opening advantage is gone.  Most games can be won with merely an extra pawn or two. 

When we start out in chess, we all SUCK at tactics!  It is just the truth, there is no beginner who has ever started out being amazing at tactics, this is because first you must accumulate an arsenal of basic patterns, solidify them, and then you can begin to incorporate more complex patterns and ideas to your arsenal.  Even the advanced tactics in chess are often just combinations of simple patterns.

Most tactics, aren't that deep. If you look at a 600 level player's games, they are consistently missing tactics that are only 1/2 a move ahead.  (Undefended pieces, Mate in 1)  This is typically because the 600 player is not looking at their opponent's immediate possibilities.  Most players aren't in a habit of checking their opponent's resources after every move until they are 1200 or even higher!

Improving at tactics, is taxing on your brain.  It is not supposed to be a cake walk.  Tactics training is like going to the gym for your chess, if it is too easy, you probably aren't doing much. This is also why slow games are better for your improvement, you are straining and exhausting those mental muscles.  (I never sleep better than after an OTB chess tournament) 

How to do tactics correctly:

#1 Forget about your rating. Focusing on your tactics rating is MADDENING.  You can easily go up or down 100 points in a day but that is just temporary fluctuation and not a reflection of a 100 pt gain or loss in ability.   Rating always comes AFTER improvement in skill, and sometimes it can take a while for your rating to catch up with your skill. There is always variance in rating and your new data needs time to solidify in your brain.  I was stuck at the 1200-1400 level in tactics for almost a year.  I probably did 2000 puzzles staying around the same rating, I'll have to admit that I had lost some patience with the puzzles and I was spending less time on them, but I kept at it because I knew I was still absorbing new patterns and solidifying old ones

#2 Failed puzzles are your best friend. Correctly solving a puzzle feels GREAT, right? +15?! OH YEAH IM AWESOME, but then you fail two in a row and you are lower than when you started and then you say STUPID PUZZLES and immediately start a blitz game, forgetting about them as fast as possible (You've done it, we've all done it) STOP DOING THAT! You have to modify your own psychology on the issue.  After your initial frustration with PUZZLE FAILED, take a deep breath and open the analysis board. The entire point of tactics training is to get better at tactics, if you got every puzzle right, then you wouldn't be learning too many new things!  After each failed puzzle you MUST ANALYZE IT afterwards to gain the maximum benefit for your time.  Not analyzing your failed puzzles is like lifting weights every day, but not getting enough protein (or amino acids). When you analyze your failed puzzles, two things should happen. 1. You should try to figure out what was wrong with your move. (even more effective is to verbalize this out loud)  2. You should look at the correct answer and describe to yourself what type of tactic it is, and why do you think that you missed it.

#3 Take your time and be focused.  
Turn off the TV, put youtube on pause, go somewhere that is quiet, if possible. Don't be in a rush. When you first open a puzzle, get in a habit of looking at the entire position.  Count the material for both sides, look at the pawn structure, look at the pieces and the squares they can attack, count how many times everything is attacked and defended. Identify the weak squares.  Look for tactical themes https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-tactics--definitions-and-examples.  

Now start picking  "candidate" moves.  Get in a habit of looking at checks and captures first, as they are the most forcing and allow your opponent a minimum amount of reasonable replies.  Go through 1 option at a time, and try to refute it yourself.  Does this check do anything?  What are ALL of their possible responses? If it looks powerful yet just 1 reply can refute your move, then your move is objectively no good at all.  Try to prove to yourself that your candidate move is bad as fast as possible so you can move on to the next candidate move.  After you have looked at every available check, look at all of the possible captures you have  and apply the same critical process.  Remember when you are evaluating a candidate move capture that is not a check, your opponent doesn't have to directly respond or recapture, so they likely have 20+ legal responses and now you have to look at THEIR checks and captures, you have to look at all of them, as just 1 good response can ruin your entire idea.   After checks and captures if you still haven't found anything promising, look for THREATS, do you have a candidate move that threatens a checkmate? Do you have a move that attacks a valuable piece with a less-valuable one?  can you threaten two pieces at once? Look at the geometry of it, are the enemy king and queen connected in some way?  Same diagonal, same file, same rank, a knight fork apart? Sometimes you even have to start going through EVERY legal move to find the tactic but this is how some of the most genius tactics of all time have been found!  How else would Shirov have found bishop h3, an empty square sacrifice that wins the game, in an otherwise, completely drawn opp-color-bishop endgame 

Some good tips here. Here's an example: I spent literally an entire day the other day studying an opening just for it to come up maybe once in four games. Like if I plan to start with e4 as white and they don't come back with e5, I don't know what to do lol. So I think playing more puzzles is a good idea to learn the patterns. You can also play unranked puzzles and filter them by category. I saw another article on here listing which categories to focus on based on your rating. Things like Mate-in-1 and 2 and bishop pair, etc. Anyway, nice little write up. 

Thanks

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