Feel like I've hit a wall with tactics

As everyone here is well aware, any time someone wants to improve they're told to go away and study their tactics, and so I have, the only problem is I feel like I've hit a wall with them.

In sites that rate tactics I haven't moved much in 2-3 months from a modest rating, my puzzle rush top score remains the same for the same time. I've tried practicing them most days, I've tried repeating tactics, using books that group them by pattern so I see familiarities but it's not really yielding any improvement.

I take so long to see the tactic that it's making playing games hard because I'm not really positioning my pieces in their best places to give me tactical opportunities too.

So, really a question if anyone has any idea for freshening up my approach or any advice at all.

Well, the point of studying tactics is to get better at chess and your rating has been climbing very rapidly over the last year.

Dump the speed chess.  Play no less than 15 min.  Also rating flaws exist in these online systems.  Pay no attention to tactical rating. Do the problems just ignore time.  Take your time. When you miss, it is more important to discover why.  

I have checked your tactics trainer statistics. Your pass rate is barely over 50%, and this is even worse in the last weeks. When you don't see the solution right away, you just make same move and hope that you get lucky, am I right? Come on, what is the point of that? Try to think, calculate, go for a 100% pass rate, and your results will improve (both in tactics and in real chess).

That's exactly what I do. I try a problem for a few minutes, and if I can't figure it out, I just guess and hope I get lucky. I know it leads to a lower passing rate but I still think anything over 50% is good.  The point of doing that is that's exactly what I would do in a real game. It's chess, and since we are all human and make a lot of mistakes, guessing is a big part of the game. For me at least.

In a real game what else is there to do besides guess if you dont know where to move? You have to make a move eventually. So it's either guess a move, or resign.

Thinking for a few minutes and then guessing a move in great. The thing the I was talking against is thinking for a few seconds and guessing.

May I suggest a course of action that will alleviate your "hitting the wall" problem in tactics? I'm certain that if you apply my suggestion your "wall" will come crumbling down and you'll start to make progress again. I suspect you are somewhat of a perfectionist and possibly a type "A" personality. To you playing 2nd fiddle isn't an option and it drives you nuts and gnaws at you at a conscious and subconscious level. You may have been born in September also. What you need to do is stop playing tactics for one whole week. Then begin playing tactics again but limit your play time to 30 minutes only per day. Try to stay unfrustrated and calm. Follow the time limit of 30 minutes max per day of tactics religiously and do not waver from this schedule, although you can skip entirely a day or two even. You need not play everyday but when you do......don't exceed the 30 minute limit. In two weeks you will find yourself making forward progress again. I know this will work so give it a shot and good luck.

I had no intention of following this advice, however I ended up getting sun stroke and was simply too tired to even contemplate playing chess. I left it for about 4 days and have decided not to spend hours doing tactics at my work and just go through 30 mins to an hour when I can. I have actually noticed an improvement.

what color is the wall? is it hard?

how hard is it?

Geez....You gotta be more careful man !!  It is fortunate you or somebody else got you some medical attention in time. I'm interested in the gory details if you'd care to elaborate. I was given a crash course concerning "heat exhaustion" and "heat stroke",  by a registered nurse who by chance happened to glance over at me and my girlfriend and came over and introduced herself.  We were at a large wedding reception on an extremely hot day and I'd been drinking beer and playing some aggressive frisbee all afternoon. Without warning I started missing catches and my throws were getting way off. Luckily I decided to take a break then and I sat down in the shade next to my girlfriend. Minutes later the nurse came over. She correctly diagnosed a dangerous condition by my appearance and my movements. I was probably just minutes away from full blown heat stroke. I'm glad you're going to be ok though. Back to chess.......   I'm not sure exactly, why playing less would make someone play better. Going by a straight linear extension,  the more a person plays or practices something, the better and better that person will become at that task.  Though largely a true statement, there appears to be a point of diminishing returns, where improvement in performing that particular task can slow dramatically, stop, or even reverse direction,  in spite of playing or practicing more. I experienced this 10 years ago when I was learning a few songs that had some barre chords and some other things in it that I was anxious to play. It seemed like the more I worked on it, the crappier I got . I  was frustrated and disgusted with myself and put the guitar in the stand and didn't even touch it for about  a week.... When I  finally did pick the guitar back up, I was running thru some scales and noodling around a little with it kind of absent- mindedly as I watched the news on TV. During the commercial I attempted to play what I had been trying to learn the previous week, not really expecting anything. I was quite amazed when I played most of the song with ease right off the bat.  15 minutes later I had the whole thing down and sounding good too.  I don't know the reason why this happens, I just know that it does and that's good enough for me....

You should be able to get at least a 70% pass rate in whatever tactics you do. And spending a few minutes then guessing isn't good enough. You should spend up to 20 minutes per problem, and only guess if you can honestly say that you gave it everything you had and were simply incapable of working it out.

In a real game, it's very different, for 2 reasons:

1) Real games you're never told that a tactic exists, so you could be wasting your time, looking for a combination that doesn't even exist. In tactics trainer, you're never wasting your time. The combination exists and you can find it.

2) Real games are about winning or losing, but tactics is about learning. In a real game, you have a time limit and you're forced to guess in a lot of spots, but with tactics, you don't win anything by guessing.

I got up to 2500 on tactics trainer by taking my time on each puzzle. It was very common for me to spend 10+ minutes on a single puzzle, and I'd sometimes spend as much as 30 minutes on one problem. If I hadn't done this - if I had have simply spent 3-4 minutes on each problem and then taken a guess - I doubt I'd even be 2000 tactics rating. You just don't improve until you force yourself to spend an uncomfortable amount of time on a puzzle. If you're just saying "yeah that's as far as I'll go" and then guessing after 3-4 minutes, then you'll never train your brain to look deeply into a position, and you'll never discover those cool patterns that you never knew existed. And once you do discover those cool patterns, you'll remember them, especially if you spent 20 minutes figuring it out on your own and it left an impression in your brain.

The best advice I ever heard on how to use tactics trainers:  DERANGED. Listen to him.

Try studying combinations.

They're similar to tactics, but usually you have to find a tactic in one part of the board that leads to a 2nd more crushing tactic on the board.

Usually the first tactic is defensable, but not without weakening his position on another part of the board.

I'm sure it's possible to get to 70% passing rate, but I would  never take the time to do that. Chess is a game, and the tactics are puzzles. It's not worth 20 minutes per problem. Life is too short for that and it's not something I would do in a real game either.

I agree that in a real game, you dont know if a tactic exists or not. But here is the problem, with tactics trainer you dont know that either. Sometimes the solutions are bad or wrong. Sometimes you will find a good tactic that wins the game, but you will also get the puzzle wrong. In a real game, it's not worth finding the perfect tactic when a winning one is good enough. So I dont worry about getting those wrong, or only taking a few minutes to find a good solution rather than a perfect one.

I reached the "yeah, that's as far as I'll go" point several times. The first time was around 1800 I think. I didn't care to go any higher, but eventually it just happened. Then I hit 2000 and knew that was way above my skill. Turns out it wasn't. Same thing with 2200 and 2400. Recently I hit 2600 (which I think the puzzles are mostly way too easy to really be 2600). So now I dont really care what the ratings are or what my ability is. Some positions are easy, some are extremely difficult and I have no choice but to guess. Just like a real game.

I think it is more important to learn a tactic, by taking time to solve it, than it is to say oh, I solved it no big deal.  It is not just about seeing the tactic but about doing the work(analysis) needed to complete the tactic.

Tactics, for me anyway, does two things: help with calculating in chess games, and builds me a mental library of patterns.

The more patterns you know in chess, the higher your rating will get. In a game, the more patterns you already know, the easier it is to find a line of play that leads to one of your known patterns.

well, taking it easy and taking the puzzles slow has definitely been a help. (tactics rating up over 200 points since I posted this)

not really seen much change in my performance BUT my play is probably improving, I've bungled a few games but have had more checkmates and resigns from tactical play. I'm pk with sacrificing being a bit less solid for the return of being a bit more dangerous, as I think longterm that will end up seeing my improve. (BTW anyone inspecting my profile on here for games is probably mislead, I only really access chess.com at work and thus games are usually throwaway to pass the time and often sabotaged by being pulled away from my desk, I'm more precious of my rating on another site) Currently studying a book on applying tactics to real game situations with the aim at transferring what I'm learning to the games more often.

Thanks to Evanmorrow, Deranged and IfPatriotGames for offering useful advice to consider.

 If you learn tactics a lot, you will develop the style of a trickster with no understanding of strategy. That is not good. Tactics is fun, and cannot be considered more important than strategy.

"... This book is the first volume in a series of manuals designed for players who are building the foundations of their chess knowledge. The reader will receive the necessary basic knowledge in six areas of the game - tactcs, positional play, strategy, the calculation of variations, the opening and the endgame. ... To make the book entertaining and varied, I have mixed up these different areas, ..." - GM Artur Yusupov