good at puzzles bad at chess

It seems they don't help me too.

The same story with mè.

Similar situation myself

Dear Hericium,

I am a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. You know, solving puzzles improves only one area of chess (tactical skills / calculation) and if there aren't any tactics in the position, maybe you cannot find the best moves. Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one general way to learn. First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analysing your own games. Of course, if you are a beginner, you can't do it efficiently because you don't know too much about the game yet. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem that it can't explain you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why is it so good or bad.

You can learn from books or Youtube channels as well, and maybe you can find a lot of useful information there but these sources are mostly general things and not personalized at all. That's why you need a good coach sooner or later if you really want to be better at chess. A good coach can help you with identifying your biggest weaknesses and explain everything, so you can leave your mistakes behind you. Of course, you won't apply everything immediately, this is a learning process (like learning languages), but if you are persistent and enthusiastic, you will achieve your goals.

In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames). If you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students really like it because the lessons are not boring (because we talk about more than one areas within one lesson) and they feel the improvement on the longer run. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.

I hope this is helpful for you.  Good luck for your games!

I enjoy the puzzles although I am only around a 1300 puzzle rating. My problem is that I just can't get to the point where I want to play others in chess. I'm terribly introverted, I'm afraid. So I've only played a few games but I've done nearly 5,000 puzzles, I think!

А мне все по плечу, мне они помогают в шахматах!

You won't improve by playing blitz. I suggest you play at least 15/10 long rapid games. How can you expect to improve when you have no time to think properly about a single move you make? Search ''basic chess opening principles'' and learn to incorporate what you learn in your games. Also, from my personal experience, the most important thing to learn is to, instead of shuffling pieces aimlessly on the board, learn to put yourself into the shoes of your opponent, and to think from their perspective BEFORE you make EVERY move. Instead of dropping your queen on a pretty square, and then soon realising that you lost the game, THINK - what are my opponents plans? if I put my queen there, what will my opponent do? If you look back at your games, I guarantee you that you will find yourself for the most part not even acknowledging that there is someone on the other side of the board, with his own plans and ideas! Realising this helped me greatly, and I am still putting great effort into being aware of this in every game. 

You will find this video useful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0c6QE7G6fk

Hang in there friend, you’ll be fine. Just keep playing.

Hi! My name is Lauren Goodkind and I’m a respected  chess coach and chess YouTuber based in California: 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP5SPSG_sWSYPjqJYMNwL_Q

I have tips and resources to help you improve your chess skills so you can win more games.  

-I recommend two books for you: “50 Poison Pieces”   and “Queen For A Day: The Girl’s Guide To Chess Mastery.”  Both books are available on Amazon.com.  Both books are endorsed by chess masters!  

-If you are serious about chess, I highly recommend you hiring a chess coach to help you.  

-Also consider all checks and captures on your side and also your opponent’s side. Always as, “If I move here, where is my opponent going to move?”

-Play with a slow time control such as G/30 or longer.  

I hope that this helps.  

You played a grand total of 16 puzzles in 18 months.

Puzzles do help, especially if you spend a decent amount of time solving them. Chesscom's puzzle rating is not equivalent to ones normal playing strenght. You'll see that most people on this website is about 1000 ratingpoints higher rated in puzzles than most other formats. 

Magnus is known to be not so good at puzzles.  Admits it himself, and others have noted it in videos.  Not so good being a relative term here.  I've heard Daniil Dubov say Magnus would get crushed in a puzzle contest with MVL, but he's clearly the better player.  Watch videos of the top players doing the Checkmate Patterns Manual Final Test and Magnus fails 3x as much as Hikaru or Dubov, yet, who's the best player?  It's even funny to listen to Magnus during his test and hear him laughingly complain that "Why can't I just play xyz here? It's WINNING! I'ts just good positional chess.  Why do I have to go for this crazy checkmate line??"  Lol.  This after having gotten one of the many puzzles wrong. 

I enjoy puzzles maybe more than playing chess, but it's not chess.

If you watch some of those videos, at least sniplets of a bunch of them, you'll see they show the accuracy of the really good players at the bottom of the screen during the test, but they omit that on a lot of players since they missed so many the accuracy was quite pedestrian.  And they didn't make videos of any patzers.  Watch Hikaru or Daniil do that and wow, just wow.... Daniil gets a lot of them right that most other players missed. 

Good Positional Chess, Planning & Strategy Books for Beginners and Beyond...

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/introduction-to-positional-chess-planning-strategy

Playing long rapid games does very little. I play 30 min games.

I'm good at puzzles, but not regular chess