purpose of daily puzzles

Its just a daily tactic.

hola

#5 is correct. It isn't necessarily to achieve check or mate, but to make the best play for that move. It often involves gaining material advantage.

It's a daily tactic. They range in difficulty. Since it's "daily", it not really part of any organized pattern. If you want problems that are really designed to teach patterns, use Chess King. They have different modules designed for different skill levels. The modules that target lower level players have a lot more pattern recognition stuff. By the time you get to about the 1900 level, the problems are much less about pattern recognition and more about cold hard calculating. That being said, the more patterns you understand, the easier it is to find the correct lines to start calculating.

Nothing more disheartening than staring at a level *1900 problem for several minutes and still not having the faintest clue what your looking for.

*Specifically, I'm using "Combinations 1" module of Chess King for those problems. They start around 1800 and eventually get to the 1900 level. Not really sure how much harder they get after that since I've been mostly stuck between 1850 and 1900 and haven't really solved to many at the 1900 level.

It's strange that most people can solve tactics much higher than their game rating. I suppose it's because you have unlimited time to ponder a position, and you know that your looking for the best move. In a game, it's often hard to discern which move is the best move, especially if there seems to be more than one candidate move that looks like it could be the best move... and the clock is ticking.

No reason to do that. Chess.com allows you to customize the puzzle theme in learning mode.

It’s kind of a catch all that they want you to figure out. They’ll give you a position and there are a series of moves that you can make to force your “opponent’s” response. The purpose of the forced moves is to result in you having a better position than you previously had on the board.* However, what is meant by “better” is dependent on the circumstance. Sometimes it is a checkmate, other times it is capturing a knight, bishop, rook, or queen, other times it is forcing a draw from a losing position, I’ve seen late game pawn breaks, and some of Jesus De Villas one hundred end games (mostly dealing with king opposition). It is really up to you to find the best move under the given circumstance.

*this is how the daily puzzles translate into your actual games. By training whatever part of your brain that juggles the various pieces and evaluate the moves and their respective threats. However, a stark contrast is the puzzles demand the best moves while most puzzles that develop in actual games—though not all— can be won on making good moves. What I mean by this, is that some puzzles will allow you to score a checkmate or take the opponents queen. In a real game, taking the queen would still, most likely, win, whereas the puzzle demands you see and make the checkmate.

The Daily Puzzle generally advances in difficulty from Sunday (easiest) to more difficult later in the week. Sometimes there is a hint in the title, but if it's there it is often obscure. But there is never anything like, "mate in two" etc. So as noted in #5 above, look at the position and do what you should be doing in your games, find the best move. Of course, that is much easier said than done, especially for newer players. It would help, I suppose, if you knew what you were trying to accomplish. At least it might give you a starting position for what to look for.

Just keep doing them (remembering the ones later in the week tend to be harder). If you can't get the correct move right away, try another or use the hint button. And try not to be intimidated by all of the "this was too easy" posts. Some of those may be true (look at the rating of the poster); however, I suspect many are just blowing "hot air" and I doubt if they even tried solving the puzzle.

Keep at them and don't get discouraged. Good luck.

I play the daily games because I am too embarassed and afraid of losing to play a live game, yet it still serves as a somewhat engaging mental form of "enrichment" (to use the term zookeepers use to describe toys/decorations to stop captive animals from getting too bored).

It's great, because it adjusts to your level. The algorithm knows me very well by now, and never sends me a puzzle over 1000. Sometimes it's "nice" and sends me one thats 200 rated. I can play those, and  feel good about myself for a split second.