6 hours of chess.com puzzles a day? good enough for GM?

I got a tablet for my  birthday to do chess.com tactics on it. I am doing 25 in the morning and 25 problems in the evening.

I have about 12 hours a day to devote freely to chess and it struck me that although highly unpractical and unlikely to do, it would be interesting to see what comes out of doing chess.com puzzles/tactics for 6 hours a day.

that has to change you as a human personally. what are your thoughts on that?

I came up with 6 hours because in the U.S. tournament rounds are 6 hours long so its like simulating real life scenarios at a tournament.

pretty unlikely to do but there are people that are so crazy to improve that they would consider it.

what are your thoughts?

Nobody here knows what it takes to become a grandmaster, but it's hard to believe that improving your tactics beyond where they are now will get you anywhere.

If we threw you in to the top pool at Wijk aan zee, how many of your games do you think would be decided by your tactics rating being "only" at 3200 instead of 4200?  How many would be decided by an inferior lack of positional understanding and/or endgame technique?

At the FM level, you'll only improve by playing tougher opposition and learning from every game, and I don't think you're going to find that kind of opposition who are willing to play at a slow time control on this or any other site.

There is a book by a gm which says work upto solving for 3 hours straight to improve your stamina and concentration.

You are a player with fide title, it sounds awkward for me to critize or suggest you anything about chess. But you are doing it wrong, puzzles may sharpen your tactics but i advise you to "go-over" masters games.. just quick runs, and it will help you to remember key responses what masters do in similar positions.

I cant believe this got so many votes.

Its hard to "see through" doing 6 hours of tactics a day for improvement. its easier to see it in number of exercises that you do. 

like at one point, the number of tactics that you do will change you internally and externally if you do enough of them.

I dont know what the number might be but I think 50 puzzles a day is O.K. as they say. its about 18,000+ positions a year. its like 57,000+ tactics in 3 years.

that might be helpful.

Is it possible to over do it and get diminishing returns? 

I think both you and I are guilty of that.  Our numbers are very similar in puzzles, rapid, and blitz, and for me, if I had put my puzzle hours past say 2500 into actual play, I'd be way better off.

I think that would be a very interesting experiment and i think a lot of things go into this. But i'm think we can agree that spending that time improving your positional play would help more.

My opinion on this is simple....  No.   Like most people are thinking or having posted so far is that doing that many puzzles a day are good to develop your overall tactical vision but is far from leading an average player to a GM.  Without all the fundamentals required from Openings, Middlegames, and Endgames one can't be even close to being titled FM, NM, IM, or GM simply by doing just an overload of puzzles.  This post reminds me of a book I have that I tried once called the "Woodpecker Method" which was basically this approach.  The book contained 1100 puzzles that needed to be done in a week.  The author idea is to improve pattern recognition and strength one's tactical muscles.  I would say on a positive note that this type of study will make you a strong club player by doing just not enough to be titled. 

General tactics puzzles are a very good tool to develop intuition, but there are so many types of tactics that it hinders memorization of certain specific patterns because it can take a while until they appear.

Plus, you know inherently that there's a tactic to solve, which is not the case in a real game.

To work on pattern recognition, I adapted the method my chess mentor used with me when I was a kid, using those old Soviet chess books that covered only one specific tactic per chapter. He would put the clock and forbid me to play any move until I 'saw' it and could recite the calculation.

I use Lichess for my chess tactics. I select the category I want to work on among those on my dashboard that needs the most improvement. Then I set my clock for at least two hours and perform as many as I can until either my eyes start to bleed, the time alloted runs out, or I begin solving them constantly in less of a minute. I don't play until I see it and if I fail, I put the Engine to study how the tactic worked, focus on it for a minute, then go to the next.

Basically, I use brute force and volume to force the brain to memorize the patterns. After doing a few hundreds or thousands of them in a single category, you're bound to start recognizing them when they stand out. Also, the ratings of invidiual categories then to follow the ratings of players who play them and, thus, are more realistic.

You are right up to a certain point. For instance I dont agree that solving for 6 hours a day is completely useless. 

Basically, I have been ramping and raging about the chess.com puzzles for some time now, I really like them.

Now, what I would like to add is that every puzzle is based on your rating. Based on my observation, the puzzles could be more advanced than the problems in the encyclopedia of combinations by sahovski. that is really really good.

So what you are doing when you calculate for 6 hours while doing those chess.com puzzles is, considerably, improving your calculation and visualization. Essentially every problem is like a critical position in a game and you are solving multiple problems at a time.

6 hours is how much you spend in a tournament game per game or round. When you are thinking and trying to solve the puzzles, you are focusing and doing meaningful chess analysis. Its serious effort. that style of thinking is of high  quality for chess masters.

Anyway, I got the idea at a certain moment to purchase every calculation book I could find online and bought like 15 of them. I am looking to complete them in the next 3 years. I would like to end all my calculation efforts with the book "Analytical Manual" by Dvoretsky. I think that book is excellent.

I spend 9 hours a day on Puzzles.

I can't say if you'll reach GM or not. But I can say that if you're willing to put that much effort into improving, (and into actively learning more), you'll inevitably keep rising.

Relentless work ethic = best path to success.

Best of luck!

Do NOT burn yourself out, make sure that your genuinely prepared to do this for an extended period of time 

you can only focus so many hours on a certain thing every day, use some study methods to improve your time spent (like quiet workspace, no distractions, 30 minutes / 5 minutes of rest ) to increase the quality of the time spent 

look into your weakest parts of your chess, tactics are definitely not the only thing to study 

And contrary to what someone said in this thread, some of the best teachers don’t have to be at the top level, many top players train with lower rated people because they know how to teach and that’s what helps the most. Not like I’d qualify for either of those though, so good luck and keep us posted once in awhile! 

yea, I am not saying I am doing 6 hours of tactics at the moment. I consider literature a big part of my study routine. I was reading two books a week not too long ago.

I got the gelfand books, the entire collection, and really the only thing I am missing is the aagaard books from quality chess. howver I am considering getting them when I am done with my current list of books.

I think the calculation is very important, specially what I am describing, when you see the type of thinking that your doing when solving puzzles. it is high level thinking specially for chess. now 6 hours of it has to be insane. I mean, does something like that change you as a human? it might and all I know is that change is great for chess!

i heard Anish say during the World Championships when Ding had a beautiful mate that Anish missed, he said players like Judit Polgar, Mamedyarov, Rapport that they have close to 100,000 checkmating patterns memorized, and thats only mates, what about the other positions?, probably close to a million or more, 6 hours a day puzzles might sound like a stretch, but will start with 3 hrs a day non stop starting 1st Dec