De La Maza Method for tactic improvement

I've not played or studied chess in 8 months. When i returned i searched for ways of improving and was convinced that TACTICS is the only way for lower rated players to improve. I bought Rapid Chess Improvement by De La Maza and I let the crowd stop me from following his suggested method. They said study strategy. And i have read Amatuers Mind By Silman and went through about 10 master game books. I discovered that chess knowledge is not the same as chess ability. I'm attempting to do the 7 circles with ct-art 4.0 Has anyone ever done the suggested method that's in the book?

I have not done it, but if you search "de la Maza" in the forum topics you will get more than enough to read, as it's a very popular topic!

I hear a lot of critics but no one has followed his training program. to me it doesnt take a rocket scientist to know that hard work pays off. no one ever got good tactically by not doing some type of practice with tactics. 

Go for it!

for the record, I have a 1789 rating as of April 19, 2016. only other exercise I may add is going over 1 master game a day just because I enjoy see how the master wins the game.

Check this thread out to read about someone who has followed the program in a serious manner and what his results were.  

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/outcome-of-de-la-mazas-seven-circles-program

What's interesting is that guy is talking about blitz rating, 5 min games. I have De La Maza' s book. Everyone will not gain the same amount of points. What a lot of people don't know is the National Master Dan Heisman help De La Maza with a thought process that was more important than his study plan. That same thought process is what help me reach a 1800 rating. Point blank is that if you've studied a lot and still 1600 or below , then that means you play fast and don't see if your moves can be beat by an opponents threat that you can't stop.

It worked for you and that's great; congratulations on improving!  Most severely underestimate how much hard work is involved in improving at any discipline.  Big fan of Heisman's concept of easy level tactics mastery (pattern recognition) as a necessary shortcut/and/or remedial tool.  If De La Maza inspired you, so much the better.  Everyone loves success stories. 

The only thing de la Maza's exercises can do is help quick tactical processing. 

Playing blitz here is vastly better to help you improve than de la Maza's method, because you come across tactics in normal play in proportion to how they actually occur and understanding how they actually come up. There is no point in looking for tactics in a position where there are none, it is a waste of time. I wouldn't be surprised if de la Maza made some people's performances worse, because they are counterproductively searching around for tactics and not grasping the game in its proper context. Even worse is the fact that you're meeting the same tactics again, so you're going to remember the exact position rather than the patterns. You also have to process an entire new position every puzzle, so you lose the feeling and development of the games. Almost any benefit of de la Maza can be done by playing chess online. 

I do not know what it is about this idea that takes a hold of people, almost like the conspiracy theory of chess. I've seen person after person latch onto this idea and think they were going to be the ones who it worked for, making big claims.... all of course before they made the rating jump. And where do they go a few months later? All disappeared...? 

I also think it's a little distasteful to punish yourself to make sure you can get ahead of someone else when they are trying to have fun. If you work that hard for a game, you're doing something inherently gratuitous and setting the bar higher for everyone. It's not supposed to be a competition of who can take the most suffering, it's supposed to be fun. Not everyone has the time to spend on working hard at chess, some people more important things in their lives. 

This is exactly what thing I'm talking about. He started playing a lot of blitz games at the same time as doing de la Maza's programme and playing them seriously to win (time pressure, concentrating etc.). He also I believe had other trainers at the same time, including I think an IM as one of his trainers so a complete confounding factor. If anyone started playing that much they would gain 150 points or so from their usual rating. He was completely into it, I predicted the increase in performance would be limited and temporary and then he would disappear... and guess what? That's what happened.      

People need a little more nuanced thinking over what actually happens when they are doing something. If you want to gain arm muscles, you practice lifting weights. If you want to get better at endgames, you practice and study chess endgames. However it's different with chess tactics... chess tactics can only be taken as a whole with the strategy. You can't just study chess tactics on their own, and certainly not the brute force way de la Maza advocates. The only plus I could think would be if there were important patterns de la Maza was highlighting, but that's just normal chess study. 

I think the secret to Michael de la Maza's success was that he is a very intelligent person and he was able to do the extremely hard tactics. Most people get stumped after the 600th problem from CT-art3.0