How to get better at chess tactics?

I've solved more then 5000 chess puzzles in the last year alone but I'm not making any progress what-so-ever. It's like i'm stuck in this range of 1750-1850. If I warm myself up I get pretty far, but the next day I loose all points that I previously got.

So, what to do here? How do you improve your chess tactics, besides the obvious chess tactics trainer and puzzles?

What you can try is go over scores of simple tactics (1-2 moves) to speed up your pattern recognition. It may help you beat the clock when training with chess.com's TT

Look I'm a rotten chess player and too old to ever get much better, but I find the ChessMentor tactics courses on all the different tactical motifs quite useful.  You get 5 lessons a day, why not add  tactics courses to your training?  One like this, on deflection for example:

http://www.chess.com/chessmentor/view_course?id=277

Hovering over your name, I see that it gives a bullet rating for you. That's your problem right there.

In order to become a stronger player, you need to play a mix of both slow and fast chess. Just trying to become a stronger bullet player by only playing bullet doesn't work. You need to become a stronger overall player, and your bullet rating will follow your overall strength.

That means playing slow games regularly, doing tough tactics puzzles that take you a while to solve and are several moves deeper than the ones you've done before, etc.

And at a certain point, you do need to work on stuff other than just tactics. Starting with endgames, then middle game strategy. Don't bother with openings until you're already strong in other areas.

Repetition. And redoing failed problems so that you remember certain motifs.

Its all about patterns. There is a limited number of patterns for chess tactics so it would be useful to make a list about all of them(or create a database with the name "tactical patterns" where you save all patterns). After this you need to do some tactics training about this patterns. For example you do 10 tactic exercises about the Anastasias mate on one day and another pattern the next day. As more as better. Your goal has to be to develop a tactical intuition which immediatly sees tactical patterns in positions.

It was either Danny Rensch, or David Pruess, who suggested how to study tactics. 

If i remember correctly it was something along the line of the human brain can remember 3 new patterns a day.  When you study tactics, keep going until you run across 3 that you dont know.  Then study those 3 tactics, and really study them, remember them, and really think about them. 

I used to do 100 tactics a day, which is just plain dumb.  Youre trying to remember patterns, and the brain cannot remember that many new patterns.  3 new patterns a day, and after 2 years, you will have as many patterns remembered as an IM.

Pruess:

http://danheisman.home.comcast.net/~danheisman/Lessons/zadult_guide3.html#Preuss

You can certainly remember more than 3 patterns a day.

Study the games of Alekhine, Spielmann, and Tal. 

thanks everyone. i will try playing slower games to spend more time thinking about positions. i play bullet games too often...

A post by IM David Pruess on a chess forum relating to how chess players respond to advice (good or bad): 

Thought you mind find it interesting...(Dan H added bold for the parts related to The Four Homeworks)

"As a teacher, my impression is that there is precious little advice the student actually wants to hear. Almost anything about how you need to work to improve is disregarded.

For example people write in to Jeremy Silman's column and ask him how to become a master. He'll list many things including "playing over 10 000 games" (I forget the exact number). Rather than starting to look over games, they'll reply in the comments section that he's lying, making it up.

"You should analyze your own games: losses and draws particularly." So, I've been doing this program "your games analyzed" for over 20 weeks now, in which a chess.com member has the opportunity to select any game of theirs and show it to me, and i'll go over it, ask about their thought process, and give my comments and feedback on the game. I believe I have seen 1 loss and 1 draw submitted out of ~25 games.

"Don't use computer engines until you are over 2400." but you see, a computer can "analyze" a game in a few minutes without any effort from the player-- who cares if they won't learn A SINGLE THING? and it's cheaper to ask a computer what you did wrong than hiring a master-- never mind that after the computer affixes a ? (or two) to one of your moves and provides an alternative, you'll be none the wiser as to why your move is not best, why the suggestion is better, what principle(s) is in operation, why you made the mistake you made, or what you'd have to do to produce the computer's move in a future game.

or when i give players in the 1000-1800 range advice on improving their tactics, viz: 10-15 min per day of solving simple tactical puzzles. the goal is to increase your store of basic patterns, not to work on your visualization, deep calculation. remember that is your goal. you are not trying to prove that you can solve every problem. if you don't solve a problem within 1 minute, stop. it's probably a new pattern or you would have gotten it by now. (with private students i'll take the time to demonstrate this to them: show them through examples that they can find a 3-4 move problem in 10 seconds if they know the pattern, and that they can fail to find a mate in 2 for 10 minutes if they don't know the pattern). look at the answer, and now go over the answer 3 more times in your head to help the pattern take hold. your brain can probably take on 2-3 new patterns between sleeping, so you should stop once you've been stumped by 2 or 3 problems (usually will take about 10-15 min). there is no point in doing more than that in one day. and any day you miss, you can't make up for. a semi-random estimate on my part is that you need about 2000 of these patterns to become a master. so you need to do this for 2 years or more.

i would guess that less than 1 in 100 of the people i have given this advice to have followed it to the letter. if they enjoy it, they'll waste their time doing it for 1.5 hours in a day, choosing to ignore that it's not helping them [after 15 min]. or some with ego issues will insist on trying to solve every single position (if only they linked their ego to their self-discipline ).

i could go on and on. from my experience, there are exactly two kinds of advice players *do* like to get:

- "you don't need to do x." Love, love, love, love that!! eg: "you don't actually need to memorize openings to be a master;" or "you don't need to calculate in positions like this, you can just move your pieces towards the best squares;" or "you don't need to study the endgame until your games are balanced enough to reach a lot of even endgames." people really drink that stuff up. sort of related is #2

- "see, this principle explains the entire position." provided the principle was well-explained, people love this too. well, on the one hand, powerful principles can often be pure gold; but i can't help but jadedly suspect that part of it may be that it is another pass for playing without working. playing according to principles is so much easier than employing painstaking analysis.

but anyway, chess is supposed to be fun, so have fun. you don't need to calculate if you don't like to. you don't need to revisit your losses if they are painful. you all have my not-even-one-iota-of-sarcasm-or-irony blessing to keep playing as you do. it's even fine with me if you ask me for advice and then ignore it as long as we all have fun in the process.

besides, people with an extremely strong desire to improve (in any field) pretty much all do put in serious work, and take pains to make sure they incorporate messages they are instinctively resistant to into their thoughts. when other masters tell me: "david, you aren't going to like hearing this, but here's what i think your problem is," i perk up. but currently i'm not doing the work to take advantage of that advice. i just enjoy playing"

All Good Advice! Maybe not so harsh.....

That was it!, thank you

Kralju, nisam ni ja baš nešto pretjerano dobar u taktikama, ali ja sam tek počeo ozbiljno da ih studiram. Mislim, da za razumijevanje taktike, nije dovoljno raditi ih samo svaki dan i tako ispočetka, nego da ih trebamo studirati i razumjeti. Ja lično taktičke probleme riješavam na jednoj stranici "chesstempo" i moj ti je prijedlog da se tu registruješ, jer imaš mnogo modova za riješavanje istih, ako želiš taktike sa vremenom ili bez, teže ili lakše ili pak samo neke određene taktičke probleme, kao na primjer deflekcija. Osim toga, ako samo igraš bullet šah i ne igraš spori šah da bi razradio ideje i strategiju u samoj igri, nećeš sigurno pretjerano napredovati u šah. Šah je više studiranja, a manje igranja i to je koncept kojeg se trebaš držati, ako želiš da dostigneš visoke nivoe. E to ti je moj savjet, pa prihvati ga ako želiš :)

That's why your profile pic is Megan Fox....

+1 - Slower time controls so you can actually learn to play chess to its fullest extent.

Just as an example.  There is a young 12 year old that floats round the mid 1700's to 1800.  Everytime he gets to 1800, he goes on a losing streak.  We have tried to tell him to add middlegame planning, and openings to his studying, but nope..."Im tactical..." "I like to play agressively..." "Posiitonal play is boring..." and he simply refuses to do anything besides tactics.  Which is fine if hes happy doing that.  But he gets frustrated, and upset because he cant consistently stay above 1800, and wonder s why he loses to those "boring" players.

Me like.  You've got your mojo working again.  Those long posts weren't your thing.

My official national rating is 1782 and I play on chess.com usually while I'm at work. That is why I usually play bullet since playing longer games poses a risk to get caught

And this about playing so much lower opponents is really exaggerated. Sometimes I do play lower lever opponents again for the same reason - don't have time for serious game and just want to relax. If that is a crime - judge me.

But, I get it. I agree I should play longer games and harder opponents. Finding the time for it is my main problem. But again, it's something I need to deal with.

What I am surprised here is that I get so little progress with chess.com tactics trainer. I really expected more...

@CrimeZone

E hvala ti za taj chesstempo. Nisam znao da oni imaju to tako raspoređeno da možeš odabrati samo npr. deflekciju i te razne modove. Možda je to baš ono što meni treba. Budem pogledao