I finally learned how to study tactics right and finally improved my rating

Just wanted to post about my recent experience with gaining 150pts in 4 months on blitz at chess.com, from about 1150ish to 1250-1300ish now. 

I was stagnated at 1100 for 2+ years before that (didn't play here much before that, but I playedchess years before that.)

I knew tactics was the key, but despite doing thousands of chesstempo tactics at my level, my rating remained static. TOTALLY frustrating, and I'm sure many of you are right where I was right now, stuck at 1100-1200 no matter how many tactics you seem to study.

Turns out I was studying tactics WRONG, and unfortunately chesstempo was to blame for most of it. No, nothing is inherently wrong with chesstempo, but the problem was with my approach. I was doing problems, but not REDOING problems I got incorrect on CT. And I wasn't redoing and redoing and redoing those incorrect problems to fix my errant thoughts.

About 4 months ago, on a whim of the good reviews I bought "tactics time" for my kindle, thinking it would be a good distraction on lines or other pointless waiting. I dont' think it's a uniquely amazing book in terms of content, but what the kindle format forced me to do was to focus on a FIXED set of problems, and thus I could bookmark the ones I got wrong and do them again. And again. And again. Anda again. Seriously, I'm on my 5th pass through the book now, in entirety.

That redoing of problems made ALL the difference. Seriously, tactics study is all about studying and restudying tactics you get wrong, especially the easiest of the ones you get wrong. I had wasted literally 2 years on chesstempo because I didn't regularly review my wrong problems, and my lack of rating improvement showed it.

 Learning and repeatedly reviewing 10 easy rated problems that you had missed the first time around by redoing them until you'll see it instantly forever on, is more valuable than doing 100 chesstempo problems set at your rating, but never reviewing the ones you got wrong. 

Now I've branched out to other similar tactics book, repeating the same 'do the wrong problems until they're burned in' and my rating is finally increasing, slowly, but surely. Hope this helps all you who are stuck in exactly my same boat. 

I think there is a book that suggests that called pump up your rating . Congrats

Chess Tempo has a feature to let you make spaced repetition sets so you can redo your problems.

Honestly, I tried that spaced repetition (I had a paid membership for a year, used it a lot) and it didn't help.

The idea is right, but my big problem with Chesstempo is that it's too easy to not make a 'small set' of problems to solve, and the spacing of repitition is way too far apart. 

For example, in Tacticstime, you get 100 problems, which are not too hard, from 1-movers to 3-movers in general.  SOlve 'em all in 30-60mins if you're good, and them do the ones you get wrong like 5 days in a row until you've completely, utterly memorized them. Put 'em away for awhile, and then redo that 100 problems like 3-4 weeks later and see how you do. 

Seriously, I could do TacticsTime (or any other problem book of similarlevel) repeatedly and likely raise my rating another 200-300 points from where it is now just by doing it faster. 

Tactics Time automatically serves you all past incorrect puzzles?

That feature is easy to set up?

Congratulations! 

Like i tell my students, doing hundred of tactics a day, for hours on end, isnt going to improves your tactical vision.  As you have found out, it quality, not quantity. 

My tactical study plan is this:

I do 5 at a time, and if it takes me longer that a few seconds to solve it, it gets marked for review.  Once i get to 3 for review, I work on those alone.  I study them until i have completely solved them, understand them, and see the pattern.  This is coming from someone that doesnt care for studying tactics. 

What will also help, if youre not doing this already is to look at Forcing Moves - Checks, captures, Threats first. 

This is why I liked books. In all my tactic books I make a mark off to the side of the puzzle meaning correct or incorrect. Some days I only review the ones with an incorrect mark.

If a problem has many correct marks, I can ignore it. Problems with many incorrect marks get extra attention.

Good job.

For someone at my level (1300 blitz here), I disagree with you that hundreds of tactics won't help. They WILL help, but importantly, only if you review the ones you get wrong a lot to fix the erroneous thinking.

Nothing else I have done has remotely helped my chess rating, and I've spent a fair amount of time memorizing openings, reading strategy books, etc. Even endgame study has not helped - because at my lowly level, one side will invariably have an obvious win or lose endgame not requiring any skill to manage. It's all about tactics at my level.

This is why I spent hours cutting apart John Bain's great book "Chess Tactics for Students" and put them on over 400 note cards. I carry a set around with me (say about 30-40) and solve them over and over until I can do them at a glance. Then I grab another set and do the same thing. The problems are simple, but doing them until you get them immediately really helps. And there are over 400, so I'm not likely to just memorize them.

And its ok to disagree :-)

What you have to remember, is that when you are throwing hundreds of tactics a day at the brain, its not going to remember them.  Sure youll remember some of them, some partially, etc.  But to get a firm understanding, and to really remember them, you need to really limit yourself. 

Think of it like this.  How do you remember a phone number? XXX-XXX-XXXX.  You dont just go XXXXXXXXXX.  You break up what you learn into smaller segments. 

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 ).

Ok, we're on the same wavelength.

I'll do literally 300 problems in a day now - but importantly, these will be problems I've seen already, likely multiple times in the past. 

If I'm just doing 300 new problems a day, and not focusing on ones I've got wrong previously, it won't work, just like you say. 

When I do these shotgun 300 problems, it's to get faster at the easy ones AND to have a game-like context where you can get mixed up and distracted by similar looking positions. If you only need to memorize 5 problems a day, even a 900 player would be able to memorize deep 8 move combos. HOwever, make them spot those same 5 problems in a context of 245 other 'easy' problems, and they'll have a much rougher time of it. 

I'm finding this approach directly translates to my game play. In fact, depth of calculation has not at all been a limiter in my blitz games at my lowly 1300 level - it's spotting the 2-3 movers FAST that is key.

I am not sure how "you wasted time studying openings". I see basically a lot of talk about raising ratings, but the main poster was talking about for blitz chess. Are you also just raising your blitz level?

I'm not who you replied to, but I consider most (not all, but most) of the time I've spent learning openings almost a waste of time, at least compared to the yield if I had spent that time studying tactics the way I am now.

I spent a lot of time learning openings for blitz last year, but my rating actually went DOWN whenever I did this. Really, really frustrating. I'm just not good enough to neglect tactics, even if I"m gaining opening knowledge. And at 1300 blitz, you're pretty much out of book by move 5, in almost all your games. 

That's interesting, I'm actually getting better from just playing more and gaining more experience. I tried the tactics trainer here, but I seem to get nervous lol.

My rating's jumped a few hundred points from just improving my experience. 

I wish I could say the same! Alas, didn't work out at ALL for me. I was stuck at 1100-1200 for a year and a half!

OP is right on.  Interesting to see the resistance to this advice even in this very thread, a la David Pruess.

chesstempo has a tactical motifs section that I really like; lets you look at and play through the major motifs so you can recognize them when they come up

I think Bain's tactics book + Chess Hero is about the best way to do a good set of elementary tactics on a repetition schedule.
But everything is Chess Tempo is customizable.  The difficulty of the problems, the tactical motif, the quality of the problem as rated by other members, the amount of moves, etc.  You can make sets of problems that you got wrong previously and drill that for 5 days in a row if you want. 

Once again... 

Blitz. Is. Nonsense. Period. 

Nothing that happens in blitz is of any relevance to your rating in chess. 

The only possible defence to playing blitz is the idea that you are simply going over moves in a fun way, and ignoring every last bit of "feedback" you are getting from the results.  

Pruess doesn't have a monopoly on proper tactics study advice.  You can improve in tactics by doing more problems per day than he recommends.

Note that I'm not saying he's wrong.  I do disagree with his claim that you "probably" can only store 2-3 new patterns per day.  That's easy to falsify and I highly doubt that he looked through any research on the topic before making it.