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

Loved this post. More people need to read it. Thanks for sharing.

OP here - just as a continued update from my post.  

I still think at 1100-1300 level, my advice was good - repeated study of tactics, particularly, reviewing tactics you INCORRECTLY solved, is crucial. 

I will however, amend my prior post where I assumed that by just doing more tactics in that pattern, I'd probably gain 200-300 more points.  That clearly was NOT the case. I got a pretty rude awakening at 1350ish level, when players with much better opening and basic positional knowledge (simple stuff, really), gave me few to no chances to strut my tactics stuff. 

Unsurprisingly, I think the take home msg that's common sense, but needs to be reiterated, is that balance in study is the highest yield in chess. Tactics should be emphasized first as they're the most decisive, but you have to add the other stuff to play decent chess games pretty soon afterwards. My positional practice knowledge (simple stuff but which I was not executing reliably, like capturing the center, not moving 2 pieces in the opening - stuff that sounds beginner/rookie but I guarantee even 1450s are routinely ignoring since I'm about that level now!) was really lagging my tactics and it showed.

I thought blitz was all tactics at first, but even in blitz, good positional moves are required to set up the tactics, or to give your opponent so few viable moves that it becomes really easy for them to blunder. 

@hhnngg1 I totally agree with you

As Fischer said "Tactics flow from a superior position." But you need good positional understanding to get into a good position and you need tactical skill to take advantage of mistakes and/or convert good positions.

That's why I also say the 2 most important questions in chess are: 1. Are there any tactics? and 2. How can I improve my position. And as you said, they work together.

Another good way to improve your tactics rating is to move from plain tactics drills to tactics studies. Eugene Perelshteyn made a nice mobile app called "Chess Genie" that has a fairly large amount. It also has tactics puzzles on a leveled basis that you can repeat.

I personally use it more than other tactics trainers especially since I am always away from home:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.problem_solver.chess_genie

If you as a nm find these puzzles challenging, that's pretty much advice to the 95% of us lesser class players that we should avoid this app - it'll be wayyyyy to hard for us to benefit.

SL0M wrote:

Another good way to improve your tactics rating is to move from plain tactics drills to tactics studies. Eugene Perelshteyn made a nice mobile app called "Chess Genie" that has a fairly large amount. It also has tactics puzzles on a leveled basis that you can repeat.

I personally use it more than other tactics trainers especially since I am always away from home:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.problem_solver.chess_genie

Well most people approach tactics study with "speed" in mind. If they can't find the forcing line right away they give up and see the answer with a "Oh! That's easy, I'll find it next time!" face. However, the ideal approach, in my opinion, is to study tactics with "accuracy" in mind. Speed will come given time.

I think you misunderstand.  

The app is on a level basis so it can be adjusted to be easy or hard. The best part of it is that you won't have to worry about not being challenged enough.

One aspect that should not be overlooked is the thinking process. It is very common for novice to solve mate problems, but missed a simple mate threat in actual game. The culprit here is the thinking process. You should not lose focus.

Always study your opponent's last move. Always look at the whole board to see piece positioning. Before you make a move, check if there is a tactical drawback. Before you react with defense, if your opponent has a threat, check if you have a stronger counter threat.

Are there no other counterexamples here?

I have been doing tactics on chesstempo for a year, without redoing any wrong problems. My tactics rating has risen from 1600 to 2000 (fluctuating based on activity) and my rating has risen from about 1300 to 1500 (again, flunctuating based on activity) and keeps rising. I don't need to go back and do problems I got wrong because the patterns I don't recognize get recognized in later problems.

Not to mention that all of it simply improves my vision, calculation, and creativity regardless of whether or not there is a specific pattern I learned.

I've seen people suggest to give up on a tactic if its been more than 3 - 5 minutes. Frankly, that's absolutely ridiculous, just absurd. I have spent 20 minutes on tactics and been proud to reach an answer, with greatly increased visualization ability and creativity. I never put an answer on a tactics problem unless I am sure its correct. I still get problems wrong, but due to miscalculation, not because I give up or guess. Even if I have to look 7 moves ahead and/or pull out an analysis board and it takes me 20 minutes, I still do the problem. I don't give up, look at the answer, and say that I've "learned a pattern" for the day and pat myself on the back. I actually put in the work to find the solution and my brain never forgets.

I think that is a way that this "chess is pattern recognition" attitude can be taken too far and really hurt your improvement. Chess is also calculation, visualization, stamina, creativity, and many other things. It's really important to be able to calculate well enough to back up your moves with solid evidence in the form of variations and not play moves simply because it looks similar to another position you saw.

The reason why I say this is because of all the titled players I've seen play blitz and standard with commentary, not once have I heard them say "this move, feels right, so I just play it." Not once! Always, *always* there is concrete reasoning and calculation behind every move and play. There is real investigation and calculation into several opponent responses. Yet people who are overly zealous of the value of pattern recognition would expect high level chess players to say "This looks like something I've seen before in which f4 was the right move, so I'll play f4."

Xman720,I respectfully disagree with alot of this here. I think you misunderstood the whole point of "giving up" as you put it on a tactic after 3-5 minutes. The idea here is if it's a tactic that you can't spot within a few minutes or so,then guess what? you DON'T know that pattern,plain and simple,so why waste any more time on it? It's all about maximizing your study time. I don't think that not giving up on a puzzle is a waste of time but it may not be the most beneficial way to solve and study tactics,the keyword there being study and not solve. I think a more efficient way is the way suggested by many authors and that is simply to look up the solution after a few minutes,study it,go over it and study it a bit more and then move on to the next puzzle. I have done this several times and I personally feel that it helps ingrain the pattern into your mind better,even if,for the moment it's only in your short term memory. (Repetition should help ingrain it into your longterm memory.) Afterall,I thought the whole point of studying Chess tactics was to learn more "patterns".

Chess pattern recognition is an attitude? Well that's news to me,I thought it was something in the subconscious mind,something you picked up over time,unconsciously. I've heard, or well read,that Magnus Carlsen play moves that feels right all the time?,this is because he has 10,000 games in his memory to draw from,I think this was said on a special he did on 60 minutes,some years back. I mean if that's not pattern recognition that I don't know what is.

The way it works is,you see something that you've seen before,and then you come up with a candidate move and then you check it,and if you're wise,you'll check it again and make absolutely sure it works in the given position/situation,only then do you play it. "This looks something I've seen before in which f4 was the right move,so I'll play f4",well that's exactly what I would do in a blitz game that's about 5 minutes long and I don't have time to think about the situation,how else do you think top players play so well at blitz? I mean it's not magic or some secret pill that they took and you and I didn't,it's pattern recognition that's what,it's called intuition or more accurately Chess intuition,you just "know" something is right,why else would that be?,other then pattern recognition. I have solved several Chess puzzles like that,without giving them much thought,probably mostly mate in ones or something. Here lately though I've been slowing down alot,which I think is going to be more beneficial to me in the future,my motto is,if it didn't pass your conscious mind,then you're not really in the process of learning it,and the whole point of doing Chess puzzles or tactics or w/e you want to call them,is to learn something,something new,or at least reinforce something you know already and may not be applying in your own games.

Hmmm, I remember stating my opinion in this thread but I must say, I don't remember stating it so strongly!

I have recently started trying out making lists of missed tactics to see if they will help (I simply felt I was ready for some additional studying). That wasn't the main thing I was against in this thread, I was mainly against the time limits people impose on themselves because they strongly believe that chess is either entirely or mainly pattern recognition.

However, even so, I do it pretty differently than other people on this thread and for a pretty different reasons.  Here is the blog where I keep track of all my missed tactics problems.

The point of this blog has nothing to do with pattern recognition. If you solve the tactics, you will see that I wrote explanations in each tactic for how to find that tactic in the future, and what I did wrong to arrive at the incorrect answer. Occasionally I wait a while before putting the tactic in the blog so I don't remember the incorrect move I made or the reason I made it, but I put it in anyways.

My idea with this blog and the repetition of old tactics was to move as much processing power as I could away from the subconscious brain and into the conscious brain. I didn't want to just stare at the board and hope my unconscious brain finds a solution, that's where I was hitting a slow down.  It only works so well to try out moves in a position and see which one of them wins something.  I decided I needed an approach that was more precise and more efficient. One habit I have started to take up which has given very positive and interesting results: Never checking the same line twice, except for a conscious reason that I think of (I of course also calculate for a second time before I am about to play a line). In other words, if I try a line and decide it doesn't work, I need a reason to reopen the case. This has improved my calculation quite a bit; before I often got stuck because I spent a lot of time calculating the same lines over and over just trying to see something. What I am doing now is learning to trust my calculation, and this is an example of moving chess calculation from the subconscious to the conscious.

The whole point of this is to make the entire act of playing chess more focused and purposeful, so there is no wasted energy or wasted time. I think this  very different from people who suggest redoing solved tactics (without taking notes, I might add) to improve pattern recognition.

You silver-tongued devil, you...

Your discovery is correct. How did you come to this conclusion?

Another interesting topic that's being bumped 2 years later. So unfortunately my opinion on this feels irrelevant from the get-go. But I'm surprised that if you are stuck at the same tactic rating for 2+ years that you haven't been repeating failed tactics. I'm a bit stuck between 1300-1400 currently. But I regularly see the same failed tactics. And I usually get them right the second time around.

Do this with your lost games and you will improve even faster.

How do you go about repeating all of your tactics? Do you just go through your list of recent ones? It would be nice if chess.com offered an option to repeat all of your missed tactics until you get them right on the first turn.

And do you think that by repeating them until you can get them almost instantly is actually teaching you something? It seems more like you're just memorizing an exact position at that point which may or may not show up in a game. Just curious on your thoughts, Chesslover.

a long time ago a NM I play with on occasion told me to study ONLY the games I lost; similar concept but it works