advice.

my tatic trainer rating hovers between 1400 and 1450 and i cant seem to bring it up anymore. ive put over 250 hours on the tatic trainer and read books ect. i was woundering if anyone could help me get through this slump. thank you

sincerly Alex

What you might be doing tactics too much, Cut it down to no more than 12 per day. Start taking part in analysing master chess games. Do one endgame exercise per day. What ever book your reading, read and study one chapter. You're doing too much and your brain is getting overloaded. Try just doing less. You might be burning yourself out. Just slow down and relax a bit. Take it slower. I stil read and study but I have slowed down, too. Get yourself a calender and a notebook to use as a journal. Write on the calender what you did that day and write down what you did. Give yourself 3 weeks. I'll talk to you later. John Moyer

Is it important that your tactical rating is higher or is it important that you are better at tactics? 

My tactical rating right now is around 1600  and yours is around 1450 but do you think that tells either of us how strong we actually are at tactics in game?

Sometimes I play youtube videos of titled players solving high end tactics and pause the video before they attempt to answer it and figure it out on my own. To be honest with you I do pretty well a lot of the time but my tactics rating is 1600 .. that pretty much tells me that the tactics trainer doesn't represent my full tactical ability.

What I have noticed is a lot of tactics that arise in the tactics trainer both in chesstempo and here somehow don't seem to arise in my games as frequently. For instance, the amount of queen sacrifices leading to a won game in tactics trainer vs my games are not even remotely comparable. Like once in a good blue moon my opponent will allow me to set up my queen in way to achieve a tactic that allows me to sacrifice it for some kind of mate.

With that being said. The way to improve your tactical rating is to consistently solve problems. The way to do that is to question tactics that exist. You need to approach each problem asking yourself things like.. 'wheres the pin', 'wheres the fork', 'wheres the mate' 'wheres the distraction' 'wheres the desperado' 'wheres the perpetual' Find out immediately if something like that exist then try and solve the problem.

Of course in a real game.. its much different.. you decide to create a pin or a fork or a mating oppurtunity. 

let me give you an example in one of my games

I told you that you need to slow down on tactics to say a dizen a day. You need to do a couple of master games and get yourself a good extensive endgame book. There are more things to learn in the endgame that you can ever imagine. The endgame will help you become a better player. It will bring your rating up, too. There's Dvoretsky's endgame manual; Van Perlo's Tactical endgame trainer. There's Jeremy Silman's endgame which has gotten both good and bad revtewa, The endgame is where it's at. Learn and study the endgame.  John Moyer