lichess.org
Donate

Ross Sneddon

What's the Point of Puzzles?

ChessTacticsPuzzle
“Chess is 99% tactics,” is one of the most misleading chess quotes.

We all train.

We select some activity or another and do it in the hopes of improving our chess.

But we rarely stop to consider what the core skills behind the chess activities we do are. Knowing why we are doing any given chess activity is fundamental to it bringing about meaningful improvement.

Today I want to look at solving tactical puzzles and break down what fundamental skills this activity enhances in us. Without understanding this you might very well be spending hours working on your chess, only to see little return.

99%?

“Chess is 99% tactics” is one of the most misleading chess quotes out there.

I often have students quote this at me and assume that tactics are the only thing they should be doing to improve at chess.

Often new students state with exasperation that it's the only thing they have been doing and they feel frustrated that the advice and the work they are putting in doesn’t seem to be getting them anywhere.

So is chess 99% tactics?

Whilst it is true that the majority of games in the rating bands I teach within are decided tactically, that is actually true all the way up until master level. Consider these statistics from the book “The Woodpecker Method”:

This is the percentage of games decided by tactical mistakes according to the authors:

2500+ 42%
2200-2400 44%
2000-2200 63%
1800-2000 72%

From this we can derive that tactics are clearly extremely important at all levels, it’s not until master level that the majority of your games won’t be decided tactically.

So does this mean that you should focus on tactics 99% of the time until you reach the level of master?

It doesn’t.

The notion that you can improve by only doing tactics is misguided in my opinion. If you know nothing of strategy, general principles and endgames then you are going to end up in a bad position.

And then we can apply another overused chess quote: Tactics flow from a superior position. Or to use my own more eloquent quote: Tactics flow against you when your position is shite.

image

So before we get into the meat of this post I just want to caveat that solving tactical puzzles is important, it should form a large part of your diet. But it should form part of a balanced diet.

Having said that, tactics work should yield results. As cliché as the aforementioned saying might be, putting in hard work on tactics as part of a balanced training program should work.

So in this post I’m going to explore why some people doing large volumes of puzzles don’t seem to be improving and outline how to get the most from the time you invest.

Adult Improver Chess Coaching | Book your Free Trial Lesson | Support the Blog on Patreon

CHESS IMPROVEMENT HAS BEEN SOLVED

I used to think the secret to chess improvement was hidden in a secret bottle at the bottom of The Perpetual Chess Podcast’s Adult Improver Series. And despite there of course being great advice in there, I think the real secret is hard work. It’s pretty well known what you're supposed to do to get better at chess. Half the problem is actually getting yourself to do it.

So the secondary thing I hope people take from this post is motivation. Sometimes solving puzzles can feel like a grind, and if you don't believe that the process itself is helpful then it can be hard to get your arse in the chair and actually start doing the work.

Motivating my students to solve tactical problems everyday comes from showing them the actual value of doing this work and how the results of that work manifest to make a difference in their games.

So without further preamble, this is why solving puzzles makes you stronger.

THE THREE SKILLS OF SOLVING

Consider the following position:

https://lichess.org/study/IBsuDIEB/g6BxrFeN

This is one of the many positions I show my students to illustrate the three skills that solving puzzles will teach them.

Let’s explore the first skill.

PATTERN RECOGNITION

When you first see a chess position in which a tactic exists you need to see opportunity.

If you do not see opportunity then you will look at the position and feel lost. When I talk to my students about pattern recognition, I want them to see these patterns as opportunities.

When your opponent moves a queen onto the same diagonal as the king, that is an opportunity. When a piece moves to a square where it is totally undefended, that is an opportunity. These opportunities might not be immediately exploitable, but if we recognise them and bank the information, then as the game progresses we might find that the situation changes and the opportunity we were aware of becomes one we can exploit.

In a tactical puzzle, a pattern or series of patterns are exploitable. The pattern in a position is the opportunity toward which we march. And by marching I mean calculating which we will get to next.

First consider the training position I presented earlier. What patterns did you see? Where is the opportunity in the position? Did you notice the configuration of the king and queen, the perfect forking distance apart for the d5 knight? The more paranoid or defensively minded of you might have recognised black’s bishop and queen lined up towards g2 threatening mate in some unlikely future. Perhaps you noticed the h8 rook, undefended and lacking a single square of mobility.

image

If you do not see these patterns, then you will not see any opportunity in this position, and you will stare at it feeling completely lost.

So if you didn’t notice the potential fork, what can you do to increase the likelihood of you seeing such an opportunity in your games?

In order to recognise the opportunity in this position you will have needed to have solved hundreds (if not thousands) of simple one move knight fork puzzles, and to see the opportunity to win the rook, thousands of trapped piece puzzles. Those are big numbers. But if you want to see these opportunities as soon as they present themselves in your games then this is what it takes.

Note you don’t necessarily need to solve thousands of different puzzles, you can repeat the same few hundred, thousands of times. Either way we are trying to train our subconscious to show us these geometric configurations automatically.

You don’t want to go looking for a tactic after every move. That is not a practical thing to do. You need the tactic to find you. You need your subconscious to show you it for you. And we can help our subconscious by adding labels to potential opportunities such as pieces being lined up on certain files or diagonals.

So grab a copy of the easiest chess puzzle books you can get your hands on and solve these 1-move puzzles over and over and over again until the patterns are ingrained in your soul.

If you are newer to chess it is best to start with themed puzzles (pins, forks, x-rays) before moving on to mixed theme puzzles.

CALCULATION

Once we spot a pattern we know. The opportunity on the horizon of the chess board, we must march towards it. And to do that we begin mentally moving the pieces across our board. We begin to calculate and visualise. We move pieces to squares they currently are not on and we attempt to hold an image of that position in our heads in order to draw certain conclusions from and evaluate that mental image.

This exercise strains the mind. It inspired one of my favourite chess quotes from GM Jan Gustavsen: "chess is a battle between the desire to not lose versus the desire to not think."

It is all too easy to think, this is all too complicated, I’m just going to play Ne4, yeah, Ne4, that's probably fine. And then the whole world explodes. You play Ne4 and realise immediately from your opponent's response that Ne4 was in fact, not fine. If only I could have motivated myself to calculate you think to yourself.

Well the good news is that I believe that calculating is like going to the gym, and whilst that 10kg dumbbell felt heavy when you walked through the door on day one, after a month you can launch it through the roof.

Calculation is no different, the more you push your brain, the further you strain it to look, the easier it gets. Whilst seeing a few moves ahead might seem difficult now, if you solve everyday for a few months you’ll find the same calculation is light work by comparison.

Calculation is a muscle and without use it will weaken, so you need to turn up often to keep that fitness.

What I recommend to train calculation is to lift heavy weights everyday. The calculation should really stretch you.

For this I suggest a few exercises. If you already have many patterns embedded in your subconscious then solving puzzles from challenging books or online puzzles with a 10-15 timer can offer a good mental workout.

Note that if you use an online tactics trainer for your calculation training then you need to be diligent about only solving for your chosen length of time there or the puzzle rating won’t match your level for the exercise. If you tank your puzzle rating doing 5 quick attempts on the toilet in your lunch break, then you won’t be sufficiently challenged when you sit down to do the 10 minute calculation exercise.

image

As long as you can spot the opportunity fairly quickly then you can start actually calculating. Right now I switch between setting a ten minute timer and doing rated puzzles on Lichess or the intermediate puzzles from The Woodpecker Method.

If, however, you're not yet able to spot opportunity in these harder exercises then don’t stare at the position feeling lost. This is a complete waste of time because you're not actually moving any pieces around mentally, you're just looking for the opportunity in the position and if you don’t see that fairly quickly, then it’s unlikely you’ll ever see it. This is one of the main reasons I see students putting in a lot of tactics work and not getting results. Looking at a position lost isn’t helping to absorb new patterns or train calculation.

For newer and lower rated players, more emphasis of your training should be placed on pattern recognition. When you have absorbed enough patterns then the opportunity in more complex puzzles will be more readily found and your time will be well spent. Until then, calculation training can be sought by playing longer games. Another option is to learn some basic king and pawn endgame theory and solve pawn endgame puzzles. This is a great way to train calculation at any level because the solutions are often very long sequences but still within almost everyone’s capability to calculate.

Consider (without a board) a pawn race where black has a pawn on h6 and white a pawn on a2, white to move. You are going to calculate 6 moves for white and 5 for black until resolution has been reached. That might be further than you have ever looked before if you are new to chess, but you can do it because it is simple.

COGNITION SPEED

When I wrote my blog post Losing Consciousness, I considered whether or not I lacked the intuition of my rating peers who had been playing chess since childhood. After writing that article I spoke with NM Todd Bryant who suggested it might not be intuition but processing speed.

And I think he might have been right.

It's possible my opponents weren’t dismissing certain lines based on intuition, they were calculating them and dismissing them faster than I was.

It got me thinking about how I could increase the speed at which I calculate. And it made me change the way I go about my pattern recognition training. I used to do easy puzzles and just try to let my subconscious take over. See a fork - play a fork. See a pin - play the pin.

I had to totally change the way I did these puzzles. I had to start fully calculating the main line of the solution as fast as possible before playing the first move.

That meant not seeing a fork and playing a fork but seeing a fork and thinking. Okay I play the fork - check, the king goes there. I take the rook, and then my opponent... doesn’t seem to have any threats, okay - let's play the move.

This is very different. And comes down to some important advice about any puzzle you solve.

Never guess the answer.

Even in the puzzles I take ten minutes to solve, if I haven’t cracked it, I play a move in a line I have calculated that I think is good, not just a random check I think might start down the road to success.

CONCLUSION

Chess is not 99% tactics, but tactics training helps develop important skills that drive chess improvement. If you start thinking of the work you do in terms of the skills you are developing, then you will be able to direct your training more effectively.

Specifically you want to seek to increase the volume of opportunities you are able to spot quickly and subconsciously by learning simple tactical patterns through repetition. You want to strengthen your ability to calculate by... calculating. That means moving the pieces around towards a meaningful goal, not just staring feeling lost. And finally we want to push ourselves to do all this as quickly as we can without compromising on accuracy to improve our processing power.

This is advice based on my observations as a coach, my own progress and conversations with other adult improvers. I’m always interested to hear and learn more so please reach out with your own perspective.


Thanks for reading.

I have been teaching chess to Adult Improvers for almost two years now. You can book a free trial lesson to see if we are a good fit.

I recently migrated from Twitter to BlueSky. Follow me there.

Join my patreons in our bi-weekly hangouts. There is one tomorrow (Friday 22nd) at 1800UTC. Thanks for your support: Ben Johnson, Benjamin Portheault, Dan Bock, Ev Clark, Rob Willians, Rick Chlopan, Tim Everett, MatthewKCanada, Brett, Nate Glissmeyer, Laura Holmes, Marcus Buffet, Jose C, Dawn Lawson, Alan May, Michael Shpizner, Karen W, Gregory C, Bowie, Ross W, Stefan K, and Ché Martin.