Low Correlation between Puzzle Proficiency & Rating - Implications for Chess Improvement?

I think a sample size of 4 is hardly enough to make these conclusions. From my non-scientific look at players' profiles, I'd say there is a correlation between puzzles and rapid rating, with puzzles being about 500 points ahead.

Chess is 99% tactics. But not 99% tactics trainer.

Solving puzzles is like practising penalties, free-shots and corners in soccer. It is not bad but it hardly makes you a good soccer player. You have to practice by means of playing/analyzing tons of whole games. The opening, the play before the combi, the conversion; everything glued together with tactics.

@Blundered_the_queen said in #1:

Basic summary of a very long post: Why are players who are good at puzzles bad at chess, and vice versa? Does this mean that puzzles aren't the best way to train chess? If so, what is the best method to train at chess?

I've heard the following refrain numerous times both in real-life and on the Internet: Any chess player under 2000 FIDE doesn't need to bother with strategy, openings, or even endgame theory. All they need to do is keep doing puzzles until they get better at tactics and stop giving their pieces away, and they will naturally reach 2000 FIDE.

I'll break this belief down for further emphasis. What I was told was the following:

1: Under 2000 FIDE, the reason you lost is because you missed a tactic. All a player needs to reach 2000 FIDE is a solid grasp of tactics.

2: Tactics are trained by doing chess puzzles; the better you are at puzzles, the better your grasp of tactics.

If statements 1 and 2 are true, then I think there is also an implicit statement 3:

3. The better you are at puzzles, the closer you will get to 2000 FIDE.

That is to say, under 2000 FIDE or its equivalent on Lichess (I'm guessing about 2400 Lichess?), there should be a very strong correlation between one's proficiency at chess puzzles and one's proficiency at chess games. People who are good at tactics will have a high puzzle rating, and likewise a high blitz/rapid/classical rating. You would expect there to be a very strong direct correlation between how good someone is at chess puzzles and how high they are rated, at least until they hit the highest echelons of chess and become a titled player.

And yet, whenever I look at the players I've played, I'm not entirely sure that any such correlation exists. At my current level of play (which is about 1200 blitz and 1300-1400 rapid), the puzzle ratings of my opponents can vary from as low as 1300 to as high as 2100 (no, that's not a typo). And I'm not talking about people who've maybe done a puzzle 5 months ago and improved a lot since then; I'm talking about players who regularly do puzzles and also regularly play games.

I've also seen people with a 1691 puzzle rating attain an actual game rating of 1759 rapid. I've also just seen someone on the forum a few days ago with a puzzle rating that consistently climbed into the 1700s and even 1800s before falling down to an average of 1600 complain about being perpetually stuck at 1300 classical.

The puzzle rating / Game rating of some players I've observed, in table form:-

Puzzle Rating Game Rating
1396 1372 (rapid)
2178 1414 (rapid)
1691 1759 (rapid)
1634 1393 (classical)

All of these players play both puzzles and games on a weekly if not daily basis (in the case of the last person, he just played 400+ puzzles today). This isn't a case of someone with an inactive puzzle/game rating from 5 years ago, these are actual puzzle / game ratings from active players.

I'm not naming the exact players since I'm not sure if Lichess would consider naming them on a forum post to be harassment. But I'm sure that everyone who's played around at the lower levels of Lichess has seen similar players before. These aren't rare standout players I've combed through a million games to find, they're people I've played literally today, or people on my best wins / worst losses list (aside from the poor guy who's been playing hundreds of puzzles per day; that guy's someone I've found on the forums). I've selected them out of maybe 20 or so players as illustrative examples of the point I am making, but I'm not going out of my way to find the weirdest players I can find, and I'm sure anyone who's around my level can reach around their game history and easily find a dozen or so players with similar rating disparities.

This brings me to the point I'm trying to make: if your puzzle rating doesn't correspond to your actual game strength, then what gives? Didn't your chess club, your local grandmaster, your favourite twitch streamer, your chess forum, and social media all tell you the only thing you need to get good at chess is puzzles?

I've thought of 3 explanations that kind of explain why highly-rated puzzle players are still bad at chess, but all of them feel unconvincing, even to me.

1. Chess really is all about tactics; the reason highly-rated puzzle players are bad at chess? It's because Lichess puzzles don't actually reflect their tactical ability, which was always terrible. These players just managed to get an inflated Lichess puzzle rating because they're using some kind of non-tactical calculation to defeat puzzles. Maybe they just got really lucky and guessed the right move a couple hundred of times without calculating the entire puzzle out in their heads.

2. Lichess puzzles really do reflect your tactical ability; but chess is actually about more than just tactics, even at 1300 Lichess. The players with a "tactics rating" of 2100 might suck at basic opening principles so badly that they just implode on the chessboard before they can bring their tactical skill into play. They do have a finely-honed sense of tactics, but they just never get to use it because they don't know how to get their pieces into position.

3. A player with a high puzzle rating really does have a high tactical strength, and chess really is all about tactics. Normally, players with high puzzle ratings / tactical ability would be good at chess, but the players you've observed are outliers who are unable to bring their tactical strength to the board because of some mysterious psychological hangup about how they play. When they play games, they play on autopilot, and can only really think about chess when they're looking at the puzzle dashboard.

All of these seem like terrible explanations.

With the first explanation, even if you're "guessing" your way through puzzles all the way up to 2100, that still reflects a high level of intuition and game sense. Maybe you suck at calculation relative to your puzzle rating, but you should still have a good enough sense of intuition to outplay someone who can neither calculate nor intuit the sort of positions you can find.

With the second explanation, I've analysed hundreds of my own games and I can confidently say that at my level, all games are filled with obvious tactical blunders from both sides. Even if I play the opening perfectly and my opponent is down -4 or -5 in the opening, I will always find a way to blunder away that lead by missing two or three tactics throughout the entire game. It's obviously, trivially true that chess is all about tactics at my level.

The third explanation basically sounds like bad pop psychology to me. If someone is dedicated enough to suffer through thousands of chess puzzles to improve their chess games, they're not the sort of person who would sleepwalk through a game of chess. Saying that good puzzle players lose to bad puzzle players in chess, is like saying the guy who hits the gym twelve hours a week can lose to a coach potato who only goes two hours every week in a powerlifting competition, because the first guy suffers from a mental block where he can only lift weights at the gym and can't do it outside the gym. This idea just sounds like plain nonsense.

So, logically, everything seems to indicate that chess puzzles ought to be the key to chess improvement. I can't think of any good explanation for why a good puzzle player can still be a bad chess player.

But all of the logical thought in the world doesn't matter in the face of empirical data. This is a bit like Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise; it doesn't matter how good your theoretical framework is if it cannot stand up against empirical data. A single data point about a man walking across the room breaks the Achilles paradox. And there are probably thousands of data points on Lichess that break the "puzzles lead to improvement" paradigm.

I don't have any answers here; if I actually had the answer of "how to improve at chess" I probably wouldn't be rated 1200. But I do know that whatever the answer is, it probably isn't just or even mainly about puzzles. If anyone has found the holy grail of chess improvement and wants to share it in this discussion, please let me have it.

TL;DR

It's an interesting topic. I haven't really done any comparisons between puzzle/game ratings of my opponents (haven't played many games yet) but I've also seen recommendations that most "average" or lower level players should spend most of their time doing tactics puzzles or studying tactics books - as opposed to studying openings for example. There is one problem that I can think of - when you sit down to work out tactics puzzles, you know that there is a tactic there that you should be able to find. In contrast, when you play a game you don't have someone telling you "there is a tactic, find it." So I could see how one's tactics "rating" could be higher (perhaps significantly) than one's game rating.

Over time though, I think doing tactics puzzles regularly helps you develop "board sight" (or whatever you want to call it) - so that in games you start to recognize patterns or situations where certain tactics should or could exist. In which case you should start finding them more often which should lead to your game rating rising. Still, I would think for most the game rating would lag the tactics rating.

As I get back into chess I'm finding that tactics training is helping, but I have observed that I tend to blunder in endgames. I recently heard someone saying that those of us in the middle rating range should spend more time on endgame studies which seems to make sense. What's the point of playing a solid game and coming into the endgame with a pawn advantage if you don't know how to convert that.

So my approach is to try to spend about equal amounts of my study time on tactics and endgames. Less time on openings as I've got a few that I like to play. We'll see how it goes.

A few ideas:
Some are good at puzzles but bad at everything else.
With a puzzle you know there is something there. In a game if you stopped to look that hard at every move you'd lose on time. In a game having a sense of when to look and when to play a simple move is critical. Puzzles dont develop it.
Puzzles dont develop the skill of building the position until something is possible.
It doesnt work vs a good player to play by making 1 or 2 move threats until after a strong positional advantage is there [There is a game Walter Browne vs Keres that shows that pretty clearly].
Puzzles can be repetitive for some that do a lot of puzzles.
Puzzles dont test when there appears to be something there but it has a refutation at the end of the sequence.
......
Now the thing I dont understand is the number of people who can do an amazing number of puzzles in 5 minutes and stink at Blitz.
Bill

@Blundered_the_queen said in #6:

Sorry mate, didn't have the time to write a short post so I wrote a long one instead. Summary's in the title and at the top though.

Sorry, it's my fault me really. I was kinda jk

@Blundered_the_queen said in #1:

Basic summary of a very long post: Why are players who are good at puzzles bad at chess, and vice versa? Does this mean that puzzles aren't the best way to train chess? If so, what is the best method to train at chess?

...

I don't have any answers here; if I actually had the answer of "how to improve at chess" I probably wouldn't be rated 1200. But I do know that whatever the answer is, it probably isn't just or even mainly about puzzles. If anyone has found the holy grail of chess improvement and wants to share it in this discussion, please let me have it.

I remember you - we have recently discussed something similar.
I see you've stopped playing bullet, and it looks like you've started winning more in rapid. Now try to give up the game of blitz, at least three minutes. You will have more time for puzzle streak - this is a good exercise, do not give up on it.

I didn't fully read your message, but I think I understood correctly what you are worried about.
There are chess blogs here on Lichess. In my opinion, this is something like an advertisement, but it contains some information. Here is a link to chess strategy blogs. I think you'll need it.
https://lichess.org/blog/topic/Strategy

And in this section I found a blog with this title: "Correlation between rapid/blitz rating and puzzle rating".
https://lichess.org/@/mlatb/blog/correlation-between-rapidblitz-rating-and-puzzle-rating/H39ApaeR
A nice girl wrote, has the title WIM.

And there's another article on her blog - "Have you plateaued with chess ratings?"
https://lichess.org/@/mlatb/blog/study-plan-based-on-rating/0BmQZqjX

I don't know, maybe this will take you to her website. I'm afraid they'll offer you something to buy there)
Have you tried working with any textbook? Maybe it would be more useful to read Capablanca's textbook? There are a million courses of all kinds now, and Capa is a classic.