Great article! I would also be interested in seeing the raw data before the normalization. While this chart is useful for understanding a theme's relative frequency across ratings, I'd also like to see how it compares to the frequency of the other themes. That data may be available somewhere else, but I'm not sure where to look.
All I know is that at the 2600 level, the puzzles get on my last nerves. Some days I'll go 5 or 6 out of 10. Others...0 - 4 on the first four tries. Any mental fatigue and it's "no dice". Any drowsiness and it's "no dice". I've spent upwards of 75 minutes on a few of them. Natural moves are almost always wrong.
You should not be spending such time on a puzzle, at tops 5 mins or else there is no doubt that you will miss it mid game. 75 mins on a puzzle shows that they are way to hard.
Good article! I'm stuck at a low level, but I find tactics trainers to have the advantage that the difficulty of their puzzles is more consistent. For instance, if you pick, say, 10 different 1500 level puzzles on Lichess, odds are that they will be of similar difficulty.
If I picked 10 puzzles from an author-selected puzzle book at my level, they will probably be from a mix of different levels (say 1200-1800 on Lichess). This is because they were probably curated by a master who finds them all incredibly obvious. To someone like that, there's no difference between a 1200 puzzle and an 1800 puzzle.
That's why Lichess-type puzzles make it easier for bad players like me to stay in their band of "desirable difficulty".
If I picked 10 puzzles from an author-selected puzzle book at my level, they will probably be from a mix of different levels (say 1200-1800 on Lichess). This is because they were probably curated by a master who finds them all incredibly obvious. To someone like that, there's no difference between a 1200 puzzle and an 1800 puzzle.
That's why Lichess-type puzzles make it easier for bad players like me to stay in their band of "desirable difficulty".
I'm not sure how much to trust higher difficulty tags or lackthereof, seeing as fewer people play the puzzles and add them. They are alos harder to mark because there is no one clear theme. I also often feel think something like "That would have been a fork the oppoent played the other move, so do I mark it?"
bien traducido ;-;
performance ratings don't display sample size, so we can't see see how significant a radar plot or performance rating per theme comparison is, based on enough exposure to the theme. I find that this is missing information that could easily be added to the mouse hover mechanism. I thought I would recall that persistent oversight.
@MellifluousSky said in #3:
> All I know is that at the 2600 level, the puzzles get on my last nerves. Some days I'll go 5 or 6 out of 10. Others...0 - 4 on the first four tries. Any mental fatigue and it's "no dice". Any drowsiness and it's "no dice". I've spent upwards of 75 minutes on a few of them. Natural moves are almost always wrong.
I totally agree with this, but around the 2400-2500 level for me, if I'm not absolutely focused and 'in the zone' I just can't see the board properly and keep the calculations in my head properly, it's gonna be a bad puzzle session. If I feel any urgency or frustration, I end the puzzle session immediately.
I know WHEN in the day I play my best chess, so I stick to that schedule. I read an article somewhere about a huge correlation to rating gain/loss tied to WHEN we play chess, based on our own biorhythms that we need to recognize. It's really apparent if my head is in the right spot when I try to do a 2500ish puzzle, I either see things and I'm excited for a nice round of puzzle or I'm brainfog fuzzy and I don't play until I'm focused.
> All I know is that at the 2600 level, the puzzles get on my last nerves. Some days I'll go 5 or 6 out of 10. Others...0 - 4 on the first four tries. Any mental fatigue and it's "no dice". Any drowsiness and it's "no dice". I've spent upwards of 75 minutes on a few of them. Natural moves are almost always wrong.
I totally agree with this, but around the 2400-2500 level for me, if I'm not absolutely focused and 'in the zone' I just can't see the board properly and keep the calculations in my head properly, it's gonna be a bad puzzle session. If I feel any urgency or frustration, I end the puzzle session immediately.
I know WHEN in the day I play my best chess, so I stick to that schedule. I read an article somewhere about a huge correlation to rating gain/loss tied to WHEN we play chess, based on our own biorhythms that we need to recognize. It's really apparent if my head is in the right spot when I try to do a 2500ish puzzle, I either see things and I'm excited for a nice round of puzzle or I'm brainfog fuzzy and I don't play until I'm focused.