Here’s how to use chess tactics exercises to get better faster at chess. You’ll need a chess tactics book, board and pieces, a watch or timer, a notebook, and a pen or pencil.
1. Make a commitment to spend a certain amount of time five or six days each week on chess tactics. 45 minutes a day?! Pick a number you can commit to.
2. For each tactics exercise, unless you can solve it “at a glance,” set up the position on your chessboard. Write down your problem number, and your “best guess” answer in your chess tactics notebook. Limit yourself to 5 minutes maximum "think time" on any one exercise.
3. Check your answer in the book.
4. Now, think about the difficulty of the tactics problem you’ve just tackled. Decide on a difficulty scale of 1 to 4 based on the following chart, and then write the number next to your problem number.
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Difficulty |
Meaning |
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I could see the correct answer immediately—in under 30 seconds. |
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I found the correct answer (in less than 5 minutes). |
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I didn’t find the correct answer, but fully understood the solution in the book. |
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I didn’t find the correct answer, and I did not fully understand the solution. |
Work in Your Learning Zone. Ideally, you are working through tactics sets that have a lot of 2-star and 3-star difficulty problems in them. This should be your learning zone—your deliberate practice sweet spot. It won’t hurt you to tear through some 1-stars tactics or bump your nose up against some 4-stars brain crushers. These kinds of positions happen in your tournament games too, right? But for most people, a steady diet of 1-stars does very little for your improvement, and a steady diet of 4-star exercises makes it challenging to come back the next day—it would be like only playing games against your chess computer, set at its highest setting.
Don't work for longer than the time that you've committed to yourself. Come back a little bit hungry tomorrow!
The Review Loop! You’ll want to make one or two sessions a week a review session of the 2-star and 3-star exercises that you’ve tackled during the week. You may want to add to these from cool positions that happened in your tournament games, especially missed tactics that were pointed out to you by your coach or your computer engine.
Your future better-chess-playing self. All of a sudden, it feels easier. As you get better after many weeks of effort, the 3-star exercises from before will become today’s 2-star exercises. It’s like when you’re improving faster than one of your regular opponents, and all of a sudden he or she seems to be playing much worse. It’s not that they’re playing worse…
Tech Note: Why This Exercise Helps You Get Better Faster
Deliberate practice is a theory from psychology that says that people who put sustained effort into the good learning strategies get better faster than those that don’t.
Now, consider this conversation between a “math coach” and a 12 year old “math learner:”
“What’s 8 + 5?”
“13!”
“What’s 5 + 8?”
“13.”
“What’s 8 + 5?”
“That’s too easy.”
“OK, what’s the cube root of 2197?”
“Errrrr.”
Asking a typical 12 year old math student questions like these does nothing to help his or her math. At some point in a kid’s learning, “What’s 8 + 5?” is a great math question. Asking it again may be appropriate, too.
So it goes with one size fits all chess tactics books. Even putting stars on exercises only works so well, since a problem that is assigned 2 stars by a USCF 800 player should not be given the same 2 stars by a USCF 2300 player.
There have been some big strides forward recently in helping ambitious chess students to stay in their “learning zone.”
· Some on-line tactics servers have adaptive testing. You miss a tactic, you get an easier tactic. You nail a tactic, the difficulty ratchets up… My study buddy National Master Eugene Brumley swears by these tactics servers, and you may too, but I recommend setting up the board, and moving the pieces around. It keeps you from building superficial calculation habits. And--This set up the board method is how Kasparov and English GM Daniel King recommend studying, too, so I do have some good company here.
· Books like Jeremy Silman’s fine Complete Endgame Course are broken down by rating. CT Art 3 groups tactics by difficulty level. Unfortunately, the new on-line version of CT-Art seems to have lost this important capability.
««« The edge of failure is your competitive edge! Remember that you may be learning your most when you’re doing the problems you can’t quite get right. Professional athletes that do strength training deliberate practice know that pushing toward that last push-up or weight rep that they can almost do is where much of their improvement comes from.
To consider. Where else do you think you can use deliberate practice learning strategies to help you get better faster at chess? Do you think that deliberate practice could help you do better at math or writing or playing a musical instrument or throwing a football?