Musings on law, tech, chess & other topics by a geek

Chess.com has a great feature for teaching chess tactics called a Tactics Trainer.  This is very useful tool for new players and club players.  The following video has my advice for using the tool and ways to improve the tactical trainer. (Note: Chess.com’s free account gives you access to 3 chess problems a day)

Summary of advice:

• Turn off the timer, the timer gives you a huge hint.  In a real game your opponent will not tell you how difficult a tactical win is.
• Limit you time to 3-5 mins per problem: if you can not find the solution do not sweet it.  Move on to the solution. The goal is to learn the patterns and improve calculation over all not to get the right answer every time.  The patterns will sink in subconsciously over time.  To focus on calculating tougher positions get a book like Secrets of Chess Tactics by Mark Dvoretsky and focus on calculation skills.
• Take a min after problems you miss to see why you missed it click the show solution and if need View Analysis & Source link and see why you missed it.

Summary of improvements needed:

• Give me stats! I did 2000 problems tell me which ones I am worse at.  Do I miss x-rays, knight forks, or Queen sacs.  I could learn so much from looking at that history.
• Enable crowd sourcing to add tags to problems like Mate in 1 or Queen Sac so we can sort by type.
• Let me choose a theme and do problems from that theme to get better at that theme

To take chess lessons with me check out my Teaching Chess Page.