Best advice ever regarding studying tactics. I used to study too many tactics at one. Now I am a Senior Citizen and I study tactics and endgame to keep my mind active. Good way to exercise my mind.
Good, good. Over time you'll have tons of them in your passive memory-- meaning you aren't going over them again and again in your head, or even able to set them up to show a friend. But when you encounter a position with the same pattern, it will simply pop into your head, without you even looking for tactics.
Hi David - I'm a beginner (between 900 to 1000). And just found your videos. They have been very helpful and I wanted to say thank you. I hope you continue to make more chess content in the future.
I played chess for a few years back when I was a kid, but recently some friends and I have started getting into playing chess with each other for fun. This guide was so amazing to help me understand how to get better! Thanks for the great video. Now I shall watch the next tactics 2 video for this.
About number of tactics on a website, notice that on ChessTempo they have researched how much of an improvement members gain. It turns out improvement after 4000 tactics puzzles sharply decrease. For elderly people improvement after solving 4000 puzzles comes almost entirely to an halt. Therefore practicing properly from the get-go strikes me as extremely important.
I posted a link with my source, but it seems that comment didn't make it through the YT spam filter (probably as a result of the link). Search for "Long term tactics solving improvement - Is it possible?" and Google will guide you to a statistical analysis from ChessTempo on this topic. A quote from said post elaborating on what I mean by statistical artefact from the Chesstempo algorithm: "A topic that comes up fairly often on the forum (and external blogs) is how much it is possible to improve over an extended period of problem solving. Some believe that it is very uncommon to improve after the first 4000-5000 problems. Some believe most people (or rather most adults) plateau in the 1000-4000 problem range, with some initial improvement, and none after that. In the past this was an easy impression to form, as the very high volume solvers' rating graphs often showed long plateaus or even declines. However it was clear that duplicate reward reduction was a big factor in these cases. The fact that duplicate reward reduction started to become a serious issue after around the 4000 problem mark when duplicates become much more common is certainly no co-incidence. Essentially, reward reduction was masking improvement in many users. With some users seeing the same problem many times, and therefore receiving very little reward for correct answers, but full punishment for incorrect responses, it is no wonder some of these high volume users were having trouble increasingly their rating, especially if they had poor explicit memory of the solutions to problems they had seen before."
@@ferlou2373 even in this discussion, this assumes the user only does rated puzzles up to their max rating ie every puzzle is super hard. But if they do variety of difficulty puzzles by doing unrated puzzles and setting custom difficulty level, they can continue to pattern recognition train having no metric to measure improvement other than chess games rating going up
i've seen that done before, and i can remember using it with some students myself in the past. the way i did it, i'd set up a few positions, gradually adding more pieces into the position once they knew the basic pattern, and see if they could still recognize it. i don't have enough experience with this approach to vouch for its efficacy.
Yesterday, on chessdotcom, I saw a position that had a Black king and pawn and a White rook. There was a question to identify the game from this small clue. The answer, of course, was the last tie-break in the Karjakin -- Carlsen match. I found rapid and dramatic improvement with a couple of students who were using Bruce Pandolfini, Beginning Chess, where all of the diagreams have ten pieces or fewer. I composed nearly 150 similar exercises and put them on worksheets that I could photocopy at the schools where I ran clubs. I have 150 exercises, but a little more than a dozen are standard endgame positions, and one is the problem composed by Paul Morphy. I think they are useful. I've been using them four years. I explain my process in more detail at chessskill.blogspot.com/2017/03/writing-and-publishing.html
Great video. But is there a free tactics trainer where you can set the rating range? The only free one i know is chesstempo and it doesn't have that feature.
I don't know either then. Maybe you can just keep your rating low by getting problems wrong on purpose, and then get assigned puzzles around that rating. Also, my suggestion of giving up after 30-60 seconds should help keep your rating down.
There is a shareware application called "YATT" which stands for Yet Another Tactics Trainer. The guy who programmed it is Fred Mellender and from what I can tell he's a programmer and chess enthusiast. He has a user guide and youtube video on how to use YATT. I have not used YATT much at all, but he claims to have about 5000 puzzles which can be presented in random order or by easiest first. Maybe if you use YATT you can try the easiest puzzles first parameter.
great, but do u think 3 puzzles each day is a little slow. I mean it takes years to learn just some basic patterns. How do u think about 7 circles of de la Maza?
3 per day is a bit slow, but my understanding is you can't absorb much more than that. So just don't miss a day :-) I've never heard of the 7 circles of de la maza.
de la Maza is an author of "Rapid Chess Improvement". His method of training tactic is called 7 circles. His method is basically collect 2000 puzzles then solve them 7 times, each time cut off time to solve them like first time 2' second time 1' and etc.Dan Heisman also recommend this method to his students, too
ah, that makes some sense. is there supposed to be a break between the 7 times you come around to it? you see in my method i suggest going through the puzzles several times the first time you see it, and then i'm thinking you'll hold onto it as a tool in your subconscious.
Because the set includes 2000 puzzles so when u get back to the first one maybe u forget it maybe u not but the thing is the first 3 circles is to improve calculation skills, the last 4 circles is to improve pattern recognition. In de le Maza book, he used CT-ART 4.0 to solve. A lot of puzzles from this software are not basic patterns but I think the method still works though. Dan Heisman recommends his students go through John Bain " Chess Tactics for Students" at least 7 times also until they can solve all of puzzles just by recognition (under 10s/puzzle or even instantly without thinking at all)
About the puzzles creation, I have manages to set up a new (at least for me) way to collect chess puzzles. 1. I installed scid vs. pc scidvspc.sourceforge.net/ on my Ubuntu 2. I added to scid a Stockfish engine 3. I downloaded and added some game databases. My own games, some master games collections, so now I have roughly 200k games in scid 4. I batch annotated a database with scid and Stockfish, marking search for tactical moves (in Stockfish->Annotate window, Batch and Mark Tactical marked) 5. I waited, time depends on the database size 6. After this, I have a collection of puzzles, I can solve them from scid with Find best move Puzzles from my own games are the funniest :)
It's nothing hard - use the link to install, and Stockfish is also very simple to install. If you encounter any problems, let me know, I'll try to help. I have a main database I created from interned sources with over 700.000 Master games, it works very quickly. For example - I can play out the beginning of my own game and see all games from master database with my current position, and the opening tree as well. SCID vs. PC is my only chess software. It's free as well. It works on Windows too.
David Pruess on lichess there is a similar functionality to improve on own games, guess move when you made a mistake, but in scid I have more control, fir example find only big blunders i.e. over 5 pawns loss etc.
Tons of advice, and it depends tons on the specific player. Nothing too much I can tell you quickly in a comment without knowing you; I'll just say: so long as you enjoy it, the more time you spend, the better you'll get at any of those areas. Also, the quality of the book is important, so find good authors. (polugaevsky, kasparov, seirawan, nimzovich, alekhine, botvinnik...)
I noticed that you didn't mention CT-Art software. Is this dated, or just not your preference? Personally I love it - the original 3.0 is best IMHO. But obviously it isn't mobile device friendly.
It's actually very mobile friendly. There are tons of CT-Art apps under the name of Chess King; they are usually a few dollars a piece, but most have at least several hundred, and up to a few thousand tactics. They also have one for CT-Art 4.0
you can set up custom puzzles and set category to be only mates or only piece captures which may help you to know what to look for easier while still farming pattern recognition gains but easier and more time efficient this way
Here after finding the Chess Dojo channel. What if the tactic requires a defensive move to stop a check winning check that my opponent would give. Would it violate this idea to take longer like 3 minutes?
Question: If I want to practice with a physical chessboard, would you recommend just using lichess, chesstempo, chess.com puzzles and setting up the position on the board? Or using book? Or just don't do that and stick to online?
It will cost you quite a significant slow-down to set up positions on a board, but if that's what you want to do, then yes, you will probably still want to use those sites as a source of tons of puzzles.
I did 200 puzzles in an hour. Over the board I'd get nowhere near that for time spent. There's an opportunity cost to OTB. Just to consider. I agree OTB practice is needed though for the 2d to 3d learning aspect though.
it's complicated. to try to put it into one sentence: when i stopped playing professionally it was because I thought I could contribute a lot more as a teacher and content director (at chess.com) than as a player.
okk sir thankyou so much for your time you are doing great as a teacher i respect your decision a lot of players like anand ivanchuk never supports chess teaching or its promotion
In live chess, in the play tab, there's a little chessboard icon with a drop-down menu you can click on to select a variant like 960 3check bughouse... and the final option is "Analysis Board." That's what I use.
good video i like the approach its not about how clever you are but to focus on what you dont know! : so i am not able to solve this thats great then you lean somthing new !!
everyone has different capacities, so I'm sure you're right. But everyone has some kind of limit, so I'm pretty confident that doing a small amount of consistent learning each day is superior to inconsistent binges from which one will remember little.
Best advice ever regarding studying tactics. I used to study too many tactics at one. Now I am a Senior Citizen and I study tactics and endgame to keep my mind active. Good way to exercise my mind.
Indeed, I use it for exercise just like you now :)
Rather unique perspective. This will help.
Amazing video, this deserves way more views.
well, it was only a few hours old when you saw it :D
Hey I tried this and I still have two puzzles I failed yesterday in my head! thanks man!
Good, good. Over time you'll have tons of them in your passive memory-- meaning you aren't going over them again and again in your head, or even able to set them up to show a friend. But when you encounter a position with the same pattern, it will simply pop into your head, without you even looking for tactics.
Its so simple and yet so practical. :D
I've watched videos with 40,000 views that weren't as helpful. David is the best.
Hi David - I'm a beginner (between 900 to 1000). And just found your videos. They have been very helpful and I wanted to say thank you. I hope you continue to make more chess content in the future.
thanks, Blake, glad to hear that.
Whats ur rating now if imay ask
This was such a good instructional! Thank you!
You’re welcome :)
One the best videos that i ever seen, thats make a lot of sense!
I played chess for a few years back when I was a kid, but recently some friends and I have started getting into playing chess with each other for fun. This guide was so amazing to help me understand how to get better! Thanks for the great video. Now I shall watch the next tactics 2 video for this.
you're welcome :) sounds like you're having a great time!
“ you cannot make it out with a Saturday night chess binge “ real truth.
Hi David, liked this idea a lot! thanks for helping us patzers to get better.
you're welcome; wishing you great fun in chess :)
This vid is great. I would love to see more like this in addition to the work you're doing in the dojo!
thanks :)
Excellent video David once again. Thanks a lot for helping us out
Glad it helped :)
outstanding explanations by you david sir thankyou so much for this valuable information great job
Just found this channel. Very nice lessons! Thank you so much.
Thanks!
Thanks David! Great stuff!
You're welcome :-)
This was a very useful lesson David, thank you. I'm getting to the point where going over these patterns in my head is almost a form of meditation.
that's great :)
About number of tactics on a website, notice that on ChessTempo they have researched how much of an improvement members gain. It turns out improvement after 4000 tactics puzzles sharply decrease. For elderly people improvement after solving 4000 puzzles comes almost entirely to an halt.
Therefore practicing properly from the get-go strikes me as extremely important.
That was an artefact of the ChessTempo algorithm.
Users kept on improving!
@@ferlou2373 What does that mean? What is your source for this?
I posted a link with my source, but it seems that comment didn't make it through the YT spam filter (probably as a result of the link).
Search for "Long term tactics solving improvement - Is it possible?" and Google will guide you to a statistical analysis from ChessTempo on this topic.
A quote from said post elaborating on what I mean by statistical artefact from the Chesstempo algorithm:
"A topic that comes up fairly often on the forum (and external blogs) is how much it is possible to improve over an extended period of problem solving. Some believe that it is very uncommon to improve after the first 4000-5000 problems. Some believe most people (or rather most adults) plateau in the 1000-4000 problem range, with some initial improvement, and none after that. In the past this was an easy impression to form, as the very high volume solvers' rating graphs often showed long plateaus or even declines. However it was clear that duplicate reward reduction was a big factor in these cases. The fact that duplicate reward reduction started to become a serious issue after around the 4000 problem mark when duplicates become much more common is certainly no co-incidence. Essentially, reward reduction was masking improvement in many users. With some users seeing the same problem many times, and therefore receiving very little reward for correct answers, but full punishment for incorrect responses, it is no wonder some of these high volume users were having trouble increasingly their rating, especially if they had poor explicit memory of the solutions to problems they had seen before."
@@ferlou2373 even in this discussion, this assumes the user only does rated puzzles up to their max rating ie every puzzle is super hard. But if they do variety of difficulty puzzles by doing unrated puzzles and setting custom difficulty level, they can continue to pattern recognition train having no metric to measure improvement other than chess games rating going up
Just signed up for Dojo last night. Hope to figure out the links.
I hope it’s going well!
The running around the board part at 15:47 made me chuckle
thanks 👍 I'm going back to basics
8:24 | Is Chess Tempo tactics trainer no longer free for selecting tactical motifs? I think it might cost a membership now to do that
Hi, I'm sorry but I have no idea. Have not used chesstempo in ages.
I like stripping all the extraneous pieces from positions in games and presenting these to students who need to learn these basic patterns.
i've seen that done before, and i can remember using it with some students myself in the past. the way i did it, i'd set up a few positions, gradually adding more pieces into the position once they knew the basic pattern, and see if they could still recognize it. i don't have enough experience with this approach to vouch for its efficacy.
Yesterday, on chessdotcom, I saw a position that had a Black king and pawn and a White rook. There was a question to identify the game from this small clue. The answer, of course, was the last tie-break in the Karjakin -- Carlsen match.
I found rapid and dramatic improvement with a couple of students who were using Bruce Pandolfini, Beginning Chess, where all of the diagreams have ten pieces or fewer. I composed nearly 150 similar exercises and put them on worksheets that I could photocopy at the schools where I ran clubs. I have 150 exercises, but a little more than a dozen are standard endgame positions, and one is the problem composed by Paul Morphy. I think they are useful. I've been using them four years.
I explain my process in more detail at chessskill.blogspot.com/2017/03/writing-and-publishing.html
21:35 Can find the solution to the complex puzzle but can't find the give up button lol.
:-D
Great video. But is there a free tactics trainer where you can set the rating range? The only free one i know is chesstempo and it doesn't have that feature.
I don't know either then. Maybe you can just keep your rating low by getting problems wrong on purpose, and then get assigned puzzles around that rating. Also, my suggestion of giving up after 30-60 seconds should help keep your rating down.
There is a shareware application called "YATT" which stands for Yet Another Tactics Trainer. The guy who programmed it is Fred Mellender and from what I can tell he's a programmer and chess enthusiast. He has a user guide and youtube video on how to use YATT. I have not used YATT much at all, but he claims to have about 5000 puzzles which can be presented in random order or by easiest first. Maybe if you use YATT you can try the easiest puzzles first parameter.
Sounds like an option worth investigating for those looking for something free.
Thanks guys.
Lichess has tons of puzzles
great, but do u think 3 puzzles each day is a little slow. I mean it takes years to learn just some basic patterns. How do u think about 7 circles of de la Maza?
3 per day is a bit slow, but my understanding is you can't absorb much more than that. So just don't miss a day :-)
I've never heard of the 7 circles of de la maza.
de la Maza is an author of "Rapid Chess Improvement". His method of training tactic is called 7 circles. His method is basically collect 2000 puzzles then solve them 7 times, each time cut off time to solve them like first time 2' second time 1' and etc.Dan Heisman also recommend this method to his students, too
ah, that makes some sense. is there supposed to be a break between the 7 times you come around to it? you see in my method i suggest going through the puzzles several times the first time you see it, and then i'm thinking you'll hold onto it as a tool in your subconscious.
Now the trick is to scientifically choose the "correct" 2000 puzzles to study.
Because the set includes 2000 puzzles so when u get back to the first one maybe u forget it maybe u not but the thing is the first 3 circles is to improve calculation skills, the last 4 circles is to improve pattern recognition. In de le Maza book, he used CT-ART 4.0 to solve. A lot of puzzles from this software are not basic patterns but I think the method still works though. Dan Heisman recommends his students go through John Bain " Chess Tactics for Students" at least 7 times also until they can solve all of puzzles just by recognition (under 10s/puzzle or even instantly without thinking at all)
About the puzzles creation, I have manages to set up a new (at least for me) way to collect chess puzzles.
1. I installed scid vs. pc scidvspc.sourceforge.net/ on my Ubuntu
2. I added to scid a Stockfish engine
3. I downloaded and added some game databases. My own games, some master games collections, so now I have roughly 200k games in scid
4. I batch annotated a database with scid and Stockfish, marking search for tactical moves (in Stockfish->Annotate window, Batch and Mark Tactical marked)
5. I waited, time depends on the database size
6. After this, I have a collection of puzzles, I can solve them from scid with Find best move
Puzzles from my own games are the funniest :)
i don't know how to use SCID but that sounds awesome, and especially fun to do the ones from your own games, as you say.
It's nothing hard - use the link to install, and Stockfish is also very simple to install. If you encounter any problems, let me know, I'll try to help. I have a main database I created from interned sources with over 700.000 Master games, it works very quickly. For example - I can play out the beginning of my own game and see all games from master database with my current position, and the opening tree as well. SCID vs. PC is my only chess software. It's free as well. It works on Windows too.
David Pruess on lichess there is a similar functionality to improve on own games, guess move when you made a mistake, but in scid I have more control, fir example find only big blunders i.e. over 5 pawns loss etc.
very cool!
Where did you dl the master games db ?
Any advice on how long/how many times spend on books like strategy, endgame and annotated game books?
Tons of advice, and it depends tons on the specific player. Nothing too much I can tell you quickly in a comment without knowing you; I'll just say: so long as you enjoy it, the more time you spend, the better you'll get at any of those areas. Also, the quality of the book is important, so find good authors. (polugaevsky, kasparov, seirawan, nimzovich, alekhine, botvinnik...)
I noticed that you didn't mention CT-Art software. Is this dated, or just not your preference? Personally I love it - the original 3.0 is best IMHO. But obviously it isn't mobile device friendly.
I've just never used it, so I can't speak for it.
It's actually very mobile friendly. There are tons of CT-Art apps under the name of Chess King; they are usually a few dollars a piece, but most have at least several hundred, and up to a few thousand tactics. They also have one for CT-Art 4.0
I am improving on puzzles, now to be able to recognize when it happens in game.
that is the subject of "How to Learn Tactics 2" th-cam.com/video/SFl6WABqgC0/w-d-xo.html
Great video! Thanks!
Thanks, good lesson. My main problem: i dont know whats there, a mate? a piece capture? I keep solving :)
you can set up custom puzzles and set category to be only mates or only piece captures which may help you to know what to look for easier while still farming pattern recognition gains but easier and more time efficient this way
Thank you for this vid.
you're welcome :)
Here after finding the Chess Dojo channel. What if the tactic requires a defensive move to stop a check winning check that my opponent would give. Would it violate this idea to take longer like 3 minutes?
Yes, even if there is a defensive move, that doesn't change anything about the habits you should apply to learning tactics.
@@chesscomdpruess Understood. Thanks for the video. I learned a lot
Question: If I want to practice with a physical chessboard, would you recommend just using lichess, chesstempo, chess.com puzzles and setting up the position on the board? Or using book? Or just don't do that and stick to online?
It will cost you quite a significant slow-down to set up positions on a board, but if that's what you want to do, then yes, you will probably still want to use those sites as a source of tons of puzzles.
I did 200 puzzles in an hour. Over the board I'd get nowhere near that for time spent. There's an opportunity cost to OTB. Just to consider. I agree OTB practice is needed though for the 2d to 3d learning aspect though.
great info, thanks
you're welcome :)
Do more and more like this types of videos
Great, thanks!
It was so educational thanx
glad you liked it :)
@@chesscomdpruess 🙏🙏🙏🙏
dear sir why do you leave chess you are an im??you can also achive gm norms??
it's complicated. to try to put it into one sentence: when i stopped playing professionally it was because I thought I could contribute a lot more as a teacher and content director (at chess.com) than as a player.
okk sir thankyou so much for your time you are doing great as a teacher i respect your decision a lot of players like anand ivanchuk never supports chess teaching or its promotion
Thanks
can someone hel pif there is a board editor in chess.com?
In live chess, in the play tab, there's a little chessboard icon with a drop-down menu you can click on to select a variant like 960 3check bughouse... and the final option is "Analysis Board." That's what I use.
good video i like the approach its not about how clever you are but to focus on what you dont know! : so i am not able to solve this thats great then you lean somthing new !!
exactly!
great vid
Didn't know Purge had a brother that makes chess videos for noobs.
Hard to believe one couldn't learn more than 3 patterns a day. Pretty sure many have kids have like Xiong Jeffery
everyone has different capacities, so I'm sure you're right. But everyone has some kind of limit, so I'm pretty confident that doing a small amount of consistent learning each day is superior to inconsistent binges from which one will remember little.