World Open 2010 Preparation Part 2

Tactics Problem Marathon.

The benefits of a tactical marathon are fairly obvious. Spotting tactics is key in chess, and can also be difficult. Tactics are basically the way you win games, so it is very important to be able to execute tactics well. Tactics also tend to be sharp, where the right move wins and a wrong move loses. So, it is especially important to play tactics accurately. You can usually get away with mistakes in the opening and endgame, but tactical mistakes can lead to completely lost positions.

Another aspect of tactics is that it helps your defense. If you are under an attack by your opponent, spotting all his tactical opportunities and parrying them can prevent a loss.

The problems of tactical problem marathons are fairly large though.

First, tactics are a very specific and small portion of a chess game. Focusing entirely on tactics gives you a very skewed study approach, and a very skewed view of the game. Sure, you can spot mate in 3s like nobody, but how does that help you the rest of the game?

Second, tactical problems have answers. A real game of chess has no answers. This brings up the classic anecdote, "Nobody is going to whisper in your ear that you have a mate in 2 during a chess game." Often, this anecdote is used as a reason why a chess tactic book author did not label his tactics. That doesnt really get to the heart of the problem, though. Nobody is going to whisper in your ear that you have a tactic. Nobody is going to even tell you you have a winning position. Really, nobody should be talking to you about your game while it is in progress anyway. That is unethical!

The point to all the above is that tactic problems set up artificial situations that simply do not occur in real games. Your brain is not practicing the right stuff. Maybe an good analogy would be an engineer being told that a bunch of materials he has make a machine. He can practice that for years, but he wont be all that well prepared when his boss comes in and says, I need you to make this machine, and doesnt give him any of the materials.

That is probably a pretty bad analogy. Oh well! It is not as bad as reading a lot of books about how to drive, instead of just driving. Tactical problems, after all, do get you a nice amount of practice in executing the tactics.

The player really has to work hard, though, to make sure he is thinking not just about solving the problems, but also about the way the various pieces of the problem are set up in the very beginning. A lot of this can be done intuitively, but a little bit of concentration can increase make the problem solving much more effective. Time, after all, is of the essence.

Another related problem with tactics is that they focus way too much on guessing out of a variety of aggressive moves. For instance, if you are given a tactical problem, you can pretty much cancel out thinking about the pawn push h6. Sure, it may be good to protect the g5 square, but this is a tactic so that cannot be the answer. There must be something better. The same thing goes with that quiet developing move, Rfe8. Probably not the answer to the tactical problem. Instead, lets try Nxe6, sacrificing the Knight for a pawn, or Bh3 sacrificing the Bishop to open up the King side, or Qh5 threatening mate in 1. Those are the types of moves that are going to be the answers in a chess tactic problem. The problem is, those arent necessarily the types of moves that are going to be answers in a real game. Rfe8 or h6 may very easily be the best move.

Finally, and this is mostly related to internet chess tactic sites, especially Chess Tactics Server, is that they focus way too much on speed and way to little on accuracy. I used to use Chess Tactics Server, but it was very annoying and probably counterproductive to try and solve all the tactics in 3 seconds or less. Truth be told, I havent used their site in a long time, so maybe they have added an untimed setting.

It doesnt really matter to me because Chess Tempo does have an untimed setting. If you do tactics under the Standard setting, the amount of time you take has no impact on the amount of rating points you get for the problem. You can take 60 minutes on one problem, get it right, and gain the same amount of rating points as someone who did it in 3 seconds. I wouldnt recommend spending 60 minutes on one problem, tournament games arent that long! But 3 to 5 minutes is a pretty good amount of time.

For those who say the ratings dont matter, it is true. The ratings dont matter at all, and I used Chess Tactics Server for quite a while just ignoring the ratings and going for 100% accuracy. However, it is difficult to judge your success or your rate of improvement when you have a rating that has little to no correlation to your success or rate of improvement. It is like Austin Powers, where he is taking Photographs of the one girl, and he is snapping his fingers annoyingly and shouting "Ignore me doing this, Ignore me doing this!" It is funny because that is not an effective way of going about doing things.

I am actually going to do a whole separate post reviewing Chess Tactic resources online, so I wont get too much more into all of this. The main point I wanted to make was, for the love of God, do not do Blitz tactics to prepare for a Tournament game. Accuracy is much more important than speed.

Well, I better get to those tactics!