If you look closely, you can see my opponent consistently pushing pawns and gaining position and I have no options but to retreat. I know this is not the best example, it is a 1-minute bullet game. Let me show you a simple game I played against a 1600. I agree that tactics does help, but on occasion, I am completely positionally defeated, until I finally make a tactical error because of the limited choices caused by the positional play of my opponent. I was actually looking at that book by Seirawan on amazon today, I'm considering buying it.Īlso, arbitrary, as a, pretty-much 2k player, what are you rated on tactics trainer or CT? It's a very good book, and also it doesn't require a high rating to read it. In that case could I recommend the book Winning Chess Strategies by Seirawan. That's when I'm lost-I make either waiting moves, or moves that look ok, but don't actually accomplish anything. They happen a lot more in bullet/blitz, but in online-chess, I don't see a single tactic usually, everything moves so slowly and no one is attacking. It's very satisfying to see myself go for a checkmate in a 1-minute game with 10 seconds on the clock, while my enemy has a similar checkmate on my kingside, and I am quickly able to determine, my checkmate will work and his won't. I think it has helped though, I sometimes get a quick checkmate or quick fork, even sacrificial ones more often than before. I can never truly understand positional play, when I look at GM games or whatnot, I don't understand why they make certain moves, in many games I find my time going down as I don't know what to do next because there is no available tactic to play. That's been my problem, trying to "create" these tactical situations. So unless I forgot to reset it last time, I assume my TT rating is 1200. My approach to Tactics Trainer is to reset my history and ratings deviation daily and then do a quick 20-50 problems to see how high I can get. (I took a break from tacticizing over much of March and it really shows.) My rating at Tempo has fallen from >1800 to something in the high 1600s over the last few weeks. I do slow tactics at Tempo and timed ones here. On a good day, thanks to tactics training, I think I have a more educated intuition about which positions are tactically 'fraught.' That alone can count for a lot. we weren't talking about whether or not tactics helped in chess we were talking about tactics training. I like what Yasser Seirawan once wrote: "Tactics are the guard-dogs of strategy." But the tactics are a big part of what safeguarded my move and advanced my game. It's not that I expect my opponent to fall into tactical trouble I fully expect him to see the danger. In other words, maybe I make an objectively good move that improves my position, long-term, and in the planning process I recognize that tactical possibilities effectively undermine what might otherwise be troubling replies from the enemy. Sure, not every game features a decisive forking attack or a smothered mate, but often I find that tactical threats are just as likely to direct a game as to outright decide it. I'm sure it's generally helped my chess vision nonetheless. I ran down my clock looking for "the winning move" in positions where there wasn't one. Funnily enough, I think I've lost a couple of timed OTB games on the clock because too many tactics exercises earlier that day created a kind of "white-to-play-and-win" mentality.