WHy am I not improving?

Originally posted by hammster21
Read a crap load of chess books. I've been on here for a little over a year and I have read close to 15 books. Subscribe and play more games. Study tactics and practice. Go play on FICS or RHP blitz...

I have to wonder if you've read the right books 😉

Actually I'm only kidding about that. I find with books, maybe some types more than others, it can take a long while for the knowledge gained to kind of gel together, or click, and begin showing up in your games.

Probably this too is part of why so many players (particularly those rated under 1600 on RHP) treat tactics as though it were the solution to all of one's obstacles in chess. If only that were so. One thing studying tactics does do, that other types of chess study doesn't, is that you assimilate it faster. And as you learn more positional ideas that tactical knowledge provides a weapon to deliver that final blow when you've accumulated sufficient positional advantage. But not always.

In many games your opponent opts to play quietly and solidly and starts to squeeze you. And there are no tactics to be found anywhere. If tactics is all you know, then what? That's rhetorical by the way. I suppose I'm saying that even if you've read a lot of books (hopefully not 15 different opening books) and the rating hasn't caught up, its just that the understanding of the newly aquired knowledge - outside of tactical study - takes time to catch up.

Originally posted by scandium
I have to wonder if you've read the right books 😉

Actually I'm only kidding about that. I find with books, maybe some types more than others, it can take a long while for the knowledge gained to kind of gel together, or click, and begin showing up in your games.

Probably this too is part of why so many players (particularly those rated under 1600 on ng of the newly aquired knowledge - outside of tactical study - takes time to catch up.

Tactics are everything until about 2000 then if you want to improve you need to study positional concepts...just ask wormwood.

Originally posted by tomtom232
Tactics are everything until about 2000 then if you want to improve you need to study positional concepts...just ask wormwood.

While I respect him as a player and as a regular forum poster, I disagree (even though you're posting this and not him). You will never hit 2000 without a strong grasp of tactics, but if any 2000 player wants to pretend they've done nothing whatsoever but study tactics then I have to call BS. And I doubt wormwood would make such a claim.

The most well known, and the only example, of such an approach that I know of working,even though he didn't study only tactics, is every 1400 rated player's hero (at least that's who they all parrot when they repeat this same myth, at least in substance if not verbatim): Michael de la Mazda (or however you spell it).

After, according to Michael, who I'll refer to by his first name since I don't know how to spell his last name, languished for what felt like forever to him as a Class E player, he finally got sick of getting his butt repeatedly trounced by almost every opp he faced and decided a radical change was needed. And I mean truly radical.

For something like 2 years he worked his @ss off every day for 7 hours or more doing nothing but visualization and tactics puzzles - to the point where in the end he could do thousands of them in one sitting. He also refined his approach to his opening play aiming at learning simple, low theory openings that led to fairly simple types of middle game positions where positional understanding isn't so prominent and thus where tactics are more likely to predominate. Note the bolded text by the way.

Anyway after refining and perfecting this approach, and putting in thousands and thousands of hours day after day in seeing it through, he won the U.S. Open, achieving an expert rating, and then retired from chess and wrote a book.

Even for him, and he was a tactical monster, tactics were not everything. He still studied openings. And how many people do you suppose can replicate his level of dedication to achieve the expert rating?

If you were to be accurate, which you weren't, you would have stated its possible to break 2000 by focusing mostly on tactics provided you're willing to study them extremely intensively.

The other 99.999% of chess players who break 2000 don't do it by studying just tactics. Everyone else who's heard of his achievement but has no idea of the amount of work it took to get there, seems to think - and post - as though you just need to do a few puzzles now and then, maybe even for an hour a day most days if you're really serious, ignore everything else and a 2000 rating will come.

Originally posted by tomtom232
Tactics are everything until about 2000 then if you want to improve you need to study positional concepts...just ask wormwood.

Scandium already replied to this, but this is mostly bs. Why?

Because tactics help in a four ways.
a. They outright win material with 2-3 move combinations (perhaps more)
b. They stop you from dropping material.
c. They convert a positionally advantageous game (where they most often appear) into a true win, possibly mate, possibly material.
d. They achieve short term positional gains.

a & b are related, and they will stop you from blundering away material or losing to people who do so (I suspect you will be 1500ish USCF).
c. You will never get here if you don't study more than just tactics
d. If you don't know what these are (outpost, doubling your opponents pawns, locking your opponents rook out of play, inducing your opponent to move a pawn in front of his king, therefore weakening it's cover), how will you ever know to play them? How do you even know if you're playing on the relevant portion of the board?

Quite simply, except in some rare instances you cannot have tactics with out positional play, and you cannot convert positional advantages w/o tactics. You need at least some grounding in strategy.

The endgame: if you only study tactics, how will you know when a simplification leads to a won endgame?

The opening: when there is a deviation from your memorized lines, and there are no tactics, what will you do? Do you understand enough about opening theory, and the ideas of your opening to make it up? You have restricted yourself to playing for mate in the middlegame.

Any one piece by itself is worthless, and in fact, I would argue there is little that can be studied truly by itself. To simplify a bit, when studying R vrs P endgames, you have to be able to see skewers and pins, else you will fail.


What I may concede is that once you have a solid grounding in all aspects of the game, it may be more advantageous in the short term to quickly advance your tacitcal ability than any other piece (but that does not mean they can be neglected).