Using Tactics Time to Improve Your Chess Thinking

Why "Tactics Time"?

Many tactics training books and courses group puzzles into themes (e.g., "pins", "deflection", "removing the defender", "skewers"). That is a recommended approach for introducing tactical ideas and learning tactical patterns. You should have that kind of training already completed before trying "Tactics Time" puzzles. After getting to some satisfying level of competence working the thematic tactics puzzles, it is then time to test recognizing and applying tactics in a real game.

The book Tactics Time, by Tim Brennan and Anthea Carson, is a chess puzzle book containing 1001 puzzles taken from games of average club players. The puzzles in Tactics Time are not grouped by theme, or arranged in any logical sequence. They are, however, taken from actual games rather than being composed; links to the annotated games are provided in the book. The tactics were either played in the game or missed in the game. A few of the tactics are defensive; most are either winning material or mating. Solving these puzzles is closer to the kind of calculation you need to employ during a game. There are no mental shortcuts (e.g. "OK, I'm looking for a skewer here.") available to you—other than knowing there is probably a tactic in the position.

It's not just about pattern recognition

The thematic puzzles are useful for building up your pattern recognition. And solving Tactics Time puzzles can help you test pattern recognition skills. But you can do more than that. If you solve the puzzles the right way, then you can improve your chess thinking.

This puzzle collection presents a great opportunity for practicing your thought process, the sequence of mental steps that you must go through each time it is your turn to move. After solving 100 or 200 of these puzzles, defects in your thought process, or in the application of your thought process, may become apparent. And once those defects are identified, you have a chance to take conscious steps to fix them and then test yourself against additional puzzles from the collection.

The key is to deliberately apply your thought process when solving, to categorize and track any mistakes that you make, and to use that information as feedback and make adjustments to your thought process. Applied habitually and conscientiously, you will see progressive improvement in your chess thinking.

How I use "Tactics Time"

1. I do 5 puzzles each day. This is the first chess thing I do every day, unless I have a scheduled classical game and do not have time before the game. I try not to miss more than 1 day per week (which fits with Noel Studer's "take a break" idea).

2. I don't look at any solutions until I have solved all 5 puzzles. I read Tactics Time on Kindle. Because the solution is always on a different page than the problem, I make sure to page quickly over the solutions so that I'm unable to parse the text and somehow unconsciously detect the solution to any puzzle. I don't know how the book is printed, but I would expect that the solution is always on the back size of the position (rather than on the facing page).

3. I write down my solutions to all 5 problems before I review the answers.

4. At the start, I write down the time of day. When I'm done solving, I'll write down the time of day, and then calculate now many minutes I spent solving. I'm happy with an average of 5 minutes per puzzle. If I start taking much longer than that, then that my point to a problem with my chess thinking.

5. For each puzzle I try to practice a consistent thought process, the same process I hope to employ over the board. For each promising line I calculate in my head and then, if it still seems good, I write out the line. I try to go as deep as I can, as deep as I can hold in my head, expecially when the position seems unresolved and there might be hidden danger or a deeper tactic.

   When there are multiple candidates or important variations then I will write out multiple lines (but only after I've calculated them in my head) and somehow indicate which line is my chosen solution. This is mainly for my own records, but I recognize that is not something you can do during the game; I've considered stopping this practice and only writing out my chosen line, but haven't reached a decision about that yet.

6. Once I've solved all five puzzles, then I go back and look at each solution. For any puzzles that I didn't solve I make a note of what kind of mistake I made (e.g., I missed a candidate move, I missed an opponent's resource, I miscalculated). If two kinds of mistake were made for one puzzle, I just record the kind of mistake I think is most important.

How I use these exercises to improve my chess

Every couple weeks I look back through the records of past mistakes and see which kinds of mistakes I'm making most often, recently, and then try to make adjustments to my thought process to try to reduce the mistakes.

For example:

• I noticed that I was missing opponents resources a lot. I changed my thought process to first look at opponent's resources before looking at my candidate moves. This change significantly reduced my "missed resources" errors, but also reduced my "miscalculation" errors.
• I noticed that I was missing candidates a lot. I changed my thought process to emphasize a breadth-first search for candidates before calculating lines for any particular candidate. This significantly reduced the "missed candidate" errors.

Don't just calculate the first move

Many times the book solution is just as the first move and then a text explanation of why this is the best move. I will have typically written out much more than that; 3 to 5 moves, sometimes muliple variations. I think it is important to continue this deeper calculation process and not to write down just the first move. The idea here is to improve the chess thought process (calculation and visualization and looking beyond the first move you see). Calculating just one move is not going to lead to solid improvement.

Conclusion

Solving puzzles from the Tactics Time book can be an effective tool for training your chess thought process, and for testing your ability to recognize tactics in a game situation. A disciplined and consistent daily practice of solving these and similar tactical problems will bring lasting improvement over time.

Additional credit

The idea for building a daily habit of solving tactical and calculation puzzles, and the idea of classify mistakes into categories and tracking them, both came from Noël Studer's Next Level Training course.