If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time you know that I’ve had a constant battle with tactical acumen.
I’ve spent years trying to figure out the correct approach to solving. I know that it’s important, but I’ve struggled at times to figure out how much/how long/how difficult.
What I’m doing now is combining two things, one which I learned from IM John Bartholomew, and the other which I recently learned from soon to be FM Andrzej Krzywda.
John told me years back at a camp that “15 minutes a day” should be sufficient for tactics at my level.
Andrzej said in his Perpetual Chess appearance that he solves simple tactics by using www.chesstempo.com but without logging in. This means that instead of getting fed tactics at your rating you just get fed some simpler tactics.
The hard solving in Andrzej’s studying comes from endgame studies rather than difficult tactics. But of course the idea remains that constant solving is the key to improvement.
So what I did was relaunch my 100 days of tactics idea, but in this logged off mode.
Now what I am tracking is number of problems solved vs missed.
So for instance on day one I solved 16 and missed 5.
Since my last “100 days” attempt I have still continued to solve tactics on a daily basis. Primarily through apps on my phone. This will just require me to be a bit more disciplined as I’ll need to track the time used.
I won’t have to track the correct/incorrect though as ChessTempo is kind enough to do that for me 🙂 – I’ll just need to reset it each day.
As I was recently laid off at work I now have a lot more free time during my day, and I am trying to make use of some of it for chess.
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
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