Tactical improvement

[Geoff Chandler]

Thank you.

If you are going to play chess on a website only then studying
use these sites may help.

I don't know. I can only tell you what helped me and the 1,000,000,000
other chess players BC. (before computers).

I can tell you there is this new breed of chess player going about
who does not know how to play against or spot human blunders
and has no swindling craft.

They should really stop playing their computers and join a chess club.

I bet everyone of us have positions from out own games that if we put
it into a computer and played it, we would lose.
Yet this we won from this position against a human.

Then spin the board. give the computer the lost position you had.
The thing just gives up. It cannot set an unsound trap like we can
knowing the refuatation is difficult to see.
It does not know what is difficult for a human see.

Really it's just an argument about which is better for the student of the game.

Book & board and join a chess club.

or

Computer and monitor and stay in your bedroom.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Really it's just an argument about which is better for the student of the game.

Book & board and join a chess club.

or

Computer and monitor and stay in your bedroom.

Can't you do both? Having said that, I may, based on some of the comments here, analyse my games over a board at home, rather than putting them straight into a computer. One of the problems is making notes, as it is so much easier to do this on a computer than over the board. But using a notebook to make notes, and then adding those to any computer analysis, does sound like a good strategy.

[Arshad Ali]

Aside from problem books (I am working through Polgars) does anyone have tips to improve on visualisation & calculation?

Which one? The one with thousands of one-move, two-move and three-move mates? It's good for mating patterns but not for tactics. There are many books which contain thematically organised problems -- fork, pin, skewer, decoy, x-ray, etc. Some books I found useful were the first two volumes of Livshitz' Test Your Chess IQ and the Encyclopedia of Middlegames published by Informant. Originally the encyclopedia was organised by tactical theme; a subsequent edition was organised along kind of sacrifice (pawn, knight, bishop, etc.) and not so useful. Working through books like this will dramatically raise your tactical ability. A book or two on mating patterns might come in handy as well (Polgar is simply too voluminous). Renaud and Kahn's The Art of the Checkmate is good; so is Chandler's How to Beat Your Dad at Chess. Du Mont's The Basis of Combination in Chess is also to be highly recommended. I don't know which of these are still in print.

[Kevin Thurlow]

"Renaud and Kahn's The Art of the Checkmate is good"

I recently bought a copy in an "antique market" in Kingston (Surrey), and it is good. (it was a hardback and fairly old) I saw the Chandler book at a recent tournament bookstall I think.

[Arshad Ali]

"Renaud and Kahn's The Art of the Checkmate is good"

I recently bought a copy in an "antique market" in Kingston (Surrey), and it is good. (it was a hardback and fairly old) I saw the Chandler book at a recent tournament bookstall I think.

No offence to Murray Chandler, whom I used to know when he ran his shop on Masbro Road, but I think he nicked his material from the Renaud and Kahn book. The Chandler book seems to be a subset of Renaud and Kahn. 'Course Renaud and Kahn is in descriptive rather than algebraic, is not as visually attractive as Chandler's book, and may be difficult to get hold of ....

[Andy Burnett]

Sounds quite offensive to me Arshad, unless it's true of course!

[Arshad Ali]

Sounds quite offensive to me Arshad, unless it's true of course!

Take a look at the two and draw your own conclusions. Well, okay, he, um, drew upon Renaud and Kahn heavily. He referred to it. He is indebted to it. Chandler's is the more visually attractive book and if I had to recommend a mating pattern book to someone who's just learnt the moves, that's the book I'd suggest (assuming he's already worked through Tony Gillam's Simple Checkmates). Someone should recast Renaud and Kahn in algebraic and reprint it.

[Ola Winfridsson]

What is the best way to improve tactical ability?

Aside from problem books (I am working through Polgars) does anyone have tips to improve on visualisation & calculation?

Are there any good books on this specific issue other than puzzle books?

Personally, I think the best way of improving your tactical ability (and subsequently visualisation and calculation) is by solving chess puzzles as you do already. However, I think it's important to take a structured approach (as has already suggested). Three books, which I find excellent, are Maxim Blokh's "The Art of Combination", "Combinative Motifs" and "600 combinations" (in total some 3,000 puzzles). They're all taken from real games - or composed to look like real games - organized along themes and generally goes from very easy to extremely difficult (some with solutions for both white and black), which means that you gradually build up a pattern recognition of each different theme. Another very important thing about Blokh's books is that they contain no hints, so you have to approach them without preconceptions.

Many strong players (GMs and IMs) advocate making training resemble real tournament situations as closely as possible. Therefore I would recommend you do something like this:
1) Take, say 5 or 6 puzzles.
2) Set a clock for the period of time you think you will require to solve them. In his books, Maxim Blokh has graded all puzzles by level of difficulty from 1 to 12, which makes it possible to set "score bands" for the puzzles you're solving (e.g. if the total of the 5 puzzles is less than 25 points, set the clock to 30min, 25-29 points to 45mins, 30-34 to 1h and so on).
3) Set up the first puzzle on the board and start the clock.
4) Try to figure out the solution, without moving the pieces, and write it down.
5) Move on to the next puzzle until you have solved them all.
6) Check the solutions.

Try to solve all puzzle within the alloted time. This way you're working in a more focused manner because you're not only trying to solve each individual puzzles, but you're also competing against the clock - just like in a tournament situation.

In my view, this works better than only solving the puzzles by looking at diagrams in a book or on the computer screen, because, apart from the fact that it's more tournament like, as you set up the positions on the board you can also try to put the positions up as quickly as possible (that is, with as few looks at the diagrams as possible), in order to improve your cluster pattern recognition (of pawns and pieces).

And one final thing, as Jon pointed out earlier, this training has to be done regularly; every day or other two or three days to have any real impact.