How to Improve at Tactics

Tactics should undoubtedly be the first step for anyone who wants to seriously improve their game (that is, after learning how the pieces move, learning to put pieces on safe squares, and learning to capture your opponent’s free pieces when they’re offered).

Why? Easy. Tactics will make or break almost ALL your games up to at least 1800 level, if not higher.

So how should you go about improving your tactics? Isn’t tactical vision some natural talent you either have or don’t have, or that you have to learn when you’re young?

Well if that were true, then I wouldn’t have written this article, would I! ;)

Sure, there are definitely some benefits to sharpening your tactical eye while you’re young: See below, IM Lawrence Trent and 15 year old prodigy IM Tani Adewumi in a tactics battle on ChessFlow.org/Tactics, sponsored by BurkimTech
https://youtube.com/shorts/5O58sGOij8w?si=DArFVOLkAQV3bBUW

But there’s also no ceiling to what an adult can achieve with the right approach:

Step 1:

Learn the tactical motifs, and start with UNTIMED puzzles for each motif. Why untimed, even though chess games always have time pressure?

The same reason that a concert pianist doesn’t try to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” at full speed the first time they see it: you need to go slow before you can go fast.

Tactical Motifs:
Forks, pins, skewers... They sound more like torture devices than chess patterns.

Of course it’s not necessary to know the names of things to do those things, e.g. I can learn to juggle without knowing the word “juggle”... but labels do help to categorize things into our leaky disorganized brains.

Black to Move and Win:
Theme: Attraction - Solution at the end

Let's see how this works in practice. I'm a big proponent of structuring one’s training and setting tangible goals:

Part 1:
1. Choose a specific tactical theme, and read its description if you don’t know it yet.
2. Train ONLY that theme.
3. Don’t worry too much about getting the first few problems correct, just think for a couple minutes and try your best, just until your rating settles.

Part 2:
4. Now set a rating goal for that theme that feels attainable.
5. Lock in and take it more seriously, think for longer and try to get every problem right.
6. Make notes of what you missed, and take a look at how stronger players thought about the same problem.
7. Revisit the early problems after some time (using spaced repetition) to see if you can get the right answer.
8. Keep training until you reach your goal rating.

This is all automated for you on our platform: ChessFlow.org/calculation

I’ll be writing a full article soon on how to improve at chess calculation.

Side note:

The distinction and interaction between tactics and calculation is often not well understood, so I'll clarify it here:

• Calculation:
  The overall decision algorithm you use to choose a chess move when a position is more dynamic, and move by move thinking is called for (includes tactical pattern recognition as an input, but also visualization, structured thinking, evaluation, etc).
• Tactics:
  The short move sequences and patterns that achieve a certain short term aim such as material gain, checkmate, or (less often) a strategic goal, and they often recur in different situations.

The first few times you encounter a certain tactical pattern you're probably using calculation to find the solution. Once you've seen the pattern enough and it becomes second nature, you only need to "calculate" to double check that your intuition was right that it works.

This is why if you watch very strong players solving puzzles quickly, it's often one of two outcomes:
Either they solve it instantly, OR they think for a few seconds.
i.e. Either it was in their tactical pattern mental database, OR they switched their brain into calculation mode.

Enough times switching their brain into calculation mode for the same pattern, and it enters their tactical pattern mental database.

Clear as mud? Time for step 2...

White to Move and Win: Theme: Skewer - Solution at the end

Step 2:

Once you reach your target rating for the untimed puzzles, and before moving onto the next tactical theme, you should get some practice solving problems under time pressure.

1. Do five timed puzzle session for the same theme as step 1, increasing from easy to harder puzzles.
2. Don’t just move onto the next session afterwards, review your mistakes to see what you did wrong.
3. Focus on accuracy over speed.
4. Flag any puzzles you weren’t sure about to look over after the session.
5. Pick a target # of puzzles that feels attainable.
6. Keep going until you reach that target.

After you've gone through step 1 and 2 for a single theme, keep repeating Steps 1 and 2 for all the different tactical themes.

This is all automated on our platform: ChessFlow.org/Tactics
Note: you can use our "OneTouch" feature for the simpler puzzles once you can recognize the patterns quickly.

Now you’re ready for step 3. Onwards and upwards.

Step 3:

Start training all themes at once. Both for calculation and for tactics puzzles.

In a game situation, no one whispers in your ear “Hey buddy, you have a fork!”... and if they do, they should definitely be banned for a fair play violation.

Training all themes at once gets you closer to mimicking a game situation.

Once you start this step, you may notice a slight drop in your performance compared to training individual themes. DON’T PANIC! - That’s to be expected now that you’re not being given the hint of what theme to look for.

Method:
1. Set goal Tactics rating to achieve.
2. Once you hit your goal rating, jump to step 4 before setting a new goal rating.

White to Move and win: Theme: Hidden - Solution at the end

Pro tip:
The week or two before a classical event I like to train more calculation to gear up for deeper thinking, but the day or two before, I prefer tactics drills:
1. So it’s less taxing / tiring before the event.
2. So I can cram as many patterns as possible into short term memory.
3. So I will feel sharper and more confident especially in time scrambles.

ChessFlow.org/Tactics

Step 4:

Hone in on the 5 tactical motifs you struggle with the most.

As you’ve been improving across all tactical themes, your brain has naturally taken to some motifs more than others. You’ve also been using a puzzle set taken from real games, so you’ve seen certain themes more often, since they’re more common in practice, and so the rarer ones are worth taking a closer look again as well.

There will be themes that you struggle with more, for whatever reason, compared to a player of a similar rating, so it's worth spending some time improving on these weaker areas.

Training your 5 weakest themes at a time allows you to improve on your weak areas, without giving you as much of a hint of what the motif is that you’re solving.

ChessFlow.org/Tactics

Step ??:

Not really a step, but an important input to the process is continuing to train calculation.

Recall that before a tactical pattern becomes second nature, it needs to be solved slowly. You'll also need to see the same pattern multiple times before it becomes automatic.

This goes for every level of player, so training calculation stores more and more patterns in your intuition, and training tactics puzzles reinforces them and keeps them at your fingertips.

Slow and steady wins the race:
ChessFlow.org/calculation

Putting It All Together

"But wait"... you say... "that was a lot of steps. Can't I just spam puzzles until my rating goes up?"
Well, you can, and it’s better than not working on tactics at all! It just won't work as well as a more structured, well thought out approach.

To summarize,
- Pick a theme, train it untimed until you reach a goal rating
- Add time pressure with short timed sessions, accuracy first, speed second
- Repeat for every theme
- Mix all themes together and set a combined goal
- Plateau? Focus on your 5 weakest motifs and fix them
That’s it!

Now stop reading about how to get better at chess and go do it! :)

Solutions:
https://lichess.org/training/jWLH7
https://lichess.org/training/aTmCA
https://lichess.org/training/1bzIc

Step 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3byt-guPuUQ

Step 2:
https://youtu.be/w3snorL-wIw

Step 3:
https://youtu.be/w0ArSxsNgZI

Step 4:
https://youtu.be/IsZBoVlh10Y

IM Tani vs IM Lawrence full match:
https://youtu.be/mHBStMVqqHo?si=GdvD4b7UKx_IdPjF