The Study of Chess Tactics

“Chess is 99% tactics” - Rudolph Teichmann

To become a serious chess player, you need to begin studying.  As players improve, book study becomes an increasingly important path to improvement.

The first question that every chess student must tackle first is what to study!  There are general chess treatises which cover the entire game, as well as books for specific topics.  As a player improves, the books he or she requires to get better become more and more topic specific.  E.g. a beginner would find a book on the Nimzo-Indian opening useless in its complexity.  In contrast, a master level player would find value only in books devoted to dealing with an entire sub-variation of the Nimzo-Indian defense.

At my current level of play (roughly a 1400 ELO), books covering the entire game, such as The Mammoth Book of Chess are of limited use.  I know how to move the pieces, I know notation, I know the basic openings, etc.

Much better for me are books dealing in further detail with the topics I mentioned in my last post, which are:

1.      Openings

2.      Strategy (Middlegame)

3.      Tactics

4.      Endgames

5.      Annotated Games

I will deal with the pros and cons of each in a series of posts, along with which books I am currently reading (or thinking about reading).

As the quotation at the top of this post indicates, this post will be about Tactics.  From a study perspective, Tactics provide the most “Bang for your Buck” at my level of play.  Tactics involves the ability to calculate forced move combinations which provide a decisive advantage.  It is also the ability to recognize patterns to know when a pre-existing tactic is there to look for.

The best way to study tactics is through the use of chess puzzles.  To be honest, this is one of the easiest ways to study chess.  As a work-commuter who takes the train, chess puzzles are also “train friendly” in that I generally do not require a chess board in front of me to solve them.

I have recently finished reading through Chess Tactics for Champions; which was a wonderful tactics book.  Each type of tactic was broken down and explained, and then a series of exercises (50 or 25 depending on the topic) was given for each.  I will certainly give a full review of this book in a later post.  However, after a 2^nd read-through, I noticed I had started to memorize the solutions.
So I ordered a new chess puzzle book: Learn Chess Tactics. This books seems to be along the same line’s as the Polgar book, so I’m looking forward to more of the same.  I will let you know how it turns out as I finish more of it.

In my next post, I will cover the importance of Opening study at my level, and the books I am checking out at that level.