Tactics training on the Chess Tactics Server PDF Print E-mail
Written by Sciurus   
Saturday, 22 July 2006

I got inspired by TempoSchlucker and GeneralKaia and started to do tactics puzzles on the Chess Tactics Server (CTS) again. I will write more about this after I got some more experience with using CTS for chess improvement. CTS is a web site with interactive JavaScript based tactics puzzles. Some of the fascinating features of CTS are that the problem set is huge ( currently 23,803 problems!) and that both problems and players (called "tacticians") are rated. It is necessary to solve the problems very fast to obtain a high rating. The award in form of rating increase is biggest when the problem is solved within only 3 seconds and points are lost after taking more than about 30 s to solve a given problem or even failing to find the correct move(s) at all.

The CTS rating puts a lot of emphasis on speed and accuracy is less important to achieve a high rating. The relation of problem solving speed and the all important board vision has been thoroughly discussed on TempoSchlucker's blog (who BTW worked his way through more than 53000 problems and counting!). Personally, I decided to take a slightly different approach to CTS for now. I try to ignore both the clock and the rating and also make only moves that I am pretty convinced that they are correct. That means no guessed moves - if I can't solve the problem I play a "stupid" move on purpose to fail and go through the solution. Furthermore, I repeat the failed problems both directly after I fail to solve them and at the end of the session. This way I hope I learn most from my mistakes. So far, I did about 1400 problems. I solved 78% of them and since a few days my rating stabilized around 1050, which is at the (very) bad side of the distribution curve. Feel free to check my latest progress here. My goal is to average 50 problems per day and see if this gives me any improvement, but more about that in a later post.

Comments (3)Add Comment
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written by biike, November 11, 2007
when i started cts my rating was the same as yours 12700 problems later and my rating is currently 1565.make sure you do those 50 problems(or more)every day oe else you will become uninterseted in the site as so many do.it too kme about 4 months to reach this rating i hope you can do it to
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written by Sciurus, November 11, 2007
I agree that persistence pays off. However, the returns apparently diminish over time. While everybody is different, I too saw marked improvements over the first 6 months or so. But then it started to flatten off even though I was still practicing practically every day.

I don't understand the argument why I have to do 50 problems daily to stay interested, though. After having used CTS regularly for a year, I got pretty bored of it and decided to move on to something different. After all, chess is something I do in my spare time and it is more fun to do things differently once in a while.
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written by bulldoggy, January 28, 2009
A chess training site that lets you set the clock and has a number of other innovative features:

http://www.snufflenose.com/ats

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