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[Shanta Plansinis]

Solve our daily updated chess puzzles with three levels of difficulty. To enter the solution, click on the desired piece and drag it to the target square. In some puzzles you have to enter a series of moves.

One of the reasons for my improvement was the constant solving of tactics on chess.com's tactics trainer feature, which basically made me shed my beginner skins, since tactics almost always play a decisive role in the games of beginners.

However, you must also play many normal games, preferably in real life instead of online, and against stronger players, as this will provide you with invaluable experience for the improvement of your game.

This gets the classic answer for an either/or choice that needn't be exclusive: yes. In other words, do both, as these are two of the surest ways to improve, and each is all but necessary in order to do so. Of course, one's time is limited, and so your question may rightly be: which to focus on more. That should probably be decided by an analysis of your own games, especially losses. For instance, if you can trace most losses to tactical oversights that you wouldn't have recognized were possibilities before they happened, then more tactical training is definitely in order. On the other hand, if you find yourself committing mistakes where you should have known better, but lost focus, say, then more time playing games might be needed. But I want to reiterate the case for finding some time for both.

It's an empirical fact that tactical mistakes (and taking advantage of tactical opportunities that are presented) tend to play a very decisive role in chess, and that fact is amplified at the lower levels (and on up to pretty high levels even); after all, it's hard to come back after hanging your queen. Beginner players in particular will tend to make very egregious, serious-material-losing mistakes quite often, and so simply cutting down on such oversights (and learning to spot when your opponent makes them) can pay enormous dividends in one's skill/results rather quickly. Solving tactical chess puzzles (e.g. at ChessTempo) is the best way to hone one's skill in this area, and can lead to very rapid improvement.

That said, merely doing that can only get one so far. Playing actual games from start to finish provides invaluable experience for ... playing actual games from start to finish. You could spend countless hours in a gym shooting thousands of shots from every spot on a basketball court, to the point where you are an excellent shot. That would undoubtedly make you a more skillful basketball player. But it wouldn't prepare you to struggle against stubborn defenders, or to withstand the rigors of running up and down the court for a long period of time, or to sense where you should position yourself on the court in the flow of a game. Similarly, solving tactics puzzles doesn't prepare you for the give-and-take struggle for initiative and advantage in a chess game, or offer practice in turning a hard-earned advantage into an actual victory (or setting up stiff resistance when things haven't gone your way), or maintaining your focus throughout the entire course of a game. To progress in terms of competitive results pretty much demands playing more actual games as well.

It's a decent way. But there are some problems with it. Sometimes the puzzle's AI moves their piece even though another piece could be moved better. But this way you can practice how in some situations you can win a piece (like winning a Queen) or check-mate the opponent. But to really become good in playing chess, you have to play normal matches as situations you come across in normal matches are not always in puzzles and you need to know how to win / prevent losing.

On Sep 2, 2013 I wrote a blog post explaining how the improvement shown on the image below came from almost a month of doing tactics daily. So indeed it works at the lower levels, the proof is in the image ;-)

I agree with other comments but I also believe you should have an approach to studying tactics such as recommended by Alexander Kotov in "Think Like a Grandmaster" (I skipped a rating class after studying this book) or in the book "Imagination in Chess" That is, it helps to have an understanding of tactics and a systematic way of studying them.

Meanwhile, between chess videos, I was researching and writing my new nonfiction book, Fallout, a Cold War thriller with lots of spying and science and high-stakes showdowns between the United States and Soviet Union. The chess analogies are inescapable, and I knew I wanted to get some of this sort of stuff into my story.

I loved this kind of thing as a young reader, and I still do now. And in my Fallout research I came across a story about Edward Teller, a Hungarian-born physicist who would later emigrate to the U.S. and help develop the first hydrogen bomb. As a young man Teller was sitting on a train with a friend. He was bored and begged the friend to challenge him with some sort of puzzle. His friend came up with this:

Your intuition is right, but sooner than later, there will be an in-game position where your intuition leads you on the wrong path. This is where your crystal clear calculation should come in and save your ass.

This is a phenomenon mostly happening when studying with online tactics trainers. You see a tempting move and execute it. If it is correct, you will do the same on the second move. If it is wrong, you have another shot at the same puzzle and go with the next most likely move.

1) Carefully examine the position before jumping into one move that looks or feels right (sometimes my students miss that they are material up or down because they immediately try to spot the right move).

You are now curating a habit that will help you during your exercises but even more in-game. The right, non-rushed thought process helped me and my students save dozens of points. It will do the same for you.

Nol is a former professional chess player who transitioned into coaching and blogging. He made history by becoming the youngest Swiss Grandmaster at just 20 years of age and has accumulated numerous Swiss Championship titles to his name.

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Everyone loves chess puzzles. The chess puzzles on thechesswebsite.com is one of the most popular pages for visitors. When the site first launched I only posted the hardest puzzles out there. I have now added an easy section for those players that really enjoy puzzles but might not be able to solve the hard puzzles yet. I have recently also added a medium section for those that want a little harder challenge than the easy puzzles. Some puzzles have hints if you need help but you can always email me if you are still stuck and want some extra help. Enjoy the puzzles.

A chess puzzle is a puzzle in which knowledge of the pieces and rules of chess is used to solve logically a chess-related problem. The history of chess puzzles reaches back to the Middle Ages and has evolved since then.

Usually the goal is to find the single best, ideally aesthetic move or a series of single best moves in a chess position, which was created by a composer or is from a real game. But puzzles can also set different objectives. Examples include deducing the last move played, the location of a missing piece, or whether a player has lost the right to castle. Sometimes the objective is antithetical to normal chess, such as helping (or even compelling) the opponent to checkmate one's own king.

While a chess puzzle is any puzzle involving aspects of chess, a chess problem is an arranged position with a specific task to be fulfilled, such as White mates in n moves. Chess problems are also known as chess compositions because the positions are specially devised, rather than arising from actual games. Chess problems are divided into orthodox and heterodox types, both covering a variety of genres.

Orthodox chess problems employ the standard rules of chess and involve positions that can arise from actual game play (although the process of getting to that position may be unrealistic). The most common orthodox chess puzzle takes the form of checkmate in n moves. The puzzle positions are seldom similar to positions from actual play, and the challenge is not to find a winning move, but rather to find the (usually unique) move which forces checkmate as rapidly as possible.

Heterodox chess problems involve conditions that are impossible with normal play, such as multiple kings or chess variants, while fairy chess problems employ pieces not used in orthodox chess, such as the amazon (a piece combining the powers of the queen and the knight).

Chess puzzles can also be regular positions from a game (with normal rules), usually meant as training positions, tactical or positional, from all phases of the game (openings, middlegame and endings). These are known as tactical puzzles. They can range from a simple "Mate in one" combination to a complex attack on the opponent's king. Solving tactical chess puzzles is a very common chess teaching technique. Although it is unlikely that the same position will occur in a game the student plays, the recognition of certain patterns can help to find a good move or plan in another position.

Some chess problems, like the eight queens puzzle or the knight's tour problem, have connections to mathematics, especially to graph theory and combinatorics. Many famous mathematicians have studied such problems, including Euler, Legendre, and Gauss. Besides finding a solution to a particular puzzle, mathematicians are usually interested in counting the total number of possible solutions, finding solutions with certain properties, and generalization of the problems to nn or rectangular boards.