1001: A Tactics Odyssey

I completed every tactics problem in 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners in one day. I got 953 problems correct (95.2% accuracy) and it took me 8 hours 1 minute (cry). That's an average of 28.8 sec/problem.

(See this previous post about my methods)


Notes on the final day of solving

I started at 9am and finished around 8:30pm. So that's 11.5 hours on the clock. It's a full day commitment.

Going through a physical book (well, PDF) is slow. If this was an app or on a website, I'd surely be able to go a bit faster. It'd be a luxury to see a single puzzle, play my move, have my accuracy tracked, and have the next problem present itself automatically. The way I did it required looking at the puzzle, getting the solution, then checking the solutions page in another window, finding the problem number and verifying my answer. It was a slog to wade through the material in this manner but I knew what I was getting into so whatever! This method helps me take my time and limit guessing. I'm aware this book is on chessable but....uh.....this is how I did it, haha.

It was pretty helpful to keep a list of problems to come back to so I wouldn't get bogged down staring at one for long periods of time. When I finished, I had a list of about twenty problems that I circled back to and most of them were much easier when I had a "fresh" set of eyes on them.

"Fresh" isn't the best word to use there actually. I was definitely exhausted towards the end, which was a blur to be honest. I had a few beers afterwards to unwind but even then, I remember having a hard time going to sleep. Chess positions were cascading through my brain.

For my own records, here are those problems I got wrong on the final attempt: 99 234 260 291 292 295 316 339 354 357 389 396 398 424 428 451 526 546 548 554 559 569 576 588 615 649 650 707 719 739 740 741 742 746 749 771 796 810 832 849 864 882 900 933 940 952 967 968

I noticed that I missed quite a bit from the second half of the book which was not what I was expecting since I thought those would have been fresher in my memory. Although the first half of the book is the easier half because they're categorized by motif so that must have really helped me. Additionally, my speed increased as I was approaching 1001 (and 9pm!) and I missed a few I normally wouldn't have because of it. Of the first 492, I only missed 16 problems. Of the second half 509, I doubled my incorrect number to 32.

I tried my best to never use the hints under each puzzle. I was much more diligent in the morning but as the day went on, I'd guess maybe a hundred times my eyes wandered to see the hint.

In retrospect, it's very cool that I had some memory of basically every single position. I didn't get them all right but every one was familiar to me. It's amazing that you can log in 1001 chess positions in your brain. Can I re-create all of them on a board without looking at the book? Of course not. I certainly do have the patterns and ideas in my head though and different things would get triggered each time I saw the next problem. I think these "triggers" are one of the takeaway lessons. For example, I might have seen a problem and immediately thought, "Okay this is a fork that's possible because of the pinned f7-pawn." Or "Yep this is that one that ends in a king-queen skewer but we need to trade minor pieces first so remember move-order carefully!" Any given tactical chess position might have many themes going on but it's up to us to find the relevant ones that actually accomplish something in the position. I successfully trained my brain to automatically trigger certain themes after seeing these positions so many times and through the course of cycling through them, I could automate the filtering process to see the relevant themes pretty quickly. We'll have to see how it carries over to real chess games!

How did this affect my chess?

To be determined. I need to get a larger sample of games. (Edited Feb 2021) Classical games will be the best gauge since I'll play my best chess in that time control. At the end of June 2020, I had played 248 classical games on lichess. I wanted to get a sample size of 100 games to see the changes and as of early February 2021, I made it! I've always said that I don't play that many games! 

Here is where my classical record and rating stood on June 29, 2020 when I was in the middle of working through 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners:

CLASSICAL +32 win differential
1726 Rating
132 wins (53%)
16 draws
100 losses
248 total games

And NOW, I've finally played 101 (whoops) classical games and I have some ratings changes to show! Here are my numbers as of February 2, 2021.

CLASSICAL +56 win differential
1864 Rating
191 wins (56%)
23 draws
135 losses
349 total games

Across those 101 games: 

CHANGES
+138 Rating
59 wins
7 draws
35 losses

There ya go. That's what everybody came here for. I should note that I will NOT claim my tactics work I describe in this post is the sole reason for the ratings gain. I'll never tell anyone, "Hey, just do this 1001 Chess Exercises book and you'll gain 138 points!" I don't think I was plateau'd at my 1726 rating and so I don't think doing the tactics training got me out of a funk or anything. I believe I was still trending upward anyway so these changes could have been part of the natural trend of things. Additionally, I've done more master game analysis lately and I changed my opening some, so those are factors. However, I'm certain this training I began last summer and continue today (I began working through 1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players in September) has made me more tactically aware so I don't play so many tactical blunders and my sense of criticality has increased.

It's my move, what do I do?

Do I have a check? Can I mate? Wait, there's nothing to do, do I push a pawn? Is that weakening? What if I'm allowing a tactic? WAIT! Is there really nothing to do? Do I have a threat? Oh shit I have 14 seconds...oh GOD now I'm doing PIPI in my pampers!!! 

There's almost always a lot to consider when you're deciding on a move in a chess position. I'm going to try to lay out a guideline on things to consider in a position. Needless to say, it's not a checklist that you will have the luxury to step through for every move. My goal is to automate these processes into my candidate move selection process. I briefly talk about this in my knowledge vs skills blog entry. Anyway the point of this post will be to provide a guide to approach choosing the type of move you should be calculating in a game. I won't go into specific calculating-techniques, instead this will give an order for deciding which moves to consider.

What do I do?

Basically, I think you must think tactically first since that can swing the game the most drastically in the immediate future. If you think you have a forced mate-in-two, finding and calculating that is going to take precedence over a strategic maneuver to get your knight to a better square, for example. Thinking tactically comes more naturally to most of us since we are most likely studying tactical positions a lot more. An obvious knight-fork is probably going to jump out at most people much more clearly than an equally "obvious" pawn sac or rook lift. You must also think about your opponent's plans too, say if you have a fork to win the exchange but you see your opponent will have a mating threat if you play that, then you need to consider that. When you think you've exhausted tactic possibilities, you should do the same with strategic moves for both you and your opponent. For these reasons, I break this order down into 1) offensive tactical considerations, 2) defensive tactical considerations, and 3) strategic considerations. Of course, any of these will have to be weighed differently based on seriousness but that's the order I think is best to begin your considerations. 

1) Offensive tactical considerations

CC&T = Checks, Captures, and Threats. See if you have any valuable checks, and then scan the board for captures that can lead somewhere. Lastly look at your threats. For threats, I often find myself checking over all the tactical elements I can find in the position to help identify the critical parts of the board. If you see anything of potential value, start calculating but always remember that the board is changing as you're calculating so you must remember the other things in my list: tactics that your opponent might have in the course of your calculated lines, and strategic goals you might accomplish or strategic concessions you might have to give up in the lines you're considering.

2) Opponent's tactical considerations

Remember tactics are a two-way street so you should always be thinking what forcing moves your opponent might have. So this section is simply checking for CC&T that they might have available.

You can go a long way if you have these two steps automated: constantly surveying the board for CC&T both you and your opponent might have available. 

3) Strategic considerations

This is where it gets far more broad and less concrete. Overall, the pertinent questions I'm trying to get automated into my thinking process are from Aagard: 1) Where are the weaknesses? 2) What is my opponent's plan? 3) What is the worse placed piece? 

It's harder to break these down into specific offensive and defensive as they all run together but anyway it's best if you can always be thinking of these three things from both your perspective and your opponent's: Where are the weaknesses of both my position and my opponent's? What should the plans be from both sides? What are the worst placed pieces?

Conclusion

Short and sweet, but that's it. And even strategic principles come into play when you're thinking tactically! So essentially it's 1) Do I have any CC&T? 2) Does my opponent have any CC&T I need to defend against? then 3) What are the important strategic concepts in the position? (i.e. there's nothing immediate to take advantage of that you've seen, so you start asking Aagard's three questions regarding weaknesses, plans, and worst place pieces). As you look at all these factors, you should be constantly weighing which one takes precedence based on danger.

This is a lot and not something you can do on every move. My goal is to try to build these into my sub-conscious as I've tried to do with basic pattern recognition by studying very simple tactics books. For the ideas in this post, the book I'm using is Ray Cheng's Practical Chess Exercises: 600 lessons from Tactics to Strategy. As the subtitle says, there are a lot of tactics in that book but also a good amount of strategic and defensive moves. I've worked through 100 exercises and I really like it so far. I've been trying to approach each exercise using the thinking process outlined in this post. As usual, I'm using some spaced repetition methods so I can hopefully automate a way for my mind to quickly find the most pressing issue relatively quickly in the position.

Books, Recommended and Otherwise

As best I can recall, here are the books I've read, am currently reading, or thought about reading but won't:

Completely Finished

I've read these books cover to cover. I've listed them in an order that I might recommend a new player to read:

Chess for Dummies - James Eade

Logical Chess Move by Move - Irving Chernev

Winning Chess Tactics - Yasser Seirawan

1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners - Masetti and Messa

The World's Most Instructive Amateur Game Book - Dan Heisman

Chess Endgame Training - Bernd Rosen

Simple Chess - Michael Stean

The Amateur's Mind - Jeremy Silman

Rapid Chess Improvement - de la Maza

Partially read but plan to finish:

Ordered in terms of books I'd like to finish first.

1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players - Frank Erwich

Understanding Chess Move by Move - Nunn

Practical Chess Exercises - Ray Cheng

Capablanca's Best Chess Endings - Irving Chernev

Winning Chess Exercises for Kids - Jeff Coakley

Silman's Complete Endgame Course - Silman

Starting Out: The Caro-Kann - Joe Gallagher

Build Up Your Chess Book 1 - Artur Yusupov

Chess Structures - Mauricio Flores Rios

Kasparov v Karpov - Kasparov, Geller, Lein, Chepizhny

Best Games of the Young Grandmasters - Craig Pritchett and Danny Kopec

100 Endgames You Must Know - Jesus de la Villa

My System - Nimzowitsch

The Woodpecker Method - Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen

Partially read but probably never will:

Chess Tactics for Students - Bain

5334 Chess Problems - Polgar

Capablanca's Chess Fundamentals - Capablanca



Would like to obtain and/or read:

How to Reassess Your Chess - Silman

See post about chess TODOs