tactics study and ratings

[dstring]

after nearly 1900 probs my blitz rating on fics has jumped 150 pts. I'm still among the worst blitz players and always will be but its lots more fun making it all the way thru a game without getting caught with hanging pieces or stumbling into a one-move mate. Checking thru my games I have hung one piece in the last 30 contests while being caught in two surprise mates. For me, thats a huge improvement. My standard play has gained 100 pts. but I've been playing tougher competition than in blitz. In standard games, zero hanging pieces and zero surprise mates over the last 25 games.
 Many times lately I see a tactical possibility "in a flash", without deliberately calculating the sequence. It just "pops" out at me. That's a new experience in my play. Rather exhilarating I must say.

Thanks to Richard for this site.
Now a question: How far will tactics study alone take us? To be more specific, when I first began tactics study here I was rated 1580 standard on fics. I'm now at 1680 after 25 games since study began. What do you say is the rating cap if I do nothing but study tactics?

[revenant]

It's so cool to read the steady stream of success stories here.

The surest sign of improvement in chess is that you no longer have to think about things you had to think hard about and "worry about" or "work out" or "figure out" before.

The mind of the player seems to consist of two creatures, the "presenter" and the "reasoner".

The presenter is kind of strange, like someone invisible tapping you on the shoulder and telling you which 3 or 4 moves (sometimes more) are even plausible in the position.  "Psst, hey, try this.  Or maybe that."  Not sure how that works.  It's pretty amazing considering there are usually like 20 or more legal moves available.  Somehow the presenter enjoys chess enough to be able to read  the glyphs on the board and soon know what it's all about.

The reasoner is you, the person reading this.  The reasoner is also the executive and the decider amongst the candidate moves.  The reasoner is fallible and, sorry to say, doesn't enjoy chess all that much and might rather be doing something else.  (Maybe I speak only for myself.  I hope I do.)  So the less work it has to do, the better.  The purpose of studying tactics is to get the presenter to do 90% of the work for you, if possible.

The reasoner can't accomplish anything at all if a particular candidate move is never "presented" to it.  A goodly number of mate-in-1 problems I still fail because I literally never saw that my queen could even move to the target square.  (Then I see the solution and I'm like, huh??!  whoa)  But that number of situations is diminishing.  In my time on CT the presenter seems to have gotten very sharp, almost frighteningly so.  At least compared to before I started solving.

Maybe you have noticed in your solving and in your games that even when the network of capture relationships among your pieces and the opponent's pieces is starting to get moderately complicated, your "presenter" is quickly telling you the right one of 10 captures that will resolve the tension in your favor.  You no longer have to verbalize "OK, his knight attacks my bishop, and my bishop is guarding my queen from his queen... uh-oh..."  Instead it's as easy as calculating 12x12=144 because you've got the "multiplication tables" stored away.

Is there a cap on how far this kind of improvement can go?  That is, other than obviously the limit on one's inherent talent coming into the game?  I don't know but I think right now there might be a limit at Chess Tempo simply because at the high end there are fewer problems available, so the "presenter" is finding it more economical to simply memorize how they go than to do the more valuable, more mysterious, true learning which the problems are meant to convey.

When your CT blitz rating is at or below about 2040, it feels like you're in quicksand.  There are too many thousands of new problems coming at you and each is a slightly different configuration from what you've seen before, enough to continuously flummox the presenter.  But once you get to 2040 you can suddenly zoom up to 2100 and over.  The problems being served-up are perhaps a couple thousand in number and they become more and more familiar, like people you see every day on the street.  If you have a bad day and fall below 2040 you're in quicksand again and you have to really fight your way back out.  But maybe that's how chess *should* be, a kind of martial art.  If it were just a breeze all the time, there would be no sense of accomplishment.

Richard is always adding new problems to the site, so hopefully this (hypothetical) limitation will disappear.  After that, I doubt there is a (system-dependent) cap to how far one can improve!

[dstring]

wow, revenant, what a great response. I'd never considered the Presenter and Reasoner angle but it makes sense. Unfortunately, I spend most of my time in Reasoner mode and likely always will.
 In a recent online game I was looking at my opponents back rank weakness and felt there was a tactical stroke in there somewhere but could not find it after several minutes thought. Then the phone rang. I decided to take the call (time was not an issue at this point). After about 30 seconds of conversation the solution to the problem suddenly Presented itself in my mind. I actually felt giddy about it. The thing is, I wasn't even looking at the board nor was I even thinking about the problem. It just "popped". The other thing about it was that I *knew*, absolutely knew the solution presented to me was 100% correct. Thats another first for me. I made the moves while still conversing and after my opponent resigned he said, "wow, not many players at our level woulda found that".
I only wish the Presenter would show up more often.

[phogg]

I can't count how many times I have been humbled by a response that I hadn't seen when I was "100% sure" of my solution. I try to remember to do a "sanity check" before executing my preferred line and also to look afresh at the board after each move to make sure the board still looks like I envisioned it would. That works until I get lulled into a false sense of condifidence and omit the sanity check, and I get yet another lesson in humility.