I suggest creating a new game format. In this game two players would compete with each other in a series tactical puzzles.
Both of the players would be given same puzzles to solve. The one who solves most correctly. Or if both of them solve all correctly, then the one who solves in less time, would be the winner.
What do you guys think?
I think this would give us an idea of, let's say, if we are playing against a higher rated player, then we would get to know how good he is in terms of tactics than us.
Since there are many things that contribute to our rating. We would get an idea that in which aspect of the game we need to act upon. Let's say a 1500 player did equal as a 1600 player.
Then the 1500 player would get the idea of working on other aspects of the game, such as opening or end game or positional play to get as good or better than the 1600 one.
This is what I thought. I hope it is any good.
Thank you for reading!
An interesting idea indeed, however the funny thing is that even if a 1500 player did as well as the 1600 in the tactical battle, it doesn't mean he's as good at tactics.
There's a big difference between finding tactics in a puzzle and finding tactics in a game. The big difference, of course, is that when given a puzzle you know there's a tactic to find. That allows a different thought process than you would use to try to find the best move in a real game.
I know a lot of players at my club who are quite decent at solving tactical puzzles, but miss most of those same tactics in actual games. Why? A couple reasons.
1) As I said above, your thought process changes. You know there's a tactic, so you don't look for anything else, which allows you to rule out other moves quickly. This isn't something you can do in a real game, as many positions won't have a tactical solution.
2) Tactical puzzles are more amenable to "guessing". Since you know there's a tactical solution, if you see a flashy theme or a "cool" tactical idea that looks like it might work, but you can't calculate it all the way, you can just play the move and see if it works. Since it's a tactical puzzle, such guesses are more likely to be correct than in a real game.
Incidentally, that's why I like the puzzle system at chess.emrald.net so much. The puzzles are very aggressively timed (the longer you take the less you get for getting the puzzle right), and the puzzles are chosen to meet only one criterion, really: that there is a single, clearly best move.
The cool thing about that is that some positions have a clearly best move that is just recapturing a piece, when there are lots of sacrifices around the king to look at. At a lot of sites, such puzzles are rejected because users don't like them, but those make the site much more useful for working on tactical strength.
I said all of that to say this: strength at solving tactical puzzles is NOT the same at all as tactical strength in games, so what we can conclude from two players being similar at solving puzzles is very limited.
At the end of the day, there's no getting around the tried and true method for improving your chess. Play some games, and analyze them to see where you went wrong (preferably immediately after playing them). If you're missing tactics, then that'll show up in the analysis, and you can try to figure out why you missed them (got careless, saw the idea but calculated it incorrectly, missed the idea altogether, etc.). If you're missing strong positional ideas, that'll come up too.
Sometimes it's hard to beat the old methods :)
Now, I said all of that only about whether this tactical battle variant would be a useful tool for figuring out what part of your game to work on (which to be clear, I think it would be much less useful than normal methods).
It DOES sound like it could be a lot of fun, though, which is more important than getting better anyway :)
Yeah I agree OneoftheQ,
http://chess.emrald.net/ (Chess tactics server) is a great tactics puzzle site.
Thank you for your insights on tactics puzzles, I agree.
"It DOES sound like it could be a lot of fun, though, which is more important than getting better anyway :)"
Thank you!
Loving the game and having fun is so important.