A horrible strategic move where the engine doesn’t tell you how you weakened your d4 pawn or how bad it was to give your opponent the d5 square, while the knight on b6 was misplaced… While checking your games at the end of a playing session, you pass through the following positions: While no one tells you what kind of terrible strategic mistakes you made earlier, and that you should work on strategy as well… Unfortunately, at the end of the game, you could easily come to the conclusion (for which it’s tough to blame you), that you played very well, but that only if you’d seen 24.Ra1!.or only if your tactics were better, you would beat everyone… However, the engine will yell at you, showing that you missed 24.Ra1!, a nice tactic, that because of the variation 24.Bxa1 25.Rxa1 Qxa1 26.Bd4! will ensure you win the game. Later in the same game, after both sides have made some strategic mistakes, you arrive at the following position…Īnd here you play 24.e5 – a logical move, limiting your opponent’s strong Bishop on g7. It won’t explain that you will weaken the b3 square… and that even if you play the next moves 17.b4, after 17.cxb4 18.axb4 – that your c4 pawn will be weak.Īnd it won’t explain to you that Black is stronger in the queenside, and you’re stronger in the kingside, because of your e4 pawn! And therefore the correct plan would be to push in the kingside, playing f4 at some point. If you played 13.Nc6? and without knowing what a bad move you did, in a few moves you can come to the next position.Īnd if you play 16.a3 with the idea of then playing b4, the engine won’t explain to you why this is a bad plan.
#Chess tactics online pro#
It won’t explain to you that you will lose control over the “d5” square and will open the “b” line for your opponent’s Rook.Īnd it won’t tell you that in the initial position you have a space advantage, which means that you should try to keep your pieces! (This is something we call this “The Room Concept” which our PRO Members know about from our courses).Īs a result, the best move in the position would actually be to play 13.Nde2! – keeping the pieces on the board. It won’t explain to you that after 13.bxc6 your opponent’s pawn will come from b7 to c6 – a much better position. In this position, if you play 13.Nxc6 the engine won’t tell you what kind of a bad strategic move it is. If only chess engines could highlight all the strategic mistakes, the picture would be totally different. “Do puzzles, do tactics, work on your tactics.” “If I start doing puzzles for 6 hours a day, I’ll see all the tactics during my games.”įurthermore, they give the same advice to others.
If only I could improve my tactics…”Īnd what do they conclude as a consequence? Unfortunately, they’re not smart enough (yet!), to show positional or strategic mistakes, such as when you weaken a pawn, make a bad exchange, choose the wrong plan, or make a decision that may be right but isn’t practical.Īnd because the engines are only able to show blunders and tactics, many chess players naturally think “Ah… my tactics are weak.
Most online chess platforms have a built-in engine, where after your games, you can click the “analyze” button to show all of your blunders and missed tactics. However, especially at a lower level, the importance of tactics is very overestimated while the importance of strategy is very underestimated.įirst, let’s see where the myth comes from. It’s already been said many times by the best players and the best generals of all times that strategy and tactics should walk hand in hand. “Do tactics!”, “Solve puzzles”, “Below 2,000 level is all about tactics”, “Spend a few hours each day solving puzzles”, “Puzzle Rush!”, and many answers like this…īut it’s a big myth that below 2,000 level is all about tactics.
#Chess tactics online how to#
If you spend some time in chess forums or Facebook groups, you’ll see many posts, where people ask for advice on how to raise their rating from 1.000 to 2.000, or from 1.400 to 2.200.Īnd the majority of the answers and the main advice is…Ĭan you guess it? Or maybe you’ve seen it already…