GM Grigoryan on the "Myth" of Solving Puzzles

kartikeya

Here is a game I played against a lower rated player in 25+5. Of course, white lost the game due to a tactical error, namely 28.Nd3?? but his position was lost when he played a4. 

However, my opponent let me equalize very, very easily early on in the game, and black had a very comfortable position. I used four minutes of my time, while my opponent was in time pressure (under 1 min) by the time he resigned. 

These kinds of mistakes make your position unnecessarily difficult, which increases the chances of mistakes occurring. In my game, white continuously traded pieces down, which is exactly what black wanted to happen. In the end, there were too many infiltration points into white's position due to his large space advantage.

I agree more with GM Grigoryan's perspective

I find puzzles useful, but my study is not exclusively focused on puzzles. Currently I’m reading Thomas Engqvist, 300 Most Important Chess Positions with the intention to complete the book in two months. Engqvist recommends a full year and already I have ample evidence that my rapid process courts trouble.

His 300 positions cannot be solved tactically. They require (and develop) positional understanding.

My strong suspicion is that if puzzles are used to try to improve, the opposite will happen. They are actually bad for our chess (including tactical vision) because they are marked wrong if you don't exactly follow the recommended line. Do a few occasionally, at the most.

The #1 problem with using puzzles for improvement is that with a puzzle you already KNOW that a winning tactic exists. You just need to spot it.

In real life, there is no such assurance. You aren't warned that a winning line exists, and you might either miss it entirely or (just as bad) waste clock time looking for a tactic that isn't even THERE.

On that score, of course we learn to recognise positions that are amenable to tactical shots. Generally speaking, tactics are necessary to win games from superior positions. Almost by definition, a superior position is one where a series of moves exists which makes it very difficult for the player with the inferior position to hold onto the game.

Tactics are also often the only fall-back when one has an inferior position. Therefore it's necessary on both sides to be aware of the kind of positions that give rise to different kinds of tactical ideas. In the course of a game, both players routinely scan for tactical shots for either side. I remember one player telling me that if he could get the kind of position I routinely achieved then he'd win every game. At the time, he was playing on board one for our local first team and I was on about three. I often missed opportunities but didn't do too badly because a player who allows one opportunity that's missed often allows more opportunities. I was improving and tended to play too slowly.

Very often, with the rather artificial puzzles that are presented here, alternative winning lines exist which are easier to spot and therefore easier to execute, but which take more moves to complete. Such lines are often "objectively better" than the lines given, for various reasons. Therefore, when we try to use them exclusively, puzzles are bad for our progress at chess. Much better is analysing games, sometimes with the aid of the analysis engine and sometimes without. Puzzles can be used as an adjunct to that but not as a replacement.

A player who solves puzzles regularly has a much better chance of spotting a tactical shot in a game. Much better. Sure, there aren't tactics in every position, but there's still a lot in any game.

Almost all of chess.com's puzzles are from real games. A very small minority (way less than 1%) are from chess compositions.

In a similar fashion, there are practically no puzzles where there's an alternative winning line. Surely no more than 1 puzzle in 10 thousand.

If you play three 90 min time controls each day. I think there is no need to solve tactical puzzles.

"I never did tactics training in my entire life" -- GM Ivan Sokolov:

Steinitz, Lasker. Capablanca etc. where did they get their calculation ability. From long grinding games.

my own exoerience... puzzle solving gave/giving me some knowledge about situations where i can exploit some positions on the board in my adventage, but, as Grigoryan said, i am not any better in tactics/strategy. still that 1st part made me somewhat better player.