It's not meant to provide clues. You're supposed to calculate and find the best moves. With enough experience you will likely start recognizing patterns in the position to aid in identifying where to start calculating and improve speed.
Puzzle logic?
Sort:
It’s just a skill issue
Martin_Stahl wrote:
It's not meant to provide clues. You're supposed to calculate and find the best moves. With enough experience you will likely start recognizing patterns in the position to aid in identifying where to start calculating and improve speed.
Ah, I get that, a skill issue. My brain has started recognising patterns more, but it is no where near robot mode yet. I was putting it down to lack of context regarding the situation it throws me into, and my preconceived notions of what that situation would be. But I guess I just realised that its not about the context is it, and you don't need context, its just seeing where the pieces can go and weighing up the best option.
You just have to grind out puzzles then you’ll start recognizing patterns in them then you’ll start getting them right
The point is, you don't know. Work your way through a process of targeting the king, or in lieu of that, a high value piece, or in lieu of that, a positional advantage.
Main meaning of solving puzzles is to get better in playing games. In games, you have to be prepared for many different situations. This is logic of switching themes in puzzles. But if you want to solve puzzles for solving puzzles itself, pick custom puzzles. There you can choose difficulty and theme you want and for example solve mate in three forever.
I quite like the puzzles, and like to sit down and do 50 or something in a row.
What I have found frustrating however is that recently the puzzles just keep switching the objectives non-stop.
The vast majority of puzzles are aimed at checking the king or check mating him. Which I am of course used to, and its good that the puzzles try and test me by throwing in different situations. But I keep getting really random puzzles at times that seem to make no sense or logic. I will far example, have ten in a row that involve the enemy king, then randomly I will have 1 - 5 that have nothing to do with the enemy king whatsoever. I had one yesterday where I swear you could get a checkmate in 2 moves, but no that was not the answer, it was moving a random pawn from f5 to f6. I am not joking.
When I do puzzle, I just click play puzzles and do one after that other, and when I do that, its not giving me any clue for what to look for. Sure if I was ELO 2,000, then like a robot I would spot all these potential moves, but currently I am sat here wasting time looking for impossible checks or check mates that don't exist. I then make some moves I almost certainly know are wrong only for it to eventually give me a clue and its to take some irrelevant piece in defense from a discovered attack.
Is this just something I need to get used to? Or is there a better approach to doing puzzles that I am missing. Just had like 6 puzzles in the row bamboozle me as I just logged in and they are all hybrid defense and attack puzzles (where you start off attacking then transition into defense across 4 moves or whatever - these are not easy for new players).