I have been furiously solving tactical puzzles for 6 weeks now and about three weeks ago I reactivated my account on chess.com.
Long story short I have seen my "rating" go from 1280 to 1590 during this time and for the first time ever I qualified for the second round, not in one but two tournaments on the site so I am definitely seeing improvement.
After asking for the computer analysis for the games that I have lost, I decided to also analyze the ones that I won so I got the last one, which I was feeling particularly good about it, and it turns out that the only reason I won is because my opponent did far worse blunders than I did. If he had been just a little bit stronger he would have crushed me.
I have followed the recommended variants and I just cannot understand why the position I ended up with is far worse than the one the computer recommends. I have zero understanding of positional play.
I feel that I still need A LOT of tactical practice, I still miss quite a few solutions from rather simple puzzles, but I am wondering if by not knowing strategy all this tactical knowledge might go to waste because of mistakes and blunders during the games.
So the questions would be:
- When is it a "right" time to start easing off on the tactical training to start balancing it with strategy/positional one?
- If I focus on these two, is there some kind of heuristic as to how to balance that training (20% - 80%, 30% - 70%, 50% - 50%)?
- As a bonus, if you could recommend some basic literature for someone who has absolutely zero understanding of positional play it would be appreciated.
Thanks.