How to keep improving when missing advanced knowledge prevents finding the answer to tactical puzzles

Question

I consider myself to be an intermediate player. I understand the tactical motifs well and can solve quite a few tactical puzzles with relative ease. I have also dedicated time at working on end games and can handle the basic ones with major and minor pieces as well as the ones involving pawns decently.

Lately I have been paying a lot of attention at the tactical problems that I get wrong and I have noticed that for the most part, the reason of my mistakes is that I don't know how to correctly evaluate the resulting position correctly to pick the right move.

For example: I don't really have a diagram but the question is more general than specific so, please bear with me. In a recent one I found the correct first move and on the second one I chose to exchange a knight for a rook thinking I would end up with an advantage in quality. That turned out to be a mistake. The right answer was to take a bishop which made the queen to take my knight which was defended. I kept thinking "why on earth would the queen take the knight if it is going to be taken? It makes no sense".

I know that the right answer boils down to the specific position, even when analyzing it with the engine I could see that in this case, by taking the rook the advantage was completely lost and if the other side did not take with the queen, the advantage I had would rise exponentially.

My questions would be, how can I learn this stuff? What kind of sources do I have to look for? What subject should I Google? What kind of books, or better yet, titles can I read so that I can start understanding this?

Answer 1

I think the most important thing to do right now is to clarify exactly what the problem you're having is. From the somewhat vague example you gave I have a suspicion, but I can't be sure. I think that your problem with the tactics is that the way you evaluate the resulting positions from the tactical sequences you calculate is too simplistic, in this case by being over-reliant on the material count while not taking other positional factors into account.

From the way your example is phrased, it seems to me like you can understand that the resulting position from the correct solution is better than the one resulting from your solution when you compare the end positions next to one another. So it might be a case of you knowing that you're solving a tactical problem, and therefore you assume that you're looking for a way to win material, causing you to "tunnel-vision" when solving these tactics exercises. In this case, the solution to your problem is rather simple in nature: just be aware that finding the best continuation to a problem is not always the same as finding a way to win material, it's all about ending up in the best possible position.

Another potential problem that could be the issue for you is that you stop your calculation too soon; sometimes it's necessary to calculate further than you originally expect to see why a continuation is good or bad, and if this is the case for you (which it could be, judging by your example) then you need to ask yourself why you stopped calculating at the point that you did. Why didn't you notice that you needed to calculate a few moves further? And if you were to calculate further, would you have been able to see what was wrong with your line? In this case, it is vital to be aware of this if you're ever going to fix the issue in the first place, and to appreciate the importance of calculating to the very end of the line, where the position has clarified to the point where it's easy to evaluate directly.

In the end, I seriously doubt that all your problems with these more "advanced" tactics are based in a lack of "advanced knowledge" of positional chess. I think it has more to do with your approach/attitude to calculation might be somewhat misguided and/or overly simplistic. But in the end, this is hard to judge from one vague example, and I might be way off in my assessment of your particular case. In any case I felt that what I've stated here needed to be stated so that you are at least aware of some of the potential pitfalls with tactics that are easy to overlook if you're not aware of them.

Answer 2

In your example the opponent was forced to exchange his queen for a knight.

That usually means that

1. They will win material on top of that to minimize material loss (2 pieces and 2 pawns for a queen is materially better than just being a piece down). Converting material advantages is mostly a matter of endgame technique and then trading down into endgames. There is a new book by Gelfand "Technical Decision Making in Chess" which is dedicated to converting static advantages. Of course there are also decent free resources on the topic of converting material advantages.

2. The knight was a key attacking piece and the attack was not holdable. Seeing an attack and correctly judging it is not only a matter of tactics, but also understanding how to conduct an attack. On that topic I really liked "Attacking Manual" by Jacob Aagaard.

Answer 3

To be honest you are not as advanced as you think you are.

If you are talking about tactics then almost always there is a clear material advantage or mate resulting from doing the tactics. How is it you are advanced and cannot see such an advantage?

In some cases the advantage may be positional. Clearly your experience and positional understanding is lacking. I know of no really good materials to teach you positional understanding although there may now be some on the internet. It may just take a lot of playing to gather experience to appreciate the positional advantages as well as material ones. When you finally understand that position is far more important than material you will be ready to grok those problems that you are getting wrong now.

OTOH those tactical problems on line do not always have the best solution just what somebody claimed was best.

For us to help you better then please provide specific positions and ask about those. Also tell us what your FIDE rating is that makes you think you are at the advanced level you keep claiming you are.

Having played almost 70 years your comments sound like a kid of about 12 with helicopter parents telling them how great they are. You might be a 40 year old with a phd but you do not come across as an adult at all. Especially when you keep asserting that there is some advanced knowledge out there if only we would tell where it was hidden then you could be a world class player.