Don't play chess puzzles, solve them
Chess puzzles have solutions. This sounds extremely obvious, but it's easy for me to play them as if they don't.
I've played chess since I was young, often under fast time controls, and there's a certain mode where you just look at the position and make a plausibly good move within a few seconds.
Is it the best move? Maybe, but probably not. Most decisions in a chess game are not critically important, where only a single narrow path leads to a large advantage (or avoiding a large loss) [footnote 1] . By playing plausibly decent moves quickly, you can instead put your opponent into critical positions where they need to spend a lot of time to avoid missteps, especially through aggressive openings like the Danish Gambit or the Fried Liver Attack.
For me, it's easy to get into this same mode while doing chess puzzles. There's often great-looking wrong moves for any position, and I have enough experience that I often pick the right ones. My puzzle rating on Lichess is high enough to satisfy my ego, so I was stagnant for a while and happy with that.
By chance, I spotted someone on the internet describe exactly how I approached chess puzzles... and they called me a chump for doing it. Chess puzzles have an exact solution. Every single puzzle is a critical position [footnote 2] . It follows that if I have not calculated out a substantial advantage, then I have not solved the puzzle yet, and I can just slow down and think about it more.
My rating shot up about 100 points after I started doing this. I haven't acquired any fundamentally new knowledge about chess - it's just a mindset difference [footnote 3] . That's wild. At the end of the day, my chess puzzle rating is just a vanity metric, but it makes me wonder: is there anything else that I'm doing, where I play by instinct instead of calculating to the true solution?
P.S.: I haven't played many real chess games in quite a while, so let me know if you'd like to play.
Footnotes
[footnote 1] (back to content)
This quote from Chess Life magazine, June 2014 made the rounds during last year's cheating accusations:
Former World Champion Viswanathan Anand said that one bit per game, one yes-no answer about whether a sacrifice is sound, could be worth 150 rating points.
Although I'm not a world champion of anything, I suspect this is also true of life - perhaps even 200 rating points.
[footnote 2] (back to content)
Lichess and Chess.com have both described how algorithmic approaches to finding puzzles from real gameplay.
[footnote 3] (back to content)
Okay, arguably the only fundamental chess knowledge is the basic ruleset, and elementary schoolchildren and our AI overlords can both learn that very quickly. But I feel like I didn't learn any new tactics or heuristics either, or even fuzzy feelings about where to look first.
The space below is left empty so that clicking on footnotes will scroll to the correct location.
And a bonus:
