LinearHas anyone improved yet? (General)
How is everyone else doing ? Tactics are my weak point. Yet after doing the tactical exercises every month, my rating for this year was exactly the same as last year. I have read that it is very difficult for adults to improve. Maybe just doing the puzzles is not enough and I need to find a new way of thinking about tbe problems ? I am still capable of learning new things - for example I noticed that doing suduko, I would gradualy pick up new ways of solving them and get faster, but somehow it doesn't seem to happening in chess anymore.
Has anyone improved yet?
by Tony Kosten 
, France, Thursday, December 21, 2006, 23:08 (6694 days ago) @ malcolm
I don't see why adults shouldn't be able to improve - there have been cases of players starting late and becoming Grandmasters! 
Are you doing all the other exercises too, and how are your scores doing?
Has anyone improved yet?
Yes I have improved and from a tactical point of you you can see it better when you play 5 min games when recognizing patterns and calculating quickly is even more important.
I was amazed when reviewing my games with Fritz how many tactics I had missed and they most of the time costed me at least 1/2 point.
In my opinion,not only mine, the tactical aspect of the game,at least at my level,is much more important than any other aspects.
Carry on practice on this site and play more 5 mins,in most playing site you can also review your games and find out the better moves.It is really worth it.Merry Christmas !
Has anyone improved yet?
I know I have improved. I do all the content here each month that I can without killing myself over the toughest of the puzzles, and I also spend a fair amount of time at chess.emrald.net (around 3 visits/week doing 25 to 50 puzzles each visit) doing their puzzles as well. I don't know the merits of it all, but I view the puzzles here as more difficult (certainly more depth/ply to the solutions) and more time to solve them. On the emrald site those puzzles are not usually more than a couple ply, but they need to be solved quickly to avoid losing rating points (the puzzles there have a rating, and you get a rating as you work puzzles, then get puzzles around your rating level).
Anyway, combining the quick tactics exercises over there with the more difficult ones here has proven to be very good for me. I don't actually play tournament chess since I live quite a ways from any city that holds such events, but I do play online and I play locally and there are people that 18 months or so ago I could not have dreamed of holding my own against, and now they seek me out for a challenging game.
I have a lot left to learn. Chess is definitely one of those things where the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. But, true to the mantra on the sales page here, if you exercise the chess muscle it will get better. Mine certainly has.
