01 January 2023

Puzzles

On 19 December 2022, I noted on Chess Skills’s Facebook page that I was considering a push through 266 more puzzles to reach a milestone: 5000 puzzles solved on chess.com by the end of 2022. I did far more, completing 649 puzzles in two weeks.

My puzzle rating on 19 December was 2806 with a peak rating of 2849. My puzzle rating at the end of the year was 2855 with a peak of 3002. I crossed over 3002 early Christmas morning, but became greedy in an effort to surpass a friend who was at 3012. An hour later I had fallen to 2702 (see “Blitz Addiction”). I got back to 2802 before I quit. through the last week of the year, I labored to keep my puzzle rating over 2800.

These are the last three that I failed in my final session on New Year's Eve.



Puzzles on chess.com can be instructive. They can be rewarding. In the last two weeks of 2022, I found them addicting.

Often I find more benefit in puzzles from books. The sequencing of puzzles in The Manual of Chess Combinations by Sergey Ivashchenko provide instructive value that is missing from all online tactics training. I could benefit from working through volume 2, which is at the right level for my current skill. Like the exercises that chess.com feeds me, I should get most of them correct when I am focused. Volume 1 is easier, but I made a personal commitment to do all the more than 1300 exercises in one year's time. I started at the end of February and have about 500 more to go.

The difficulty of the puzzles in Paata Gaprindashvili, Imagination in Chess: How to Think Creatively and Avoid Foolish Mistakes (see my review, “Imagination in Chess”) keep calling me. They offer no instant rewards with a meaningless online rating, but instead offer deeper satisfaction when I solve them correctly. These puzzles are on par with volume 3 of The Manual of Chess Combinations by Alexander Mazja.

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