At higher levels, chess revolves around preparation, practice, and mental strength. The search for exceptional traps, tactics, moves, and ideas demands more than mere reliance on innate ability and talent to discover the best moves on the board.
Advanced players must master specific elements of the game, such as tactics, through dedicated practice.
If you’re a very good player, just below the top top players, then possibly the difference between you and the elite players is the eye to spot almost everything on the board, or it could just be the psychology, maybe you doubt yourself and not play your best moves.
I can’t help you with the psychology part but I can definitely help you with chess tactics for advanced players!
Garry Kasparov is a great example when we think of tactics. Watch the video below to see how incredible he was at spotting clever moves and setting traps with no way out.
Also, skip the stream below to 1:25:05 and see how sharp Garry Kasparov is in solving even the most difficult puzzles live:
Only a true genius can have such a sharp eye and vision to solve these difficult problems.
But before you lose any hope and start thinking that becoming great at chess is an inborn ability, I will like to share a video of GM Leonid Kritz, where he is solving puzzles and explaining the ideas behind them.
From him, you will learn that having an ability to solve difficult chess tactics is all down to your vision of a chessboard and the time you give to solving tactics:
Things to know about Chess Tactics
If you want to be great in solving chess tactics, it is important to know the basics.
There are a total of 24 themes in chess tactics. Any puzzle or tactical position is made up of 1 or many of these themes.
The 24 themes of chess tactics are demonstrated in a video below:
Chess Tactics for Advanced Players leading to Checkmate
Do you know the Chessable’s Advanced Checkmate Patterns Manual? Even many super grandmasters dumbfounded themselves in solving those puzzles.
Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi, the two current best chess players in the world, took on the challenge of solving the most advanced chess tactics leading to checkmate from that manual. How they did? Check out in the video below:
The Thinking Strategy behind solving difficult chess positions:
Understanding the problem is half a solution, if you don’t know the problem, how will you solve it?
It requires a great sense of what’s going on on a chessboard. Once you have grasped the situation properly, there is a 5 steps thinking strategy starting with a SWOT analysis to resolve a position.
That 5 steps thinking strategy is explained in a video below:
How to become a Tactical Monster of Chess?
Becoming a tactical monster of chess is not an overnight thing. Great chess players like Garry Kasparov did it by dedicating their everything to the game.
There is a master method for becoming a tactical monster i.e. being able to spot the tactics and taking advantage of them.
When we are solving a puzzle, we know that it’s a puzzle, which makes it easier to solve it but in a real game that information is missing, and oftentimes, many of us miss an opportunity to gain a significant advantage with an easy to solve puzzle in a game.
International Master Robert Ris did a whole course on how to spot these tactics in your games. A part of it is on Youtube, and you can watch it below: