Solving chess puzzles is tough work! There can be uncountable combinations of potential moves to choose from, and sometimes we can find ourselves trapped in the midst of an unstoppable losing streak: shouting desperately at the screen as our rating plummets and wondering to ourselves whether we really are as brilliant as our mother told us when we were little…
In this article I will be exploring the top 5 most common mistakes you can make when approaching chess puzzles.
5. Guessing the Best Move
Crashing in at number 5 is a very common mistake made by the laziest of puzzlers. In all honesty, if you’re making this mistake you deserve as good as you get. Puzzles are problems that need to be solved, not guessed! If you’re the type of knucklehead lacking the patience to approach the problem sensibly, take a good look in the mirror and pull yourself together!
4. Calculating All Possible Moves
In stark contrast to the slothful guesser is the brute force bore. Spending 30 minutes on a checkmate in 3 moves is not a good use of time! It is important to evaluate our best candidate moves quickly, exploring the most obvious forcing moves in our minds first and reaching our conclusion in good time.
3. Misunderstanding the Purpose of the Puzzle
Some chess puzzles require us to checkmate the opponent, some require us to defend and some want us to attack. It’s imperative to understand which of these is the goal before we start calculating many moves. By looking at the position, the safety of each king and the threats to the pieces, we can often quickly figure out the purpose of the puzzle, making life much, much easier.
2. Raging After Making a Mistake
A somewhat more concerning branch of puzzlers are those that lose the plot after getting things wrong. Although it is tempting to spam random moves after we have made a few wrong ones, we must refrain ourselves from doing so! It is important to stay calm and try to understand why a mistake was wrong so that we can learn, improve and develop our puzzling abilities.
1. Using Chess.com for Chess Puzzles
This is by far the most heinous crime of them all. Chess.com not only charges for chess puzzles, but they are mundane and boring to solve! There are far better free websites and apps out there, such as our own and Lichess.
So... You have been warned. Avoid these common mistakes and watch your rating fly up into the sky! Click the 'Play' button below and you can start solving our puzzles right away.