Trying to get good at chess is a scary prospect. The best at chess are expected have a special kind of lunacy, from Bobby Fisher’s infamous “Wilderness Years” to Kirsan Ilyumzhinov‘s alien abduction (the same aliens that gave us the game of chess). As Vikto Korchnoi (A really good GM) said, “No Chess Grandmaster is normal, they only differ in the extend of their madness”. Thankfully I’m not that good at chess.

But to get better at chess I play “Chess Tactics”. They are puzzles — chess positions that you are dropped in the middle of with little backstory. You are told to find the best move. Now there is a clear “best” move in these scenarios, usually involving a pin, x-ray attack, fork, or other tactical motif.

Either way I play this on the computer and on my phone. On the computer I get access to a bunch of stats about my success. Here are some of those stats

This is my personal ELO Rating compared to the number of puzzles I’ve completed. An ELO Rating is the rating of a player compared to everyone else. To give some scale a traditional “over the board” player (i.e. your grandpa) is usually around 1000 and the world’s best Magnus Carlsen is a 2650 or so.

This is the problems I’ve gotten correct relative to the problems I’ve gotten incorrect for varying difficulties. Problems also have ratings, so a problem with rating of 1300 means a 1301 player would on average get it right and a 1299 player would on average miss it.

The other stats I figured out is the number of problems per session (27.5) and percent correct (63%). Are there any other metrics you’d like to see or think would be interesting? Let me know in the comments.

Notes:

833 trials were used. I have another 1200 or so on my mobile tactics trainer but can’t get them into a good form

I used ChessTempo for the tactics and data. They offer some similar graphs through their Pro Account which is nice too — these are just some to supplement those