J.L.W.S. The Special One wrote:
My problems with tactics seems very atypical, so let me explain:

I. My ineptness in winning with tactics:
1. I fail to spot tactical oppurtunities to win material, etc.
(although I do spot them quite often, I miss enough to list this here)
2. I spot a tactical oppurtunity, but often there is a fatal flaw in it
and the refutation leaves me hopelessly lost, often in material.

That's entirely typical.


II. My plans being thwarted by tactics:
1. While carrying out my plan, I blunder away a piece or into
checkmate.
2. My opponent uses tactics to prevent me from carrying out my plan
(such as constantly attacking my Queen when my plan utilises advancing
a passed pawn).

As Dan Heisman recently said in one of his Novice Nook columns at
chesscafe.com, in general, material considerations almost always trump
positional considerations. If your plan fails because your opponent was
threatening to win material or the game, you chose the wrong plan.


III. My plans successfully leading to a strategically won position
which I subsequently lose due to tactics:

This is just a special case of (I), I think.


IV. Losing due to tactics in the opening
1. I blunder away a piece or into checkmate (sometimes into a line
which leaves my King horribly exposed)
2. My opponent creates tactical threats which thwart my opening
strategy (e.g. as Black, my opponent has a Knight fork on c7, and to
prevent it, I have to play ...Qd6 which blocks in my d-pawn and
prevents me from developing my QB and QR)

If this is a real example rather than something you made up on the spur of
the moment, you need to consider your opening strategy more carefully. If
you have the option of moving your queen to d6 before you've played ...d5
or developed your QB, you're almost certainly moving your queen too early.


When posing this question in other forums, people recommend I do
puzzles.

I'm going to recommend you do puzzles, too so I'll explain why it's not a
flawed idea.


1. In puzzles, I know there is a combination, so I spend 10 minutes
looking at it until I find the solution.

Firstly, ten minutes is probably too long to spend on a single puzzle.
If you can't do it after five minutes or so, you'll probably learn more by
looking at the answer than at the question because the answer is something
you couldn't work out on your own. Note down the puzzles you couldn't do
and come back to them a little while later (maybe a couple of days or a
week). See which ones you can do now that you couldn't do before and
you'll find that you're learning how to do the puzzles. The ones you
still can't do are the ones that rely on concepts you find difficult so
spend a little more time on them.


In a real chess game, how would I know when a tactical oppurtunity for
me or my opponent arises?

Because aspects of the position become familiar to you as tactical cues.
For example, if the back rank is weak, you try to work out how to get a
rook there to deliver mate. If there is an undefended piece, you look for
tactical ways to take it (e.g., fork it and another piece). If there is
piece whose defenders you might be able to distract, you look for ways of
doing that. You'll start looking for discovered attacks and so on.


If I treated every position as a puzzle after every move, I'd lose on
time in OTB tournaments.

By doing more puzzles, you get better at identifying the sorts of
positions that are likely to contain tactical opportunities so that you
don't need to spend too much time worrying about tactics in the rest. Of
course, you'll always miss some but that's in the nature of the game.


2. Many puzzles are way out of my depth. There is no way a 1600 player
like me can spot combinations of the depth of Rotlewi-Rubinstein unless
he has seen the game before.

So you need to find puzzles more suited to your depth. The Polgar book,
for example, has graded puzzles.


3. Doing puzzles is like memorizing opening theory. OK, so you can
solve 1000 tactical puzzles.

No, it's not like memorizing opening theory. You don't memorize every
position and its solution but you start to learn what kinds of position
contain tactical opportunities.


But what are the chances that one of the 1000 positions will appear in a
real game?

Higher than you think, actually. :-) I've never had a huge and obvious
tactical hint from a puzzle in one of my OTB games but I've won two or
three internet blitz games with Legal's mate, for example. On the same
note, I've often played OTB and online games where I've thought, ``This
position is quite a lot like one in that game I went through the other
week. I think the plan there was to do such and such.'' It's a good
guide for what to look for in a position.


Even if it appears, can you remember seeing it and the winning/losing
combination?

This question is a bit of a red herring, really. If you remember that
you're in a position like a puzzle you've seen but you can't remember the
answer to that puzzle, that's a really big hint that you should spend your
ten minutes working out the answer over the board!


Another advantage of doing lots of puzzles is that it will dramatically
increase your ability to calculate accurately, which makes it less likely
that the tactics you do try to play will go wrong.

You mentioned in your post somewhere (sorry, I snipped it because I didn't
think I had anything to say on the matter) that you're looking for a book
that explains the concepts behind tactics rather than just presenting
hundreds of examples. You could try something like Chernev's
`Combinations: The Heart of Chess' or Znosko-Borovsky's `The Art of Chess
Combination'. Both are reprinted by Dover and can be bought cheaply from
Amazon. I've only skimmed them, though, so I can't say for sure whether
they'd be what you're looking for. As I recall, Znosko-Borovsky has more
explanatory text and is probably more your style.


Dave.

--
David Richerby Permanent Indelible Postman (TM):
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ it's like a man who delivers the mail
but it can't be erased and it'll be
there for ever!