How to Improve your Chess Tactics after a long Lay Off from Competitive Chess

Almost all chess players, professional and amateurs go through a period in their life when they go away for an extended period of time from playing chess. In that period, they maybe taking care of business, work careers or plainly just not playing chess at that moment.

During that period of layoff from chess, their tactical ability and skill suffers most. What once was instantly recognized by them as tactical possibilities does not anymore come second nature to them.

They play again against their opponents and sparring mates whether long game or blitz chess and they seem not to defeat those that they regularly beat before.  This happened to me in our office,  we have been playing 5 minute blitz chess every lunch time.  I took a long chess layoff and when I got back into playing, it seems that I cannot beat my officemates with the same ease as before.  And those that are strong players I cannot beat anymore.  That lead me to search for answers.

Maybe It is because I have lost their tactical eye because on non-practice. If they are to play competitive chess again, they must regain their tactical abilities in chess.

Use a chess tactics training software that has thousands of chess positions with various chess tactics motifs.  Solve them each motif or all of them at a pre-determined number of days and resolve and resolve them again at declining number of days, usually cutting the number of days into half.  For example, you intend to solve everything in 32 days.  At the next chess tactics solving cycle, determine to solve them in just 16 days, then by just 8 days, then just 4 days, then just 2 days.  I assure you, you can recover or even surpass your past tactical abilities or even that of strong grandmasters.

There are a lot of chess tactics training software training software there, but the one I used was CT Art 2.0.  It was a great software and its guaranteed to solve your chess tactical training needs.  You will never miss a tactical possibility  again with these software and your chess rating would definitely shoot up by at least 100 points.

In my own experience, the only chess tactics training book that results to great leap on your chess tactics skill is "The Art of Checkmate".  That book opened a lot of new knowledge in me as a beginner and honed my tactical skills making it ready for more complicated and more difficult chess problems.

For beginners, I highly recommend that you buy your own book on chess tactics, particularly "The Art of Checkmate".

If you want a free way of improving your chess tactics, just go to YouTube and type in the search box "Chess Tactics Training". A lot of high quality videos would show on search results. The videos below are from YouTube.

I suggest that a serious chess player learn from the games of Paul Morphy.  His games are very instructive and packs a lot of chess genius.