How do you ‘digest’ tactics? E.g. I learn about forks, how do I actually make use of this new knowledge in a real game?
Separately, my understanding for chess is that grinding tactics is best way to improve for most players in the ~1000 to ~1800 range. What do you think?
So, digest for chess often just means “play”. That said, you can do more targeted practice by e.g 1. Learning about forks by e.g watching a video/reading an article/whatever. 2. Digesting them by doing puzzles containing forks (you can filter puzzles on chess.com).
Separately, yes I agree that just grinding out tactics can get you a pretty long way in that range, and tends to be the bottleneck. Optimal study, especially after ~1400, includes opening/strategy and playing and reviewing (ideally rapid or longer) games.
You can get a more personalised idea of where you specifically should work by going through the last 10+ games you lost and classifying them by loss type: opening/strategy/tactical/endgame/time/psychology.
This will allow you to work on the stuff which is actually losing you games.
How do you ‘digest’ tactics? E.g. I learn about forks, how do I actually make use of this new knowledge in a real game?
Separately, my understanding for chess is that grinding tactics is best way to improve for most players in the ~1000 to ~1800 range. What do you think?
So, digest for chess often just means “play”. That said, you can do more targeted practice by e.g 1. Learning about forks by e.g watching a video/reading an article/whatever. 2. Digesting them by doing puzzles containing forks (you can filter puzzles on chess.com).
Separately, yes I agree that just grinding out tactics can get you a pretty long way in that range, and tends to be the bottleneck. Optimal study, especially after ~1400, includes opening/strategy and playing and reviewing (ideally rapid or longer) games.
You can get a more personalised idea of where you specifically should work by going through the last 10+ games you lost and classifying them by loss type: opening/strategy/tactical/endgame/time/psychology.
This will allow you to work on the stuff which is actually losing you games.