Chess: How to Find Tactics

It has been said that "Chess is 99% tactics." This is very true. You can study chess openings, study endgames, study how to improve your piece placement, all of which are very important, but without tactics you're not really improving your chess. You can work so hard to get a great position in a game only to miss a knight-fork and lose a rook. You can memorize the Scheveningen variation of the Sicilian only to get your queen trapped by a tricky opponent who knows nothing about your opening but has been doing lots of tactics puzzles at tacticstime.com. So how do you learn to spot tactics, since they are so important to improving your chess ability?

Lee Simmons of Colorado's Rocky Mountain Chess has a method of calculation that he teaches called "The Compulsion Scale." Using the Compulsion Scale I found the right move in this position during a real game. Finding a tactic in a real game is actually a lot harder than finding one in a tactics puzzle. In a puzzle you know it's there, so you know to look for it. In a real game you don't know it's there. But if you use the Compulsion Scale you will find it. So what is the Compulsion Scale?

The word compulsion means to be forced to do something. A check is a forcing move. You are forced to move out of check. Therefore all checks are first on the compulsion scale. That doesn't mean you should always play the check if it is there, but it does mean you should always look at all checks as far as you can see. All checks for you and all checks that your opponent can play on you. As far as you can see means you don't just play the check in your head, you play all possible responses to the check, followed by all follow-up moves that you can make and all responses etc.

Second on the Compulsion Scale is threats of checkmate. If you are threatening to checkmate me that is compelling. If I have a threat of checkmate that is also compelling. The only move that is more forcing is a check. If you are in check you cannot checkmate me (unless the move that gets you out of check is a checkmate for me. Sometimes it can be hard to find a threat of checkmate for both sides, but you must look for it every move. Of course not on move one or two maybe, but a few moves into the game and especially when the position looks tactical and complicated.

Next on the compulsion scale is threats to win heavy material. In the diagram above it was this threat that I looked for and found. Black to move finds a direct threat to win heavy material and it is a tactic. In most games winning heavy material will not be an obvious one-mover. It will take two moves. At first it looks like I'm losing a piece in this combination. The fact that it looks at first glance like I am losing a piece is what stops a lot of players from looking any further. But a second look, or one move further shows that I'm winning the piece back and more with a fork. Now go back to the diagram and see if you can find it.

Of course at advanced levels all material is heavy, but for beginners the heavy material simply means the more valuable pieces. A rook is worth five pawns, a queen is worth nine, a bishop or a knight is worth three and of course the king is worth the whole game.

Sometimes a tactic doesn't win a piece or checkmate the king, it just improves your position. It means opening lines for your pieces or closing lines for your opponent's pieces. Lines are rows of connected squares that your pieces have access to. For a knight you might look for something called an outpost, a powerful square deep in your opponent's territory that cannot be chased away by a pawn. Maybe the piece improvement is a gaining a passed pawn. Maybe it is improving your king safety or king centralization in the endgame. Maybe it will be connecting your rooks or disconnecting your opponent's. Whatever it is, when you have run out of more compelling moves and plans you should look for these improvements to your position.

Now go back and look again at the diagram above and see if you can find it. Did you find Knight takes b2? At first it looks impossible, it looks like you are losing a knight but remember that you should look at all threats to win material (light or heavy) as far as you can see. That means capture the knight in your mind with the rook and then you will see that the queen can then recapture the knight while forking the rook and king. This is a tactic called removing the guard. Good luck finding tactics in your next game and remember to use the compulsion scale.