[cactus2093]

I'm curious if anyone has advice on how to interpret the ratings in the tactics trainers. Should they map roughly to your in-game rating? I'm pretty new to chess and still pretty bad (just under 1000 online, I make a lot of blunders and/or fall for opponents' tactics) but my rating is 1750 on the tactics trainer.

I would imagine at some point the tactics are not the bottleneck and I should be working on something else instead (openings, endgames, or studying mid-game strategy?) but just wondering where that point is.

[Nemerie]

> Should they map roughly to your in-game rating?

For a typical player, the chess.com puzzles rating is at least 500 points higher than the blitz rating on this site.

I think tactics shouldn't be on focus only for very strong players, such as FMs or IMs, but you definitely don't need to choose one instead of another. It's fine to learn some tactics, then some strategy, then some endgames, isn't it?

[drw]

Among chess.com players who have played 10+ blitz games and 10+ puzzles, the average difference between their blitz rating and puzzle rating is 45 (blitz rating higher). The standard deviation of the difference is 374.

Among players who have played 100+ games/100+ puzzles, the difference is -205: puzzle rating substantially higher, standard deviation 320.

I'm not sure that it's ideal for ratings to be identical across the domains, but they should correlate to some degree.

[whimsicalism]

> Should they map roughly to your in-game rating?

For lichess at least, they don't. I'm a 2100 tactics and nowhere near that in actual rating (around 1500).

[bluGill]

You can make grandmaster studying only tactics and playing games. However most branch out long before then because there are other useful things to learn as you get good.