ACED

How to solve any puzzle

After playing games, solving puzzles is the most important way to improve your chess. Puzzles develop your pattern recognition and calculation skills, and provide practice in finding the best move in high leverage moments.

Yet, as with any form of chess training, how you do it is as important as what you do. If you solve puzzles with a bad thought process, that’s the process you’re practicing and reinforcing.

Today I’ll go through my thought process for solving puzzles, which I call ACED: Align, Calculate, Evaluate, Decide.

Align

The first step is to align yourself with the position. In other words, to get your bearing, recognize the main elements, and determine what you’re trying to accomplish. This is especially important in a puzzle, because in contrast to a game where you have an ongoing narrative and some preexisting ideas about the position, here you’re dropped into a completely unfamiliar scenario.

A good place to start is the material imbalance. Material isn’t always the most important factor, but it often is, and it tells you a lot about what you need to accomplish. If you’re down a rook, you probably need to win a lot of material or create mating threats very quickly. If you’re up a rook, all you need to do is survive. You’d be amazed how often I’ve seen players look at a position for a long time without realizing they’re way up (or way down) material.

Counting the material also acts as an on-ramp to thinking about the position, because it’s quick and easy. Even if it doesn’t end up being the most important factor in the position, you should still be aware of it.

When it comes to looking at the other factors, there are several templates you can use. I like K-MAP for evaluation, and it works well for alignment too: King safety, Material (already did that!), Activity, Pawn structure.

Another good template is Aagaard’s three questions:

1. What is the worst piece?

2. Where are the weaknesses?

3. What is my opponent’s idea?

Ultimately, these are both good ways to start thinking about the position. Not every point or question is guaranteed to yield fruit every time, but usually at least one of them will point you in a good direction. The more skilled you become, the more intuitive the process gets.