If I don't play chess with regularity, what's the best way to get better at these problems? Would it be as effective to play games against AI?
Edit: I asked my wife about this - who is generally better at chess than I am by a large margin - and she said, in a way that implied it was obvious, that of course the way to get better was simply to play a lot. But although this must have a positive effect on one's skill level, I feel like just playing AIs over and over, without some guidance as to theory or something, might just lead to bad habits and getting better at beating AIs.
Could be wrong - but if my past auto-didactic efforts are any indication I can't help but wonder if there's a more efficacious road - maybe involving books or something...
If you really want to improve you should play games against and then analyse them with strong chess players. They can better explain you the ideas and concepts behind certain move orders than any AI. Apart from that I would solve tactical chess problems on a level below the ones I am presenting here. You must get a feeling about chess tactics. Long variations like these ones here are maybe still too complicated - but on the other side of course I don't know how advanced you already are ...
Not very, I’m afraid. I found some tactical games to run that are very simple and I’ll start folding those into my free time for now.
If you like we can play (unrated) chess at the lichess-server. I am jaki01 there.
I appreciate the offer - I'm downloading that app now - i think I'm going to set some short term goals first and see if I can spend a month getting good enough to consistently beat the low level AIs - right now I still lose to really low level mistakes that I think repeat play with AIs will iron out.
Once I won't utterly embarass myself - and here I'm taking a conservative definition of the "utterly" - then I will definitely take you up on this!