How do you organize your calculation ?

Once you answered check the solution here:

Spoiler:

Is it white or black to move?

Black, as indicated by the black circle bottom left, and i turned the board for black side.

Completely overlooked the move, was searching for mating comb against white king lol.

Same here, LostTactic; the position begs for attack against white, but I overlooked the nice simple trap. Also even without that the trap is tricky to see as it involves two knights in coordination.

That's my excuse, so I'm sticking to it. So I guess the poll needs "infinity" as an answer.

When we see a diagram we assume the side to move is going to win so we start to look for an attack because we think a nice tactics is hidden. In this case the aggresive black queen and rooks make us think checkmate is about to happen, this is why we spend too much time to find the answer. If the position were in one of our games, probably we would find the move as first sight because we have the history of the game in our brains so we don't need to spend time calculating the attacking chances as we already did it. And finally this is the cause why we miss tactics opportunities in our games, nobody tell us you move and win, it is something you have to realise yourself.

I train calculation/tactics on this site http://chesstempo.com/
I can se from my statistics that i have spend 8.8 hrs since i started on 25. feb and that I have tried 127 problems.
A month ago I would not have been able to solve this - the training helps a lot. If it helps in real life I dont know but it helps in solving problems.

In the above position i first look for a mating pattern or theme. It was not there right away. Then i look for un-covered pieces (the knight on h3, the bishop on e2 and possibly the rook on F1 if the bishop can be deflected and finally the queen. I spotted the queen as a vunerable peace and my first thourgth was if i could clear the third rank with forcing moces and end up taking the queen with the rook. While liiking at this i discovered the knights move to e7.
best,
Larsen_fan

I wonder if i have to adopt a systematic analysis strategy like:
1. look for king safety
2. look for checks on opponent king
3. look for hanging pieces
4. look for weak pieces
5. look for sacrifices
etc...
Or if i should continue have a global appraoch at the position, and do these steps partially according to the needs of the position, with the risk or miss something, but gaining some time on the clock.
Also, I noticed that everytime i tried to be systematic, i forgot about my initial plan and go in erratic strategy, which is not good either...

Great position. This is a good case for following the ICS protocol to check king safety first - after a brief look at the white king its clear there there is not a local superiority. Then a look at the black king safety drove me to the solution in just under a minute.

In this case, the fact that the queen was in the area of the black king helped because it was the first white piece I considered when looking at the quality of the pieces.

I think the more general approach is a better approach. One of the bad habits I'm trying to correct in my own play is to stop wasting too much time looking for tactics where in fact they don't exist. Too much CT-ART....

I agree with both of you, Hangingking and Pawncustodian, we are taught how to think by ICS and we don't improve because we keep using our erratic thought process. If we would have followed ICS thought process we would have found the very simple move at once.

I can only assume I got it right (I can't seem to find any answer in the spoiler), but I too started looking for ways to attack the white king before seeing the effect of the solution move.