I've heard that the players strength depends on his tactical skills, his analysis and calculation abilities, and when two players are of the same strength tactically then planning skills, strategy, opening knowledge and theory make a little difference between them.
I also heard about the principle of tactical dominance. It states that the smallest tactic is more valuable then the biggest positional advantage. So you can't avoid a pawn to become isolated if it costs you another pawn, because such positional weaknesses will always cost less than a pawn. However many positional weaknesses can be a disaster of course. What do you think about this?
I agree that tactics are very important, but you won't get any tactical possibilities to exploit if you have no opening knowledge and strategic understanding. I think the tactically superior player will usually win, but if that player is weaker in positional understanding, he has a higher chance of losing anyway due to a tactic the opponent had seen.
Also I don't fully agree with the principle of strategic dominance. If you would follow this principle strictly, a pawn sacrifice would never be possible unless you would immediately win back material or mate your opponent, which is obviously not true.
Yes the principle of tactical dominance is only true when the positional factor is only one, but when many positional factors come together like in the gambits example, or when you create a mating net through a sacrifice, then it's not just a positional advantage, many tactical and mating opportunities are there.
And in the case of positional moves I think they are easier than calculation, we can find positional moves based only on principles or on intuition.
Hi friends, When one is talking of positional factors, is it placing one's pieces on a strategic square on the board so that one could obtain an advantage in the future even though there are no immediate threats to one's opponent. I would be grateful anyone could clarify this. Thank you friends.
Tactics is just one variable so is strategy. Both are different corners/edges/boxes/cans of skill or whatever else you want to call them. To totally use each effectively you must have knowledge of the others.
If we could possibly equate these to values (meaning lets assign 2 sets of values for 2 players).
Player A
Tactics 8/10
Strategy 3/10
Total 11/20
Player B
Tactics 7/10
Strategy 5/10
Total 12/20
Player B is better.
Same would be said if
Player A
Tactics 7/10
Strategy 4/10
Total 11/20
Player B
Tactics 6/10
Strategy 6/10
Total 12/20
Player B comes up short in tactics but "makes up for it in strategy."
Now this only works if both players would play all the main openings from both black and white to balance things out. Some openings lead to middlegames where tactics will prevail and others where strategy will prevail but most are fairly balanced. Lets not get theoretical about how you would possibly calculate this on an individual level, but the point I am making is both are important to understand and without 1 you do not have/understand 2.
I would say two players of relatively equal tactically ability, the one playing with a plan (strategy) would generally have the advantage.
Tactics vs strategy? Players that are in to tactics will choose to play variants that require more tactical calculations (sacrifices, creating imbalances). On the other hand do players that are into strategic positions choose those strategic positions (draws, theoretical positions).
It is a myth that those are separable attributes. It all comes down to the calculations made and preferred. If those calculations turn out to be wrong you might still have a small edge as a strategical player. But don't pin me down on this.
Missed the mate in 1 -.-
Positional chess is higher than tactical chess.
Playing better positional chess than your opponent leads to the tactical opportunities.
Tactical combinations are just the physical manifestations of superior positional play.
In my opinion, the learning curve of chess goes:
1. opening principles
2. tactics
3. positional chess
In positional chess, the 1. and 2. are just tools for the position. But position is GOD. Serve your GOD!
Still without one you dont have two and vice versa.
Heh, this is one of my favorite topics, but it often adopts an almost religious character, so I usually hesitate to chime in.
TLDR: Positional play and tactics are both important to imperfect players like us and computers, but tactics are fundamental and positional play serves tactics, not vice versa.
(Very) Long version:
First, it helps to define our terms as best we can.
There's been much back and forth about defining things like "tactics","combination","positional play", and the like historically, so I can't do justice to that conversation here.
For simplicity, I'll define tactics as series of forcing moves, "forced" in the sense that these concrete moves are the only way to achieve the objective result (win/loss/draw) of the position.
This is a bit restrictive, and leaves out some things that we might normally call tactics (for example, finding a mate in 5 in a position where you're up a queen; you likely have many, many ways to win, but most of us would still call that a tactic).
However, I don't mind having tactics defined narrowly because that's actually charitable to the other side of the debate.
Let's also say positional play is everything that's not a tactic. This is broader than what most of us would consider positional, but again, this is charitable to the opposing view, and simplifies the discussion.
Now, assuming the initial position is a draw, we can already say by definition that a perfect tactical player with no positional sense whatsoever would never lose. Why? Because no matter how difficult he makes his position with his nonexistent positional play, he's never going to miss the forced drawing lines.
Conversely, a player with immaculate understanding of positional concepts but no sense of tactics is going to lose a lot. He'll shatter his opponent's pawn structure, but drop a piece doing so, or some such thing.
Now, these contrived examples make clear why both tactics and positional play are important for us (and engines): none of us can be perfect tactically.
The goal of positional play is to make the position easier for us and more difficult for our opponent.
Sure, doubled isolated pawns are almost always bad, but only because they're hard to defend and might get picked off or the opponent can use the square in front of the pawns as the base for a winning attack. They make tactics for the opponent easier to come by.
Alternatively, take something like a lack of space and activity. Without space and activity for us, it's pretty easy for our opponent to avoid tactical mistakes, and we'll end up being forced to find very difficult tactics to survive. We've made the game easy for our opponent and hard for us.
If I were perfect tactically, I could just say "Eh, sure those doubled isolated pawns look ugly, but I happen to know allowing them doesn't lose."
Now, even if I am perfect tactically, if I'm playing a tactically imperfect player, I might still have use for positional concepts, since I want to make the game as hard for him as possible, and those doubled isolated pawns might make the game too easy for him.
Still, though, tactics are at the root of all of this, which is not surprising to me.
When I play someone, the thing that most strongly indicates how much difficulty I'll have playing them is their tactical strength.
I've played guys who were very strong tactically and played very anti-positionally, but their tactics were strong enough relative to mine that it didn't matter.
Conversely, I've played guys who knew the typical plans and positional ideas in the positions we've reached much better than I did, but they were weaker tactically, so I came out on top.
Tactics are fundamental, but we (and our opponents) will always be imperfect tactically, so our results will generally be better if we use some positional judgment.
This isn't always true, though; one of the cool things about chess is that when you have several moves with the same objective evaluation (win/loss/draw), the main thing that determines the practical result of each is how well you play the resulting position compared to your opponent.
The move that's best on positional grounds might lead to a drawn position where I'm "better", but that my opponent will play well and draw.
An anti-positional move might lead to another drawn position where I'm "worse", but is also messy and will allow me to outplay my opponent.
Positional play is a great help, for sure. Even engines, which are much better tactically than we can ever hope to be, get much better results by including positional concepts in their evaluation than if they ignored positional elements and used the extra compute cycles to look for more tactics.
Still, tactics are fundamental, and all else being equal, will give a bigger return on investment than positional play.
Of course, not all else is equal; we can all benefit from getting better at tactics, and we can all benefit from getting stronger positionally.
Still, if a genie told me I could either retain my current positional understanding and become perfect at tactics, or retain my current tactical skill and become perfect at positional understanding, I'd take the former in a heartbeat :)