> It assumes you know only how the pieces move and builds step-by-step from there.
Do not get me wrong: TFA is a fine and useful book for an intermediate player but the above claims are overselling it. They are equivalent to telling you that learning the
x ^= y;
y ^= x;
x ^= y;
trick will make you a better programmer while being silent on what copy-and-paste programming, magic constants, or hardcoded data are and how to avoid them. While novice chess players are naturally attracted to brilliant combinations, they will have no chance to play them without knowing how to gain positional advantage.
> Strategy and tactics both are important, but tactics are more important.
> If you're a whiz at strategy but not much good at tactics, you will have trouble winning or having fun because your pieces will keep getting taken.
I beg to differ. You should first learn how to supercharge your pieces by controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc. Two oldie but goodie books that teach these principles and are available as PDF's are Capablanca's A Primer of Chess [0] and Nimzowitsch's My System [1].
EDIT: memorizing openings ⊄ strategy. I understand strategy as applying good principles regardless of your opponent's moves, and tactics as calculating (mostly) forced move sequences. Also, strategy does not have to be dull. Playing a gambit and attacking Black's f7 weakness is a strategy, albeit one that can hardly succeed without tactical thinking.
>> If you're a whiz at strategy but not much good at tactics, you will have trouble winning or having fun because your pieces will keep getting taken.
>I beg to differ. You should first learn how to supercharge your pieces by controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc. [...]
I would disagree. At a rating level below 1300 (where all beginners start) I'm pretty sure that openings don't matter at all and strategy is not very important. Magnus Carlsen, the World Champion, has even suggested that by being only good at tactics you can get to a 2000 ELO rating. If your opponent can look two moves further ahead you will almost always loose. This is also the reason why small children are able to beat seasoned chess amateurs playing at a club level. The children definitely have a limited understanding of the strategy and they don't know a lot of opening theory. But they will outplay you in the middle game.
Thanks for the reply. Since you are the second person who understands the opening theory as a subset of strategy (an alien notion to me), I added a clarification to my post.
Coming across the theory of Steinitz from [0] has made me look at chess in a different manner: at most levels of play rather than it being tactics or strategy, it is more about avoiding mistakes and waiting, prolonging play till oponenent eventually makes a mistake. My experience in over board play has been in concurrence with that view, one plays carefully parrying the opponent's move, while waiting till they make an inevitable mistake, then one can quickly consolidate the advantage in materials, mostly by cancelling out many pieces and then end game can start, which can be somewhat easily learned compared to other parts of the game.
This is the text of the Theory from [0]:
At the beginning of the game the forces stand in equilibrium.
Correct play on both sides maintains this equilibrium and leads to a drawn game.
Therefore a player can win only as a consequence of an error made by the opponent. (There is no such thing as a winning move.)
As long as the equilibrium is maintained, an attack, however skilful, cannot succeed against correct defence. Such a defence will eventually necessitate the withdrawal and regrouping of the attacking pieces and te attacker will then inevitably suffer disadvantage.
Therefore a player should not attack until he already has an advantage, caused by the opponent's error, that justifies the decision to attack.
At the beginning of the game a player should not at once seek to attack. Instead, a player should seek to disturb the equilibrium in his favour by inducing the opponent to make an error - a preliminary before attacking.
When a sufficient advantage has been obtained, a player must attack or the advantage will be dissipated."
Any person(including world champ) makes lot of mistakes and that's why they get badly beat by computers. The thing to know is when the opponent made a mistake and knowing how to attack it to advantage(that is basically called tactic). I wouldn't recognize the mistake of players rated 500+ point above me but a GM could and would punish them.
Indeed. I once posed a question at chess.com, which attracted many comments answering the opposite of my hunch, but after lots of analysis of games I'm pretty sure I'm right:
Looking at the computer-calculated advantage score during a game (e.g. "white is at +1.0"), is it possible to make a move that increases your advantage?
My belief is that, no, as a human it is not possible (at least, virtually impossible) to make a move that increases your calculated advantage. Your advantage is the score calculated with the assumption you make no further mistakes. The best we can do as humans is to keep that score, or (more frequently) lower it.
The game is then won by whoever lowers their advantage the least over the course of the game.
What cemented this for me was watching AlphaZero play against Stockfish. AlphaZero was playing so far outside the realm of what Stockfish could do that it was the only game I ever saw where a player increased their score. Basically Stockfish would say "you made a bad move, you made a bad move, you made a ... wait a second, that's a great move! How did I not see what you were doing!?"
After learning simple piece development and basic checkmating techniques, it's tactics, tactics, tactics. The positional concepts you espouse like rooks on open files are only useful to lower level players in service of opening up opportunities for tactics. Rather than learning pawn structure directly, he recommends actively sacrificing pawns to open up tactical opportunities. He doesn't recommend ignoring positional concepts of course, but he expects his students to learn them slowly, almost by accident, during focused practice on tactics.
Modern chess engines (pre-NN) even work the same way. Traditional chess engines with limited memory and limited depth search had rich, complex evaluation functions to try to compare the positional strength of a position. Modern chess engines have evolved towards simpler, faster evaluations, instead relying on vastly deeper tactical searches with gigabyte-size transposition tables. It's all in service of tactics.
> After learning simple piece development and basic checkmating techniques, it's tactics, tactics, tactics.
Fair enough, tactics is fun, pretty, and rewarding. I like it, too, and do not advocate avoiding it. But if any of their games lasts till the endgame, it is usually the principles not the tactics that contributes to the victory.
> Modern chess engines have evolved towards simpler, faster evaluations
Alas, modern humans do not undergo Moore's law so your analogy to computer chess can as well be turned upside down: we ought to improve our evaluation function if we want to play better with the limited resources of our brain.
It's all well and good controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc., but if you leave your pieces vulnerable to tactics that your opponent can find and you can't, then it's all for nought.
That's why tactics can be considered more important than strategy.
Strategy becomes more important only when neither player is making tactical blunders.
I think you are using nonstandard language. Tactics are short term material wins. Hanging a piece is absolutely tactics, it's a one-move tactic.
You seem to be saying that "defending against tactics" is strategy, which I guess it is, but it's a very tiny strategy that won't fill a "study". Once you know the idea of "find your opponent's best move before you choose your move". There's no more of the strategy to study , you just apply the tactic every turn.
Things like maintaining control of many squares, building a >3-move plan around depriving the opponent's bishop of mobility, and switching between these plans when they are inevitably interrupted, is strategy that takes a lot of time to study.
> and if they were we would no longer be in disagreement.
I tried to explain my (perhaps unorthodox) understanding of strategy and tactics in the last paragraph of my grandparent comment.
EDIT: Now I can see that I was framed into the tactics:strategy dichotomy by the answers to my top-level comment. To get a better verbalisation of my ideas, replace "strategy" with "principles" in all I wrote.
I'm going to differ with you and all the other (so far) replies: you start with end games. Until you can solve simple mate in one puzzles there is no point in going farther as you will never be able to win. You then study tactics (which is what most others are saying start with), and more complex endgames.
The above is the Soviet school from the 1920s. There is a reason it produced (and continues to produce) so many great chess players: it works.
I suspect many of the other replies to your post agree with me, they moved a step beyond the basics in their replay because there are so many tactics to learn that they still find lack of tactics is their personal limit to greatness and so that is where they are working.
> You should first learn how to supercharge your pieces by controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc.
I tend to agree. Based on my (limited) experience, I would say that strategy is akin to a 'feel' for the game and how it should develop, while tactics are entirely necessary, but come more as specific, self-contained, little tools that you should put in your arsenal.
I think elementary tactics are a little more important to chess than a single random bit-twiddling hack is to programming. Not having a basic grasp of tactics and missing simple forks, pins, etc. is really only going to give you a game that's slightly beyond "not hanging pieces".
Anyone good enough to light you up tactically probably also knows at least the Cliff's Notes version of positional play and is not going to develop knights to a3, block their bishops behind an idiotic wall of pawns, or set up a nice doubled isolated pawns for you to murder.
I think this book is for pre IM level and I think you can do well by learning tactics rather than remembering all the 15 length opening sequence. It is fine if you miss a tempo if you can attack when you need to. Of course in GM level classical chess missing few tempos could be equal to a loss and structure is very important. A Primer of Chess and Nimzowitsch's My System are targeted for IM/GM.
Tactics are more essential for initial improvement than strategy for the simple reason that you cannot execute sound strategic plans if your execution contains tactical flaws.
> It assumes you know only how the pieces move and builds step-by-step from there.
Do not get me wrong: TFA is a fine and useful book for an intermediate player but the above claims are overselling it. They are equivalent to telling you that learning the
trick will make you a better programmer while being silent on what copy-and-paste programming, magic constants, or hardcoded data are and how to avoid them. While novice chess players are naturally attracted to brilliant combinations, they will have no chance to play them without knowing how to gain positional advantage.> Strategy and tactics both are important, but tactics are more important.
> If you're a whiz at strategy but not much good at tactics, you will have trouble winning or having fun because your pieces will keep getting taken.
I beg to differ. You should first learn how to supercharge your pieces by controlling the centre, putting rooks on open files, co-ordinating your bishop pair, keeping a strong pawn structure, etc. Two oldie but goodie books that teach these principles and are available as PDF's are Capablanca's A Primer of Chess [0] and Nimzowitsch's My System [1].
EDIT: memorizing openings ⊄ strategy. I understand strategy as applying good principles regardless of your opponent's moves, and tactics as calculating (mostly) forced move sequences. Also, strategy does not have to be dull. Playing a gambit and attacking Black's f7 weakness is a strategy, albeit one that can hardly succeed without tactical thinking.
[0] https://archive.org/details/aprimerofchess (this particular edition uses the outdated descriptive notation)
[1] https://archive.org/details/my-system-2020