yah i am speaking from a relatively strong player perspective, but i feel you underestimate how much piece pressure causes the blunders in your games.
of course there's the eventual terrible oversight - but these things should be regarded as the exception, not the norm. i've played a lot of people in your rating range and i can't say that they are super eager to blunder their pieces to me.
i've probably said everything i had to say - may whatever path you choose bring good results :o
"But I also believe that they must be separated because tactics can achieve the game's preferred end state, which is checkmate, while positional play does not. Positional play can lead you there and gets you those tactical chances but it can never win by itself."
If you visit an open tournament and watch grandmasters play lesser players in the first rounds, you will see exactly the opposite. The grandmasters generally avoid sharp tactical lines and aim for simple positions, trading pieces, acquiring small advantages and ultimately winning an endgame i.e. queening a pawn to ultimately mate.
@tpr Yeah sure but they can win no matter what they do. GMs are complete players. Am I really expected to grind my opponent with Karpovian strokes and then finish him with some Tal-like combination? I doubt it. And lets say I do theoretically play like a GM for most of the game and get to a position similar to what I posted. Does all that work really matter if I don't have the tactics to win a won position?
Lets look at a typical position that many players take for granted after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5. Now many players know that 3...a6 is a common move. It's a positional idea that works because after 4.Bxc6 White can't win a pawn. But what if Black hasn't calculated this and thinks that White really is threatening to win a pawn? The moves 3...a6, 3...Nf6 or 3...Bc5 will not be one of his candidate moves. He will be devoid of a good positional idea because he can't calculate correctly. So he'll try to find a defensive move. But what to do?
3...d6 4.d4 is not easy at all for Black. 3...Qe7 can't be good. 3...Nge7 is ok I guess but Black just blocked in his dark-squared bishop and after 4.d4 he'd better know what he's doing. 3...Nd4 is a move but if he couldn't calculate the consequences of 3...a6 4.Bxc6 then this just looks like a dangerous idea.
There are lots of these situations in chess and it's hard to deal with this when your tactics aren't strong.
Tal was also a strong positional player and Petrosyan was also strong in tactics, as Robert James Fischer asserted. You do not become World Champion when you are weak in one aspect of the game.
At club level, however, we know of pure tactical players and pure positional players. When these play one another, the positional player usually wins, because the tactical player gets no position where he can display his tactical skill.
"Yeah sure but they can win no matter what they do." Robert James Fischer said of the Yugoslav Attack against the Sicilian Dragon Variation: weak players even beat grandmasters with it.
If you want to win more games, stop blundering pieces. At first improving your tactical sight will alleviate much of this, but eventually that is not enough to not blunder because your opponents will put you into positions where you'll eventually have no way to avoid tactics against your position even though you know it's coming. That's positional play. Truthfully a balanced approach is often the best in things, and I think in chess it's the same. You can see a lot of improvement with improving your tactical sight alone, but you'll improve even faster if you combine tactical and positional training. It's a lot easier to get tactics when your position is just move active, more solid, or even completely dominating. We've all had winning positions and then hung a piece, allowed an easy checkmate, and what not. But over all, if you're constantly getting good positions in your games you'll find yourself winning more and more of them- and that isn't 100% tactical ability dependent.
@jg777 But that's just what I'm saying. If I miss tactics then nothing else in the game matters. Who cares how well I play positionally if I miss a tactic and throw the game every time? All that positional stuff just ends up being a big waste of time because without good tactics you just can't keep your position together anyway. And seeing as I have already noted that most games U2000 are decided by blunders, it seems like tactics are more important than anything else in the game for a while. That's OK and all but it's not what they tried to sell me when they talked about what kind of game chess is.
That's the whole point of the thread really. You don't auto-lose if someone dominates your light-squares or gets a knight on d5. But missing a tactic can end the game immediately.
Well, Spielmann said long time ago: "Chess is 99% tactics." You can reduce the positional play to simple tactics or fine tactical motifs - then of course everything is tactics.
But it seems to me that you think you can get everywhere with Neanderthal tactics!? Well, give it a try, if it works for you. But: there's world beyond blitz and bullet.
You can do everything right, but if you fail at the critical moment, then you fail. This is true in all of life's endeavors.
Stop whining about it.
I guess if you don't like that aspect about chess maybe it's not for you. For me tactics is just one of many interesting aspects of chess than make chess a complex and interesting game.
@Sarg0n No I don't expect to win with neanderthal tactics at all. That would require me to actually see tactics lol. I do unfortunately expect to lose to them. My rating has jumped from 1600 to 1800/1900 and back to 1600 again because of this multiple times. It's crazy.
@jg777 Yeah I guess. I just feel that it's really the only aspect of the game that will ever be relevant for a player at my level. I mean sure it's a great game but it seems like there's a wall of entry just to really see the game for what it is and I guess I'm not interested in climbing such walls to simply be able to play the game. Thanks though.
