Be A World Top 1000 Player Without Much Strategy!

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"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."

Who thinks they can beat this artificial life form?

HAL playing chess -

Dr. Frank Poole Let's see, king... anyway, Queen takes Pawn. Okay?
HAL: Bishop takes Knight's Pawn.
Dr. Frank Poole: Huh, lousy move. Um, Rook to King 1.
HAL: I'm sorry, Frank, I think you missed it. Queen to Bishop 3, Bishop takes Queen, Knight takes Bishop. Mate.
Dr. Frank Poole: Huh. Yeah, it looks like you're right. I resign.
HAL: Thank you for a very enjoyable game.
Dr. Frank Poole: Yeah, thank you.

---

I think that HAL could beat this character hands down, provided he doesn't fry HAL's circuits with bursts of electricity!

ha ha ha

I’d like to lead the discussion away  from computer chess for now, although I have greatly enjoyed those posts.

Returning to human chess, is it strategy, or is it tactics that ultimately decides a chess game amongst the elite? Said another way,  how big of a role does strategy play, and how big of a role does tactics play in deciding the outcome of a chess game at the highest level?

The key word here is decides, which is not at all the same as saying this: from the first move to the last, what underling chess skill ultimately grinds down the losers amongst the top 1000 players? What chess skill employed by the winner causes the losers position to crumble, no longer being able to hold on and defend?

To help make perfectly clear what I am trying to say, when I play chess, no matter what strategy I might try, it is always a tactic that decides my games, i.e., a very simple fork tactic that top players would never miss, even under time pressure.

As a player gets stronger, it become less clear as to the determining factors. Here is one such example from a member that I think helps to illustrate this point, and this member is not even a master chess player! I don’t see any obvious tactical blow that decided this game. This match contained plan after plan, as you will see in the annotations.

What do you think? Was this game won by tactics, or by strategy - plans the winner used to cause the other persons position to finally give way, crumble, no longer being able to hold the position, with defenses exhausted, tied down to just holding on and hoping the aggressor makes a mistake? In the end I see a display of outstanding technique. Is good technique synonymous with good tactics?

Excerpts from Ziryab's annotations. Observations followed by plans. Sounds like strategy.

13.Qa4 I felt that I'd gained something from the opening: queenside pawn majority, bishops aiming at the queenside, rooks connected and ready to come to the open c-file and the half-open d-file. I would like to swap pieces and go into a pawn endgame. Trading my e-pawn for Black's d-pawn, or provoking the d-pawn to advance where it becomes weak are considerations. I have a comfortable game and a slight advantage with long-term chances for a better endgame. 

17.Rac1 Ng4 I had used eighteen minutes getting to this position, and now thought for seven minutes - my second longest think of the game. This was the only time in the game when Joshi's superior tactical skills were a significant factor in the game. I decided almost immediately upon the correct move, but realizing that my bishop would become trapped, had to find a compensating resource. It appeared to my opponent that this resource was more than adequate, and as a consequence, my opponent opted to let my bishop escape.

32.Rxc7 Nxc7 Now I am certain that I have a technical win, and the plan is straight-forward. The majority must become a passed pawn, tying down one of Black's pieces. Then with two active pieces to one, White shifts attention to the kingside in order to create another passed pawn. 

                                                       The Game

Chess games between humans aren't perfect, thank god and there are more than technical reasons for that. Time pressure IS a big deal, statistically most blunders in master games occur at or near the time control, cool nerves are a big advantage here. Allied to that is sheer mental exhaustion, in the old days with 6 hour sessions this was more of a problem but even today you see games with 100+ moves where one player has had to try and hold the balance in a slightly worse endgame for 50 or 60 moves. With the stupid 'no grandmaster draws' rules now in place those players have to go out the next day and put in a similar effort, often sheer tiredness leads to them making errors that they wouldn't normally.

Opening novelties can often lead to a quick win or at least a significant advantage throughout the game for the player that found it. It was a lot easier to pull those out 30 years ago when no one was using computers to prepare their openings and a lot of interesting ideas were buried in obscure correspondence games or tournaments that only the participants knew had even been played!

There is more than one way to skin a cat as they say, look back through history and you find examples of very strong, even great players who were quite weak in certain areas of the game. Janowski notoriously hated endgames, a lot of club players today know more about the openings than Lasker or Reshevsky. Schlecter would offer draws in superior positions for reasons known only to himself, probably a pathological fear of losing. Maroczy avoided sharp positions like the plague even if they offered the only chance of winning certain games. All of these players were titans in their time but they weren't flawless chess playing machines by any stretch of the imagination, only Capablanca has ever come close to that ideal and yet he lost the world championship to a guy who made a superhuman effort to find the tiniest errors in the Cubans handling of certain positions and tried to steer the games towards those positions.

At the end of the day playing good moves is the most important thing, whether they be positional or tactical is irrelevant.

If you don't understand the position in front of you then you're blind and all of the legal moves seem equally plausible. Strategy tells you which branches to prune

Read the post and looked at the game, shortened the quote for space.

I think that's a bit like asking is it strength or coordination that wins a ball game?  Is it the gearbox or compression ratio that makes a car faster?

Top players use both of course, and whichever their opponent slips up in can cause a game to be decisive.  When they're so intertwined there's no way to say games are won primarily one way or another.

Zyrab's game I'm leaning towards tactics though.  There were traces of a plan coming out of the opening, but neither side had any time to implement them before black blundered a pawn.  At that point it's just basic technique (how to convert an extra pawn and your majority).

In the annotations though I think he missed some moves.  Black has more choices than to either drop the pawn or trap the bishop.  After 19...f6 black is in not forced to play g5 and has 20...Nxe3 which looks absolutely crushing.  What's noteable to me here is that it seems black decided his plan had to involve kingside pressure.  If this is true he should have spent a long time looking for tactics like this as his strategic eye had pointed him in that direction.  Otherwise he's just pushing wood unfortunately (although we all blunder).

Also 31.Bc4 wins a pawn on the spot (it looks like anyway).

So in terms of your strategic mind pointing you in the right direction, I guess you could call basic technique strategy too... and in that case Zyrab needed both equally to win the game (tactics to win the pawn, and strategy to convert it in an endgame).

Thanks for the post.

Positional considerations are not the same thing as strategic ones, at least that is what I am getting from fellow contributors. This topic is about the idea that strategy may not play as big of a role in chess as some may think, and that tactics rules the day, even amongst the world's top 1000 players. Being the OP, I was the first to express my astonishment in such a claim, a quote taken from a book by Garry Kasparov. I would like to think that strategy plays a much greater role in determining who wins. 

I've thought about time pressure, and being under time pressure greatly reduces playing strength and swings the advantage hard towards the one with no pressure. If all pgn files were time stamped, then we could toss out all of the games that were decided by time pressure, the kind of time pressure where the loser had seconds left on the clock and made a huge tactical blunder. It would also be of interest to find a way to toss out all of the games where I see my Fritz light switch to red towards the end of a game, wondering if the loser lost due to time pressure, or loss of focus. What would we be left with? Games that were decided on something other than loss of focus or time pressure. Those games could be studied closer, to determine, if at all possible, what mostly caused the win, wins at the highest level of the sport. Was it mostly tactics, or was it mostly strategy.

Garry Kasparov reduces the game down to those two elements, tactics and strategy. Positional knowledge is not one of those two major elements of chess, but under some other category. I wouldn't know what category to place positional knowledge.

However, the idea of more than one way to skin a cat and playing good moves is the most important thing...I don't know. I would need something more concrete to be persuaded, like numbers and statistics.  I’m just a bit stubborn that way. My fault, not yours.

Here is how Garry Kasparov defines chess in his book, Checkmate Tactics. I do understand that his target audience is beginners, but it is the book that started this topic, and I am a beginner as well. 

“Broadly speaking (and, admittedly, this is a rather brutal simplification) chess can be divided into tactics and strategy.”

When you think about the famous quote by German chess master Richard Teichmann, “chess is 99% tactics”, then one could reason that chess is 1% strategy.  Garry does speculate in greater detail on these percentages, particularly at different skill levels, and they can be found in post  #1.

As always, excellent comments.

"Top players use both [tactics and strategy] of course, and whichever their opponent slips up in can cause a game to be decisive."

When a player slips up tactically, I can see where tactics will decide the game, provided the other person is paying attention and sees the fork that wins a rook, for example.

A slip up in strategy? I've heard of tactical blunders, and recently, positional blunders. Strategic blunders? That would be really hard for me to see, especially since strategy involves long-term plans.

Top secret strategic plans of the world top 1000 players would also need to be annotated to see how the games were won. Even then, I wouldn't be able to understand the plans. I've read annotations in Chess Life, even from our very own GM Sam Shankland, but I couldn't understand what he was talking about. It was way over my head.

I'd like to see someone post a few games by the world top 1000 players anyway, where zero tactical blunders were made from either side, and yet, someone was able to win. In the context of Garry Kasparov's brutal simplification of chess, dividing it into tactics and strategy, those zero tactical blunder games would suggest to me that they were won by brilliant strategists! TahDah!

Wasn't Karpov famous for strangling his opponents slowly, until they had no more good squares to go to, placing them in zugzwang? Was he one of the best chess strategists of all time?

I use positional play and strategic play interchangeably because the distinction isn't completely clear to me.

It's funny to hear a GM comment on their game because they sound like any of us.  "At this point I feel like I have some small advantage, but I'm not sure if it's real or what I can do with it"  or  "my plan was to use my space to pressure him" and we're all thinking it sounds so obvious, but we still can't duplicate it :p

I'm sure many GM games have no tactical blunders.  A tourney game I played 2-3 years ago fitz9 gave the game a no tactical blunder badge (whatever that is, black or something)... not a very exciting game of course, and of course I made mistakes (I did lose a pawn and the game though).  In fact you made me dig it up and look at it :)  I've definitely gotten better, I made some odd moves.  Of course this was back when I had no idea what players aimed for, I just calculated a ton of candidate moves until I was reaching positions where I felt like I liked them... had to do everything from scratch... I worked really hard at the board those days :p

Chess annotators use grandiose terms like 'thematic' to describe certain moves or manouevres but really they are just the logical strategic ideas in a positon. Black aiming for the f5 pawn break in the KID or d5 in the Sicilian, White using the Nf1 - g3-f5 knight manouevre in the Ruy Lopez or executing the Minority Attack in the exchange Queens Gambit. Using the e5 hole against the Stonewall Dutch, trying to free or exchange the white squared bishop in the French (for Black). These are basic positional/strategic ideas that anybody who plays certain openings has to know so I doubt whether anybody in the top 1000 in the world is really as totally dependent on tactical ability as Kasparov makes out. I think he's taking it for granted that you know all of the 'thematic' ideas in your openings so then tactics is just finding ways to achieve those positional goals.

Kramnik beat Kasparov in 2000 in London thanks to strategy : he played for an early exchange of queens in almost every game.

Then Anand beat Kramnik by bringing dynamic positions on the board where his tactical abilities prevailed, so both strategy and tactic here.

Finally, Kramnik and Anand beat Topalov mainly thanks to the Catalan opening. Once again bringing up positions where Topalov would make some strategical mistakes. But of course, they needed strong tactics to prove their point.

Now, we could look at the games one by one to form an opinion, but I wouldn't be surprised if the conclusion was close to what was expressed earlier : they both work hand in hand.

i think kasparov only meant good enough opening preparation but superb tactical play is all it takes i believe this cause i made a leap from 1215 to 1571 in 3months just by understanding the openings i was playing much better. the real question to me is what is considered good enough opening preparation ???

-people also seem to be confusing match strategy [such as Anand's opening choices against Kramnik and Topalov] and a strategy used in a game

The 3-1-0 point scoring system has led some players to picking a certain strategy during a tournament while traditional round robins, matches and open swisses require slightly different approaches as well to obtain good results. 

-A  game is usually won by a tactical shot from a superior position. Strategy is just the overall plan term used to gain a superior position based on positional considerations. Tactics/calculation are the tools used to obtain your goal.

-Computer just are better at Tactics because they see 100% accurately to their depth , they just highlight human error. I for one like the faster time controls that have become popular because it creates more human error which is the real point to any competition.  Shot clocks, play clocks all are in the same goal. Embrace errors and try to eliminate them which will be a life time goal.

If you want chess perfection play correspondence chess.

Playing for tactical shots is itself a strategy.

I think this shows very well the relationship between tactics, position and strategy.

ive broken it down to a theory 

play the opening like a 1800 have tactical skill of a 2200 and endgame of a 2000 and poof your top 1000 material

That's simply not true.  Compare game tree complexity to search depth and positions per second.

This is inaccurate.  Overcoming error is one of the main points of competition, not facilitating it.  In basketball there are shot clocks because otherwise the team 10 points ahead could just keep the ball until the game was over.  I can't think of a clock in any sport that minimizes time for the purpose of creating more error, how silly.

I would love to take up CC... if it were pre 1970 that is.

I don't understand the CC comment. Are you worried about computers? I'm playing 6 fully human (as far as I can tell) opponents in a USCF email correspondance tournament right now. I'm going to post all the games in the forums for analysis when they're over.

I just don't trust it... which is probably to my benefit.  Otherwise I'd probably spend an inordinate amount of time with CC chess, looking at all the moves and creating tons of analysis for each game.

The thought that all the effort would be wasted if I wasn't actually getting to play a person is what keeps me from getting into it :)