Rex, I think the thing you are missing is that you are looking at my total stats from a two-year period. Of course my stats from earlier in that two year stretch drag down the totals. What you need to do is look at my stats from my more recent performances. My success against 2000-2099 level players was 21.4%, and that's throwing in a loss or two from earlier that year. That was from when I was studying NOTHING but tactics. If I can score 1.5/5 against USCF 2000-2099, I think that proves my point. Thanks for the somewhat clumsy observation... Confirmation bias will do that to you.
Since you brought this up, you have won precisely two games out of 41 tries against players rated +1800 according to the USCF. You've never played against anyone rated +2200 in an official USCF game. You have a lifetime 2-7-32 record against +1800 players. That's a 13.4% record against players rated +1800 For players rated 1800-1899, you have a score of 12%, which equates to a performance rating of 1504, 346 points lower on average than your opponents.
For reference: according to USCF my record against players rated 1800-1999 since 1991, when they started keeping online records, is just over 67%. It's nothing special. That's about average for an expert chess player. It's ~125 performance points above them on average.
I beg to disagree.what you are saying is that tactics is everything.Well,it isn't, at least for humans.getting obsessed with tactics at the expense of other aspects of the game can only result in deterioration of your play.
I think the point of this discussion is more about whether tactics can move one to A-Class and into Expert. I agree with you. Only learning tactics, nothing else, cost me in games against players who traded like bandits and got into an endgame quickly, or who did well with more positional and closed games. Nonetheless, I whole-heartedly agree with the moderately well-known teacher in the Pittsburgh area, IM Jerry Meyers, who says there's no sense in learning too much else, other than tactics, because he's seen a slew of students from USCF 400-2000 squander games incessantly in a single move. Club-level/class-play is decided by tactics, and learning them can bide time until the opponent makes the mistake. This has been my experience.