Chess is 99% tactics.

I know this was said by a famous chess player and all, but is it true?

Why?

Actually 99.9%...

Oh lighten up whoever.  I'm just trolling along...

Chess is not relaxing ; it's stressful even if you win.

Jennifer Shahade

Chess is a fairy taleof 1001 blunders - Savielly Tartakower

Chess is imagination.David Bronstein

Chess is not for the faint-hearted; it absorbs a person entirely. To get to the bottom of this game, he has to give himself up into slavery. Chess is difficult, it demands work, serious reflection and zealous research.

Wilhelm Steinitz

The last time we talked about this:

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/chess-99--tactics-agree-or-disagree

Chess is torture of mind. Garry Kasparov

Chess is a waste of time, according to lots of guys in this thread:

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-many-people-think-that-chess-is-just-a-total-waste-of-time-in-life?lc=1#last_comment

Chess is 87% tactics, 36% observational skills, and 53% math skills.

The idea that chess is 99% tactics is not to be taken literally.  It is merely a figure of speech, meaning that at the beginner levels, most of what you could do to get really good fast is to just study tactical motifs and mating nets.  Work your way from the basics to advanced.  You can get to be a really good blitz or bullet player just by studying tactics.  However, if you want to get better at games with longer time controls, then a study in positional play must be coupled with your tactics training.  I've said this many times.  Dan Heisman talks about this in his book A Guide to Chess Improvement.  There are 5 fundamentals one needs to get better at before they can even dream of getting good. 

1.  Time management

2. Tactics and King and piece safety

3. Chess Thought Process

4. Piece Activity

5. General Chess Principles

Dan Heisman recommends getting good at all five, while studying books like Logical Move by Move, which are master games that demonstrate positional chess play based on threats and attacking ideas.

The key principle though, that Dan Heisman explains, is that when playing slow chess, one must learn how to calculate all the possible candidate moves along with his or her opponents replies and at the same time, evaluating the position when necessary, that is, being, assessing the position when there are no tactics currently in the position in an attempt to try and set one up, improve your position, developing pieces, or defend against a coming tactical idea.  If you see a coming tactical idea you must count how many moves it would take to get there, and count how many moves it will take to defend against it.  Then you will know how much time you have, and make moves accordingly.  A GM told me that last bit, about the counting.  It sounds basic but you'd be surprised how many people don't do it.

Every move you should analyzing forcing moves.  Threats captures and threats.  Which are tactics.  That is why people like to say chess is 99.9% tactics, because that is what you are looking out for every single move, however, at the times when no tactics are possible, that is where positional chess comes into play, and a lot of games end up where when it comes down to it, all you are doing is playing positional chess.  This happens more so in closed positions rather than open ones, which is why a lot of people try and avoid closed positions and play openings to force the game to become open regardless of what their opponent does.  e4 openings are more tactical, which is why it is recommended you start out playing chess with e4 openings, because d4, come into more strategic positions which leave the beginner not knowing what to do regardless of how much time they use on their clock.

I tried to take a beginner under my wing and told him to play e4, but he did not listen to me.  He didn't listen to me because he memorized a good opening line for white and won a lot of games among his fellow beginners because they did not know what to do with his d4 opening and fell to prepared tactics.  He tried to tell me I knew less about d4 than him, however, I played the QGA on purpose, because I wanted to see if he knew how to counter it.  Of course he didn't play book moves so I wasn't able to use my QGA continuation and was taken out of my own book and could have lost the game, but being a beginner, he made other blunders and lost the game.  The moral of this story is two-fold, don't assume that your opponent who is taking you under his wing and is better than you, is playing his pet opening, as he might just be trying out something different just for fun, because he is playing you.  Also, if you rely on memorized lines, at the Amateur level mainly, you will often be taken out of your book, and get into a position that you have never seen before, and might not be sure what to do, as it happened to me when playing against someone lower rated than I.  I could have lost that game, albeit, because I was experimenting, but a loss is a loss none the less.

Lastly, I would like to say that tactics and strategy go hand and hand.  It's just that when all one person does is develop develop develop, and knows a lot of tactics, especially in speed chess, not much strategy is needed because by just the process of merely developing pieces to their best squares you have created a huge possibility for good tactics, but at the same time, knowing where to put your pieces, is strategy!  It's just a lazy saying, as when play enough games you don't really think about the strategy because, especially when playing speed chess, the moves become instantaneous in your head, because you've played them many times before, and know exactly where your pieces go.  So naturally people think the game relies more on tactics rather than strategy, because the strategy is in most cases more automatic than the actual tactics.