Chess Pedagogy that Reveals Conceptual Thinking Behind Tactics

I was looking at a famous checkmate by Cassablanca the other day and I think I noticed something interesting. It was an impressive combination that people like to ooh and ah about, and yet almost every step of the combination exploited a kind of thinking that is 2nd nature to mature chess players yet counterintuitive to the rest of us, and that's why the combination was so surprising and impressive.

People usually focus on the sacrifices. Wow! He sacrificed a Queen AND a rook to achieve mate. O.k., but I didn't sense that it was a brute force mental calculation. He noticed that by sacrificing the Queen he would get rid of a pawn that was defending a square he wanted to control and by forcing a certain move with a second sacrifice, he would force the opponent to block the retreat of his king with his own pieces and that way he could achieve a smothered mate with much less material.

And it occurred to me, wouldn't it be nice to have the benefit of chess instruction that EXPLAINS THE CONCEPTUAL DIMENSION of each TACTICAL move. Teachers bring up all these concepts in their chess lessons, sure, but when presented as general principles, the ideas are just too diffuse and abstract, or maybe the teacher trots out the concepts to illuminate the brillance of some particular move. But I suspect that tactical chess could be taught like mathematics and physics. In my math & physics courses, they key was to WORK ALL THE PROBLEMS. One teacher even told me "math is a bag of tricks". So it wasn't just the detail or the concepts, it was seeing blow by blow how the concepts guide the problem solving in specific instances, and I don't mean broad strategic principles like "control the center". I mean showing how concepts also come into play in chess TACTICS. The Cassablanca combination I saw was a great illustration of tactical brilliance that was guided by concepts a every single step. There was nothing brute force about it.

Casablanca is a famous movie.

Capablanca was a famous chess player.

"Here's looking at you kid."

Yes, it would be nice if we could just quickly run down a list of principles to figure out how to handle any situation.

Unfortunately, most of us aren't quite that logic driven.

Perhaps you could share the combination that you find so inspiring...

That’s how tactical intuition is actually built — not just by solving thousands of puzzles blindly, but by understanding why the solution worked, step by step.

I would agree! Tactics are based on recognition, not memorization. They are two very different ideas.