I have read the book and bought CT art has a result of it. The book in itself is nothing special. But Michael De La Mazas reasoning on why tactical skill has to be in place before going deeper into middle game positional understanding and end game skills makes perfect sense to me. Those skills will never show in your games if you are dropping pieces to two and three move combinations. His calls this concept 'visibility'. Say you had master end game level skills but your tactical ability was weak; You would never get to the end game to show those skills because you would almost always be down a piece beforehand. So even though you had master level end game skills they would never become visible in the game. The same goes with positional skills Maybe you move a piece to take control over a color complex but fail to notice it fails to a 3 move combination you did not see etc etc. Personally I still find this a lot in my own play. I move a piece to what I think is a positionally better square and fail to see it is lost to something as simple as a knight fork.
There is really no reason to buy the book though maybe just for the beginning board vision drills he gives in the beginning of the book. The board vision drills are really good and personally I had not seen them anywhere else before buying the book. I understand he wrote an article before essentially with all the same content. I really do not care what Silmans thinks of it. I think most of his comments just come from the fact De La Maza criticized the idea of studying a bunch of positional concepts before a player develops strong tactical vision and mentioned Silmans books along with some other authors. I like Silmans books(especially his endgame book which I am currently trying to get through) but he sure comes off like a jerk sometimes.
As for Arguments against De La Mazas approach of focusing on tactics the most common argument I see is that you have to have good positional skills to develop tactical opportunites. De La Maza addresses this argument in his book. De La Maza says correctly imo that maybe at the master level that is true but at the class level just making reasonable moves and not dropping pieces is enough and tactical opportunites will usually naturally present themselves. He also shows that you could program a chess playing program like chessmaster to have two personalities one with tactical skills and no positional skills and one with positional skills and no tactical skills and the personality programmed with the high level tactical skills will always win. He even points out you could program the two personalities where one sees two moves ahead and has strong positional skills and the other sees three moves ahead but has no positional skills and the the personality that can tactically see further will win most of the games. Pretty much any game I have seen on here that asks for analysis between players of say less than 1800 shows that is true even more so in over the board chess. So masters can criticize De La Maza all they want and feel right about it but his comments are for class players. Anway the basic point of the De La Maza book is to movitivate you to study tactics more intensively and at that he does an excellent job.
The other reason I like De La Maza is because of his own success starting at an adult age. He started chess as an adult(30 years old I think) and became an expert level player within 2 year after an intense tactical training program and putting a very disciplined thought process into all his games. I started chess about three years ago and I am nearing 40. He inspired me personally that improvement is possible. No master or grandmaster has done that for me because almost all of them started as children. Chess players who start as adults and then learn and play well are the type of models I need. De La Maza did that for me.
I'm sure you've all heard of Michael de la Maza (MDLM) and his book, Rapid Chess Improvement. Now, I haven't read the book but I have read about it.
Basically, I think that tactics are very, very important. For players below (say) 1800, tactics basically determine the outcome of the game. And even for higher rated players, tactics are always in the background - determining candidate moves, forming branches of trees of analysis, and so forth (thank you Alexander Kotov). And of course, Teichmann said "chess is 99% tactics".
But on the other hand, I definitely think that many other things such as endgame knowledge, opening theory, middlegame strategy, positional play, etc., are also very important in chess. True, if a player constantly blunders away pieces then studying these things is probably useless. At a certain point, though, these things do become important - and they help players to create positions which yield beneficial tactics.
Jeremy Silman basically panned MDLM's book: http://www.jeremysilman.com/book_reviews_js/js_rapid_chess_improv.htm
My question is: what do you think of the MDLM program? How important is the study of tactics vs. other areas? Especially for the stronger players here, at what point does the study of other aspects of chess outweigh the study of tactics?
I'll add my thoughts later, but I'd like to hear your thoughts first.