Positional vs. Tactical Chess

La Maza was attending and playing with a local chess club every week the whole time he was improving too. He didn't just show up to money tournaments and win. He played countless fun games where he demonstrated his over the board skill to impartial club players over his training period. That pretty much rules out the possibility the possibility of his cheating with a computer unless he was also a master masquarading as a duffer the whole time. That's why I think that blog post is sour grapes and bitterness over the fact that the tactics schmuck advocating nothing mut pattern imprinting in the mind is selling more books than much better and more experienced traditional players.

I saw a study that showed that the better a chess player the more they rely on pattern recognition than thinking. A master is 60% pattern recognition and 40% thinking and an amature is 5% pattern recognition, a GM is 80% pattern recognition. And it was GM John Nunn who was involved with the study. Under MRI a memory section in his brain lights up like a christmas tree when he plays chess where weaker players don't have that section have the same activity. There was a lso a magazine article a few years ago that demonstrated the same thing about memory function and pattern recognition, I forget if it was scientific american or another magazine but it was a front page article, about 8 or 10 years ago. That's the position la Maza took. He added a lot of patterns to his memory database. This is consistant with scientists think memory works in chess players.

Eh you can't call a game from one move. There are trends but nothing is permanent. 

Ron Weasley: Good information. I'll keep it in mind.

Nonetheless, I have my doubts. I've worked with programmers from MIT and they are bright, hard-working lads but they like to put one over.

I also don't understand how MDLM had such a rotten rating to begin with. The bottom boards on my high school team were B and C students, who read no chess books and just played skittles, and came out of their tournaments with ratings of 1300-1500.

Has anyone else duplicated 400 points in 400 days?

Sorry. The story still smells. One man's opinion.

Well according to one post on him he read Silman's book. If that is true you should be 1600 on a bad day. After reading the entire book you have to be 1900+ , sadly i have not finished the book as i am still reading another book and a pile of books on my left side.

Ever heard of a guy called "The Backyard Professor"?

Active piece play is the soul of chess.  Without activity there can be no tactics.  Positional chess is also more important because there are always imbalances to consider whereas a tactic is highly situational.  Tactics are still very important but need a context of an overall strategy.  In the Nimzo-Indian for example the pin against the knight is to contest the cental light squares. 

Mud?

More like prisoners(pieces) ...... of war! Many of those tactical only players have made life for me easy. What is really funny is when they try to play a tactical game and get crushed in the middle game..... some manage to make to the End Game then reality hits.

That's the position la Maza took. He added a lot of patterns to his memory database. This is consistant with scientists think memory works in chess players.

Ron Weasely: Sure. MDLM tells a good story, consistent with current theory. He is an MIT Ph.D after all. I don't doubt that he did tactical exercises and improved his chess.

But the fairy tale ending where he gains 700 points in two years, wins $10,000 in the World Open, then gives up chess forever ... that I doubt.

Maybe it did happen as he said. I was eventually convinced that the Magic Bullet in the JFK assassination wasn't magic after all. I may eventually be convinced of MDLM.

But in the meantime I doubt.

If you're referring to the 1.e4 vs 1.d4 question, I didn't mean to imply that 1.e4 leads to a more tactical style of play while 1.d4 is associated with a more positional style. It may well do, but my question was whether the decision to play 1.e4 or 1.d4 is made on tactical or positional/strategic grounds. Maybe it is neither?

The decision to play 1.e4 is made on whether to play an open (or semi-open), or closed (or semi-closed) game, and what you think your opponent is prepared for, and (at the amateur level) also the lines that you are willing to prepare (1. e4 probably requires more deep memorization of a specific lines, 1. d4 probably requires more broad memorization of a number of completely different systems).

It would be a hard argument that the Ruy Lopez main line isn't "positional", and it would be a hard argument that the Benoni or KID isn't "tactical".

We're beating a dead horse at this point, but there really is no game that's just "positional", and no game that's just "tactical".  Even if you are like Karpov, you must be looking for tactics at every turn (nothing is more embarassing than losing to a fork while you're thinking about weak square complexes and minority attacks, trust me, as I have experienced this countless times!), and all great attacking players since the advent of Staunton have played positionally -- as that helps them get better tactics and attack!!!  In fact, I would even venture to say that Morphy played very positionally as well, almost all of his famous games are examples of the damage that a lead in development and initiative can do!

Go ask a champion marathon runner whether he considers his legs or his lungs more important, and you'll have the same answer as positional vs tactical chess!

Nice analogy!

Would it be true to say, however, that some positions necessarily demand a more positional choice of move simply through lacking an 'immediate' tactic? Or is even that statement misguided?

We can name thing whatever we want.

I am afraid GM uses terms of Positional moves not positional chess.

I think they rather use term, strategic.

I never heard when someone refer Karpov, great 'positional player', but 'great strategic player'.

I like to make this distinction: "positional" and "strategic" refer to thinking in ideas, "tactical" refers to thinking in moves.

Of course when you make a move you think both in in ideas and in moves but the proportion can be different. In quiet positions when there are  no forcing moves for both sides you follow general guidelines like "improving worst piece", ""controlling open file", "creating knight outpost", "preparing king attack". Then the play is more strategic or positional (which in most cases means almost the same). However in sharp positions moves become forced and forcing and you have to calculate lots of specific variations and that's tactical play.

What do you think the difference between strategic and positional are?

I've seen both terms to be used to describe Karpov's style.

Strategy as a long-term planning is based on long-term positional factors (open files, outposts, pawn structure etc.). So for me strategic and positional play are so closely related that there is practically no difference.

There is bunch of book with a word "positional" in their title and another bunch of book with a word "strategy" in their title. And they all cover more or less same topics. From what I could see both terms are used interchangeably.

The only thing I have in my mind that (may be) can be called strategic but not positional is a simplification - for example exchanging and sacrificing material in order to go into technically won endgame.

FWIW Kramnik did not consider Karpov a strategic player, but a tactical player who made positional combinations:

...what were Karpov's weak points?

I think he did not pay attention to strategy. As I have already told, he easily forgot about the things that had happened on the board. Probably, he did not have a sufficiently deep strategic thread of the play. Karpov is a chess player of a great number of short, two to three move combinations: he transferred his knight, seized the space, weakened a pawn . In my view, he was not a strategic player by nature.

--From Steinitz to Kasparov with Vladimir Kramnik, 2005

I often use tactical means to gain a positional advantage. Tactics can be employed not just to bring about checkmate or to gain material, but also to gain control of squares, open lines, impede the freedom of the enemy, etc. Positional advantage in its turn then becomes the springboard for tactics. It is this constant interplay between tactics and positional strategy that makes chess interesting to me.

That could explain why he was apparently taken so completely by surprise by Kasparov's manoevering in the famous 'octopus knight' game (Karpov vs Kasparov, World Championship Match-16th game, 1985).

The implication that meticulous tactical play naturally leads to slow positional crush, anaconda style, is an interesting one. However, I remain somewhat skeptical of Kramnik's assessment. Are there other players who were great at "short, two to three move combinations" that also mirrored Karpov's style? Or did Karpov in fact have some additional quality that made his play so characteristic of him? And if so, what was it?

Are there other players who were great at "short, two to three move combinations" that also mirrored Karpov's style?

I couldn't say. I assume so. It had never occurred to me that one could play chess that way until I read Kramnik's comment on Karpov. It opened my eyes to more of what goes on in GM games.

Perhaps we need a new category of tactical puzzles specifically for positional gains.

I realize this is an old post. But on the subject of Positional vs Tactical, one can illustrate the idea like this: Positional Players allow you to hurt yourselves and Tactical Players are the ones who do the hurting. Which is better? It is a rather bad question. This is because both don't necessarily reach a limit or a stopping point. But, it is more than likely easier for one to play tactically than it is for that person to play positionally. Why? Any form of Tactical Chess is likened to Attacking. Any form of Positional Chess is likened to Defense. It would seem the former comes more naturally than the latter. But to be honest, having both would be of great use to you.