Strategy vs Postional vs Tactics: All important

Strategy:

Look at a position, the material and other imbalances and layout, and know what ending (attack, draw, bishop vs knight ending, keep queens on the board) will give you the best odds of doing well. You should know that if you are only up a pawn, that may not be enough to win with rook vs rook, which tends to be a draw, and that trading the rooks will help. Many beginners ask, "What should I be doing?" They don't need to know how to play out the attack or ending, but should at least know bullets of which ones are favored by which common positions, and then shoot for that, instead of letting their opponent choose for them.

Positional:

This is all about controlling squares, fighting over ranks, files, diagonals, anchor points, the center, doubling up rooks, blockading pawns, creating backward pawns, making sure your opponent can't get to your isolated pawns. While many of these structures work in all strategies, some are better for others, and the location on the board may vary. This is the slow build up that often creates the tactical blows. If your pieces are more active and have more options than your opponent's, whose are overloaded, then it is likely you who will land the tactical blow. There are tactical fights over squares, too. When my opponent sets up a knights nest on part of the board, I don't assume that is a positional strength right away. I look at where it is and what squares it gives the knight. If there is nothing it can attack, I leave it alone and let it sleep.

Tactics:

This is where material is actually won. It is the easiest for beginners to understand, since 1, 3, 3, 5, 9, instead of identical looking squares. Beginners often blunder so much material so often that they are advised to just get good at tactics, so they don't drop any and they catch their opponent's. Who needs to build up a position if you can just wait for weak opponent will blunder? Material really does matter, unless the positional edge is huge. Well, if your opponent is playing positional chess, and you are only sharp with material tactics, the tactics you will see are that you are about to lose material, since positional chess is how to set up a high probability of a tactic occurring when there was none before.

So why aren't you getting better?

1. Looking a few moves deeper takes much more brain power, and has diminishing returns on performance. Your subconscious can automate much of that with practice, but even it needs an efficiency boost. It turns out you perform better if in addition to counting material points, you look at the positional strength and the how playable the imbalances are. Looking at all 3 takes at most 3x as long, but boosts your performance by far more than putting that time into deeper tactics.

2. Any time you learn something new, you will be slower at it. It is like learning to roller skate, and then learning to roller skate backwards. You are using a ton of conscious brain power on the slower new task, which robs time from your known stuff. Silman even wrote that while learning his techniques, your rating will actually drop for a while. You have to get fast at it before your rating goes back up.

3. Some knowledge is needed often, and other knowledge less often. If you spend time studying rare tactics, you temporarily get rusty on some more common ones. But you need the rarer ones to become a master. So accept the temporary dip, and maybe review the blunders from your actual games again, since they come up more often than the more complex material. Common basics will get you strong fast, but you top out. Studying advanced tactics raise your potential, but can drop your rating temporarily.

Tactics, strategy, and positional chess vary a bit in the opening, middle game, endgame, and closed vs open. The more you know, the stronger you can play, especially under longer time controls. However, there is a lot in common between them all that can be learned by beginners, and is why we recommend them to learn the basics and common principles of all three phases and concepts before specializing deep into just openings.

Finally, slow chess, correspondence chess, and analysis are claimed to be better than blitz because they give chess players time to learn new concepts and apply them. Blitz is more of a test of what you already know., and how good your gut is, though might help by showing you what weaknesses you need to work on because you don't know the topic cold.

Finally, it is not possible for us all to be rated 2500, since we all come in at 1200, and trade those points around, keeping the average the same. A rating boost says you are getting stronger than the average player, either because you are getting stronger, or they weaker, maybe because a bunch of newbies joined, or some strong players took up other hobbies and got rusty. There will always be an endless supply of 1200 rated players wanting to hit 2000.