You would need to do a statistical analysis of these ratings, you don't seem to have done that. Simply stating the fact that outliers exist does not mean anything.
Those of you which think chess is mostly tactics
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One answer to your question: perhaps they don't do tactics very often. So their rating is lagging.
leoultimater wrote:
How do you understand players with a very low tactical rating (e.g. 879), but a very high blitz rating (e.g. 1709)?
That's... oddly specific.
But with a rating difference like that I'd guess that they let their child who barely knows how to play do the tactics trainer, while they do the blitz.
You should also check for how many games and puzzles they've done. If they've only done a few blitz games (or a few tactics puzzles) then those aren't their real ratings. Also dates, peak ratings, average opponent, stuff like that.
Anyway, chess isn't any % tactics. Tactics underpin almost all moves, but those moves have to also make sense strategically. So being good at tactics is necessary, but not sufficient. So that will explain the much more common case of a high tactics rating and a low blitz rating (of course also in games no one tells you to look for a tactic. In puzzles you know some crazy sacrificial move probably works in the end even if you can't calculate it all).
leoultimater wrote:
How do you understand players with a very low tactical rating (e.g. 879), but a very high blitz rating (e.g. 1709)? I'm sure there's enough examples out there that I don't need to list any player examples. It goes against my theory that chess is largely about tactics. If chess is, say, 50% tactics, how is it not showing up in their blitz rating? If a player's tactics are low, my understanding is their chess tactical vision and general chess understanding is low. What other factors would contribute to a player having such a strong game despite such weak tactics?
Interesting subject! Just a wild guess on my part, but perhaps it's because blitz requires very quick pattern recognition and not everyone is efficient at thinking. Personally, I'm a near master at USCF correspondence chess - since the 70's when you couldn't cheat with computers, but I'm awful at blitz. One of my goals now if to improve my pattern recognition and it's slowly working!
I've seen it in daily games where I look at a position and think I can't make an aggressive move and look at it a little while later, go through the possibilities and there, hidden deep in them, is a move I should have seen earlier.
Because you can get there not only by seeing tactics but by simply taking advantage of blunders. Most of those games are not complicated affairs where someone has to play like Tal to win. Sooner or later someone just drops a piece and there you go.
Erik_420 wrote:
Who knows? Maybe they got their blitz rating by cheating.
Or through extenuating circumstances
How do you understand players with a very low tactical rating (e.g. 879), but a very high blitz rating (e.g. 1709)? I'm sure there's enough examples out there that I don't need to list any player examples. It goes against my theory that chess is largely about tactics. If chess is, say, 50% tactics, how is it not showing up in their blitz rating? If a player's tactics are low, my understanding is their chess tactical vision and general chess understanding is low. What other factors would contribute to a player having such a strong game despite such weak tactics?