If you hope to improve, you need to get past this incorrect thinking.

okay, but what is the correct thinking that I need to get to?

"chess is 90% pattern recognition and the other half is calculations" -gm serper

Like I said earlier, a better way to look at it is everything is based on piece activity / control of squares. Not only the general value of the pieces, but winning the game means you control all the free squares around an enemy king plus the square it's standing on. From this I think you can derive all of the various strategies and tactics.

But like you seem to be aware, all the ideas in the world can't help you if you can't find and calculate forcing moves that win material. So if you need to improve tactics, certainly that's important... it's just not the basis of chess.

My take on this is that 99% of people who play the game are bad at tactics. Indeed, here that would be the under 1800 crowd (and I'm one of them) who constantly make ridiculous tactical blunders and need to work on them hard. Without tactics, there's no chess. Of course, 99% of people who play the game are bad at it. Sorry if this is too harsh, don't mean to offend anybody...

Simply put, it is the view that 99% of all chess games are won from outright tactics, and not lasting positional domination or 'grinding' a win from a positional advantage.

controlling squares is based on how the pieces move, which means that squares are "controlled" based on which tactical possibilities control the squares. i.e. a knight positioned to control e4 only controls it based on other tactical factors, like how many pieces the other player has in what positions relative to that square. I thinks it's just semantics. 2 different ways of saying the same thing. 

Chess is a lot like geometry and seeing how pieces interact on the board and with each other benefits your playing ability by taking advantage of them more often. From this we get this statement that chess is mostly tactics, or executing pieces full potential in any given position to get a material advantage, positional advantage, or even checkmate itself. How we arrive to a position where your pieces can fulfill that however is more ambiguous. But certainly the best positions in the world won't help you if you don't see how to take advantage of them, which goes back to the statement, chess is 99% tactics. Being able to take advantage of positions through tactics, ultimately to give you the ability to checkmate is essentially what chess is all about.

Strategy is important as it reflects a choice, between sharp positions and less sharp positions. A players choice of opening is a strategic decision. Tactics studies alone won't help a player decide which opening is best against which opponent or whether to attack from the beginning or sit back, wait and counter attack.

Puzzles are great but they come about through a positional error made by one of the sides. The better a player is at spotting positional errors and punishing them through a forced tactical combination, the stronger they will be. So it isn't just tactics although tactical strength is massively important.

It means that 99% of chess is about tactics.  Hope that helps

Chess is 90% calculation and rest is other things...

when you calculate, it's tactical possibilities that you are calculating

In the position from which the game starts there are no tactics.  The opposing armies are not in contact.  There are no threats, checks or captures available. But if white advances a pawn two squares and black offers a gambit tactics have arrived.  And they proliferate from there at a rate.

Tactical shots occur in your games at the rate of two or three or four per game not because that is the number of tactical opportunities that come up but because of your own limited vision and that of your opponent.  If you both did tactics puzzles daily for a while you would both start to see more.

Consider computers.  When I was a young man Botvinnick and others were busy devising programmes to play chess.  They achieved lowish club standard.  It was thought that in a couple of hundred years of work they would reach master standard.  Of course that has proved nonsense.  They are now immeasurably stronger than the best human players.  They just number crunch the position three, four, five, even six moves deep and find enormous numbers of tactical opportunities.  It makes them superbly strong players.

A world champion class human player can, once every couple of hundred games, drive a computer into a position devoid of tactics where a strategic appreciation of what will happen a dozen or more moves ahead is what is needed.  The computer cannot number crunch that far ahead and is now lost.

But it is once every couple of hundred games.  The ninety nine per cent figure is astray.  It needs to be closer to ninety nine point nine recurring.

What do you do if there are no tactics?

Lots of strategic moves are superior because tactical refutations have been excluded or because a move that sets up a would-be mate/material-gain forces a positional weakness/concession. People resign when they feel they will inevitably be checkmated (a tactic).

It is like boxing... the knockout and power blows are insanely important, but the best fighters learn to avoid receiving them and are always trying to deliver them when their opponent allows, so the theme is constantly present, as tactics are in all chess games, including among GM's, even though computer analysis would seem to argue against this.

Well, it influences e4 regardless of what is on e4, and regardless of how many enemy pieces are also influencing e4.

But sure, if you adopt a really board definition of tactics, then it's saying the same thing. However the standard definition of tactics is a sequence of forcing moves (captures, checks, threats) to win something (position, material, or mate).

---

When I calculate, in most positions it's not even forcing moves, and I'm just evaluating the end positions for piece activity, and trying to find a mover order that's most efficient.

lol

If that's your real answer then you're terrible

This is why i post my usual "Tactics vs. Strategy" post when these come up.  I then leave it at that because for whatever the reason, it brings out the insanity in people. And it always seems that the "pro tactics" people get all bent over this.   

The Difference Between Chess Strategy and Tactics

Tactics and Strategy are often confused by chess beginners and novices. Here is an explanation of the two.

 

Tactics

A tactic is a short sequence of moves, usually involving an attack or capture, that attempts to make an immediate tangible gain. Tactics are the first thing you look for when considering any move. The common tactics have been given names to distinguish them. Some of the most common ones are:

• Forks
• Pins
• Skewers
• Discovered Attacks
• Removing the Guard

 

Strategy

When you aren't able to take advantage of a tactic, you turn to strategy. A strategy is a long term plan or idea. It is usually based on positional considerations, rather than attacks and captures. Some of the common positional elements that form the basis for strategy are:

• Piece Mobility
• Piece Safety
• King Safety
• Pawn Structure

Tactics and strategy are intertwined with one another. Strategic moves often have the objective of setting up future tactical maneuvers, and vise versa.

For the novice player, tactics is by far the more important consideration. Almost all games below the master level are won and lost through tactical mistakes. This thought should guide the study of the improving player. If you want to improve fast, study tactics!

Tactics is only 50% of chess.Strategy is 45%. IF YOU KNOW WHERE THE BATHROOM IS LOCATED OR NOT, 5%

lol

not that much of the location of the bathroom

you can just ask