Why Should Class Players Learn Positional Chess?

The theory that I have often heard is that the majority of games between class players are decided by tactical oversights and blunders. If this is true doesn't that mean that it is a waste of time to study anything but tactics? My thought is that if a player can play a nice positional game but simply blunder it all away, doesn't this make the positional play a waste of time?

It seems to me that positional play gets the player a good position for a while. But once tactics and calculation are required the game will be decided by those rather than all of the positional plusses that either player has gained. While it is true that we can say that positional play can be what allowed these tactics, it's equally possible for a side to have tactical chances even though they don't have a good position at all. In many games a GM will simply say that he knows he is worse but will try to complicate the game. Obviously even this advanced player is hoping to provoke blunders from his opponent. 

It just seems like tactics are more important if they decide games. Any thoughts? 

I will repeat this again...

Play the board.  You have to play the position on the board.  

It's true for beginning players. More experienced players at a higher level will need to learn strategy because their games will often be decided by better strategic play.

Ive been told that I am a lot better posistional than tactics, so I do rehearse a lot tactics, but in every singel game  I basically fight for position. 

Tactics is like shooting at the goal in football, position is like getting inside the fivemeter to kick the ball. If you are positioned close to the goal, then you can shoot the tactical scoring shot. Position is a lot about outnumbering the opponent in a crucial area. When you have outnumbered him/her, then you can crush with the tactical blow.

Yes yes I know that this is the way to search for truth in chess. But what about players like Tal who played many unsound sacrifices and still won some amazing games? Tal definitely wasn't a patzer and neither were his opponents. And yet he was able to get amazingly complicated positions and stump his opponents who, in some, cases should've come out on top. This is one example of why I ask this. 

I wonder whether I could still take some heavy losses despite playing "correct" moves because my opponent's tactical ability is simply far superior to mine.  And every game comes to the point where there's nothing but calculation and fisticuffs sooner or later. It makes me wonder if just having amazing tactics would be enough to win even from terrible positions. 

Petrosian went 2 years straight without losing a game at the USSR championship.  These arguments always end up splitting people in 2.  Half believe its all about tactics, half believe its all about strategy.  This quickly derails into "Yea but you cant get tactics without a superior positions" and "You cant get a superior position without tactics"  

Its faster to just nail a foot to the floor and run around in circles.

Tactics should be by far what you study, but how do you decide what side of the board to threaten or where to put your pieces when no obvious tactic is apparent?  Strategic ideas like finding good outposts for your knights and deny them for your opponent, getting you Bad Bishop outside your Pawn Chain, and castling early help create the tactical situations that are an advantage to you.

Personally, I weaker at strategies and it's holding back my use of tactics. I'm getting ready to study Silman's How to Reassess Your Chess (4th Ed, 658 pages and a 423 page workbook) and also study, using the incredible database in Chess King ($27.95 at Amazon - non-masters don't need anything but the Standard version) what winning players did when the reached the same or similar positions I had reached in my games.

Still, I start off each day with 1/2 hour of either the Tactics Trainer here or those at chesstempo.com.  I also watch the Patterns You Should Know-type videos here and on YouTube. Recognizing patterns quickly is another weakness of mine.

I think it is like why soldiers go through same training courses more than learning the field intuition; there are patterns that are just much more efficient to learn from the book.

Good positional players uses clever tactics to improve their position. One aspect of the positional game is to win diagonals, squares and lines first. To get there first you might need to take a tactical shortcut. One day you think you have to use a move to cover a piece, because you haven't noticed that it is tactically covered. Tactics and position works together. A lot of the positional players are brilliant tacticians, but you dont always see the action, because many tactical considerations  isn't about executing.  The treath might be worse than the execution.

ki

Yup!

I remember looking to the games of Petrosian a while ago to see if I could try and play the things he does to get simple positions out of the opening. One of his games I saw brought up one of my thoughts of why i think positional chess must take a backseat. I do agree that positional chess and tactics are both important. My thought is that a deficiency in tactical ability (which I think is common for club players) can make positional advantages difficult to impossible to convert.

Here is one well-played game by Petrosian that got my attention. I noticed that this wasn't one of Petrosian's usual slow grinds. His opponent played a risky line in the opening that actually forced Petrosian to use his tactical abilities to win the game. People often say that tactics flow from a better position. And this is true. But often times tactics are the only reason that positional chess is even allowed to work. You are only allowed to post your pieces to great squares because your opponent can't just capture them or you can do something that is positionally desirable because it is tactically correct.

Now I'm not saying that Petrosian's position didn't lead to anything good. What I'm saying here is that if for whatever reason Petrosian wasn't up to the challenge of finding great tactics on almost every move he would've been worse at best. And this is what worries me in chess. You can play many great moves and have a great position. But sooner or later it's tactics time and whether your position is better or not you'll have to find some strong attacking ideas. But if a player is not up to it then their positional play may not even matter at all.

Meanwhile while Black perhaps did not play the best moves, he still had tactical chances in the position. Which is why I always say that tactics can come from a better OR worse position. What matters is the ones that are correct. And again I wonder how adept class players will be at finding these moves. Sure our opponents may not play like Sorokin and require such sophisticated play. But they can still take us into these murky positions where our tactical knowledge is put to the test.

And this is why I wonder about whether tactics are more important. I feel like I need to be better at tactics first in order to actually prove that these positional concepts are correct.

They need to learn *basic* positional ideas. Specific things like the art of playing with IQP and studying the positional sacrifice are unnecessary completely in the class level.

 Learning positional chess is what got me over the hump and over 2000 rating online.

Before I go on, I should say that it's a mistake to separate positional considerations from tactics.  You are right in that often tactics are used to accomplish positional aims, but if you don't know those positional concepts then you'll never see the tactics (or never see their use in a practical game).

That said, if you position gets good enough, you may not even need to use tactics.  Most of my victories are fairly uneventful affairs, where I slowly outplay my opponents positionally.  Two quick examples.

If you look at these games, I don't really do anything special.  I just slowly improve my position, and when my opponent makes a mistake I can take advantage.  In neither game was I ever in danger of losing, and I didn't need to calculate very deeply.  In the first game, I arguably won despite not calculating deeply.  That's the power of positional chess.

I spent years trying to improve my tactics, and though I got some improvement, it wasn't a lot, and it wasn't near enough for the investment in time.  Learning positional chess had a dramatic and near immediate impact.  That's my experience, at least, and why I recommend studying positional concepts.

 No, because "tactics flow from a superior position." If you have no clue about strategy, then your opponent will never be under enough pressure that he blunders, and you'll certainly never be so far ahead that tactics are unavoidable for your opponent.

 It's not possible to separate tactics and strategy. Strong players don't make either a tactical move, or a strategic move. The idea of a move, and the validation of a move is (nearly) always a combination of both tactics and strategy. The rare exceptions are e.g. a forced mating sequence, or a positional sac that requires no calculation.

 A purely tactical position is not complicated enough to swindle strong players. When GMs make things complicated, there are both tactical and strategic considerations the opponent has to make sense of. For example the losing player make offer a line that involves a knight sacrifice... but it would result in a drawn endgame in spite of the extra material. It's not only tactics and calculation going on, but also the players have to positionally evaluate the results to know which lines work and which don't.

 At a low level definitely, because there are frequent unforced errors on both sides that pure calculation can resolve. But even a player rated 1200 is unlikely to blunder if they're under zero pressure.