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I choose person 4 tbf. of course both are important and strat will help you make plans but tactic is more important for a U2400. I mean, it also depends on X person rating
there are many endgame positions posted in the analysis section where seemingly obvious strategies seem to escape the computer at depth 20 or even 25. so @dboing has some good points there about analysis depth. strategy is your helper when you cant possible calculate this deep, but you get the idea anyways.
i still think you cant possibly make it through a midgame being somewhat equal if you dont understand tactics at least as well as your opponent unless you are ridiculously well prepped and just memorize move after move after move, which has nothing to do with strategy or tactics.
in a vacuum tactics > strategy all day. to be frank it completely eludes me how anybody could think different about something so obvious. a strategy cant ever beat tactics because tactics come before strategy.
think of chess as a round based strategy game: everything is per move, the only thing strategic about it is the clock. and your strategy is limited by how deep you can calculate, everything else is just hoping that your opponent will blunder. whether or not a strategy works depends on if there are tactics to prevent your so called strategy and if your opponent is good enough to see it.
a basic example is your enemy throwing every piece at your king without being forceful (checking). you might be mate in 1 in three different ways but your probably just one sac away from sending his king on a run in a forced checkmate sequence due to all the squares he abandoned near his king. this is what i mean by hoping for a blunder (im 1400 rated i will basically panic every time and not see the counterattack sequence that is mate in 5, but that doesnt technically mean that the opponents strategy was good and the higher rated you become the more often you will get punished brutally for this kind of play). if you look at titled players or generally up in the ranks you will see people who can do puzzles blindfolded in 1-2min that you wouldnt figure out in a million years.
The question can be interpreted different ways, here are three ways.
1) If you had only tactics or only strategy, which one would be better? The answer to this one is obviously tactics. Without any tactics you will always lose, but without any strategy you can still win.
2) If you could magically improve in tactics or strategy, which one would help improve your rating fastest? This answer is less clear. Maybe it depends on rating, but I guess the answer would still almost always be tactics.
3) If you could spend time training in tactics or strategy, which one would help improve your rating fastest? This answer is even less clear and almost certainly depends on rating, natural talent, and age. I think it's possible that some experienced older players have already reached their tactics limit, so that even if they trained a thousand more tactics puzzles they will not improve or they will get worse from how much their brain has aged during that time. In that case, their rating would improve fastest by studying strategy not tactics.
4) If you like to discover principles or build theoretical castles that simplify the complexity of the experienced universe, then any emerging idea that can make sense (even if temporary illusion) of apparently headless chicken behaviour on the board, would be appealing before mastering all the tactics...to that person. That does not mean tactics dismissed, but why put artificial priorities, i think fun while improving, if not a matter of life of death (or making a living), should be the guide.
rating. I think only useful for avoiding boredom. there are other factors more important about an individual make up, that would affect the proportion of the blend between the poles of that dichotomy. I have mentioned a few, and others too.
Good exploration of angles. I just thought 4 was missing.
"Now If I had a blue check next to my name, I don't really need anything else because I have pre-approved credibility."
Debate is about the face value of arguments, not who made it. It should be self contained. And I don't think one needs a high rating to start thinking about their experience, thoughts and dreams. Otherwise, sclerosis of the minds await. Nothing new happens. polarization stagnates... because all is supposedly known for some mysterious reason.
Debate is not a litany of opinions. that do not interact. I am sure we are more than one to agree.
For 5-10 minutes games, chess is 80% Tactics. For > 10 minutes,.chess is 50% Tactics. What is Tactics? Gaining material and checkmate. Strategy is gaining space, controlling more squares, and the pawn reaching last rank for promotion.
Strategy sets the course of the game. You have general plan, how to exploit the weaknesses, which bishops to trade, etc.
Tactics is what wins you games, when they appear and your opponent dont see them.
Most players like me and lower, give too much weight to tactics. But if you see at higher levels. They have a grand strategy.
If you want to get better, you do have to learn, understand, use and develop a strategy, as you assure a good position.
If you want to win games, study tactics, but that rating increase wont really make you a better chess player overall.
Even some times that you dont have a plan you fail to convert on material advantage, but a good strategy can win you games by mere piece position
Strategy over tactics 100% of the time for me.
expanding or nudging the question a bit. Besides the winning probabilities contribution from each type of human cogitations prior to actual move (i.e. tactics vs strategy), I was wondering whether people believe that tactics or the ability to compute tactics tightly either deep or with appropriate perfect reply prediction effort or else (but of ply per ply calculation nature), breath here: that tactics skill differential is where players will with practice have more room to defeat an opponent if both have equal strategic skills.
I mean is it assumed that "strategic" or positional, notions can't be what tips the odds for a more experienced player over another if the 2 are equal tactically.
Do I read that strategy or positional analysis is easy to equalize? That positional analysis is simpler than tactics and has no mystery left? Otherwise, I wonder why one could tell which one is more important in general than the other, without precise contexts beyond the mere rating of the pair of players.
Because, I find that I make the most blunders myself when I feel paralyzed by not well honed evaluation of my chances, often with equal material. I find that independent features alone, are rarely clear cut. and that many of them need to be considered and weighted in interaction, and that there is no training system equivalent to puzzles systems to hone those skills.
It seems that I lack planning imagination (or experience in merging feature evaluations to make them decision tools before move selection, and that the focus on tactics because it has been well categorized and examples production scale developed, makes a poor effort at how to build strategic thinking, when you are not yet a master. And I also find that studying masters games, does not make enough contrasts where one can autonomously learn to hone how to dock all those feature perceptions and evaluation together into a robust decision tool. The imbalance are too subtle to be used. It may actually be the reason for the long path about mastering tactics first, so that happenstance learning of the rest does end up happening.
I actually think that the alpha-zero self-learning initial junk games is not just an obligatory evil, but that it is essential to learning beyond tactics (the NN are poor tacticians, and become better as their long term prediction ability become more informed through the reinforcement learning). Teaching NN with only perfect games does not work. because there is no innate notion of how different or similar positions can be, when only working on the perfect edge or tenuous path within real chess (legal chess). First learn through exaggerated imbalances, and then slowly reduce the variation or amplitude of those blunderous (blasphemous?) games. sorry i am a bit iconoclastic, it kinds of puts structure into rambling.
that is my can of worms. Can rational thinking (teaching, pedagogy, designer positions, or drills, communication....) shorten the current positional or long tern planning skills evolution of an individual. The psychology of learning such non purely logical chess thinking skills has not been objectified enough, at least not as much as tactical skilles, with all sorts of drills and measures....
Is my now long lasting impression that i just tried to described wrong. is that because I am a newbie compared to the chess kids that kept playing and now are often called masters, or that I did not read enough books diligently? any fire behind the smoke i perceive? sorry .,.. did not plan of writing that much. (i never do, then my fingers start thinking and run away...)
Just get your board out and solve some puzzles bro
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