@DVRazor Also you go into the tactic with the knowledge that there is in fact a tactic to win a piece which is what 99% of puzzles are. It's far more difficult to spot a winning tactic in real time.
@DVRazor I'm not sure the depth matters so much. I think if there was a person with perfect clarity of moves 4 moves each on each move, we'd probably call him world champion!
For myself tactics just enable me to look at a position and have the pieces move themselves which I find critical for any sort of calculation. I mean for instance when you look at these little mate in 1 captchas how long does it take you? I imagine probably something like 0.2s but that's inhuman if you think about it. We can take in on the order of 20 pieces, and all their possibilities, and then figure exactly which move leads to mate in 0.2s? That subconscious training is where I think the big value in tactics comes from.
I learned chess as an adult so it's still in my conscious memory of how I used to see the board and there's no way I could have ever done any sort of meaningful calculation simply because I couldn't 'feel' positions.
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