Tactical vs Positional Player
How many times do you hear that sort of contrast being drawn? “I’m a positional player.” “I’m a tactical player.” We put ourselves in boxes that we then have trouble climbing out of. “I didn’t want to play that line because it was too tactical.” “That line is too quiet.”
While these words can be truthfully applied to some positions, not all positions can be so easily pigeonholed, and certainly no player can be so pigeonholed. Don’t believe me? Think of former champion Tigran Petrosian. A quiet, maneuvering player - obviously a positional player.
But what typified his games, what was his “signature?” Sacrificing the exchange, a tactical sequence. And who can forget the time he played Tal, when tactics lit up the board with enough fire to satisfy Alexei Shirov. And it was Petrosian doing it, not Tal.
Don’t trap yourself into a style of thinking that’s false. Stop thinking about them as two completely separate and distinct forms of chess. Tactical play exposes positional weaknesses. The foundation stones of good positional play are tactics.
Emanuel Lasker wrote: “With combinations they [chess masters] attempt to refute false values, and by positional play to demonstrate true values. ”
Neither positional play nor tactical play can exist in a vacuum. They enable each other. Instead of “two sides of the same coin” (the metaphor often used) think of them as poles of a magnet. You don’t get one without the other (yes, I know about unipolar magnets, but when you look at them you’ll see they aren’t truly unipolar, they’re just hiding the other pole).
And like magnetic poles, they are attracted to their opposites. Tactical flourishes exist because of poor positional play. Positional weaknesses attract tactics just as surely as the north pole of a magnet attracts the south pole of another.
Next time you’re tempted to think about yourself in terms of tactical or positional, think again. You don’t want to label yourself as half a chessplayer. Where’s the attraction in that?
March 15th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
I suppose it’s kind of like balancing a scale. We can tip towards the strategical side, or we can tip towards the tactical side, but there’s always going to be some mass on the other side. And then we’re always trying to add mass to both sides too in order to improve in chess.
So it shouldn’t be “I’m a positional player,” but something more like “I tend to play more positionally than tactically.” I wouldn’t think that there are that many people out there that actually do strike the balance and are equal in tactical and strategical vision or skill.
I personally don’t know where I fall on the scale right now. My play has gone from almost completely strategical to having some tactical maneuvers. I suppose I shouldn’t worry about it too much and should just focus on improving and having fun!
On a side note, State is this weekend. I hope we’ll see you there.
March 16th, 2007 at 9:57 am
I plan on being there Saturday.
Think of the different facets as legs: if one grows longer than the other, you’ll walk lopsidedly and will have trouble getting where you want to go.
Tactics alone can take you all the way to master and even beyond. That’s already been proven. But if that’s all you study and work on, you will pick up some bad strategic/positional habits along the way, making more work for you later as you have to unlearn bad habits as well as learn good ones. (In one sense, that’s what happened to me. Back in the day I couldn’t handle tactics at all, played very quiet chess — one opponent said my winning method was to lull my opponent to sleep and then win on time. I realized that was the weakest facet of my game, and so focused on it, forcing myself to play tactical openings, and my results improved. But I failed to pay attention to the balance in my game, and the scales tipped in the other direction. I began playing solely for tactics and paid no attention at all to strategic concerns. My development as a chessplayer was stunted.)
I’ve set about correcting that course, but it would have been so much easier had I kept the two in balance earlier in my career. Today I spend most of my study time working on calculation, because that’s currently the weakest part of my game, but at the same time, I’m keeping the tactical work linked to positional considerations by identifying and examining the positional weaknesses that make the tactical blows I’m calculating work.
That’s where most tactical study fails, I think. Just by practicing on tactical problems, you automatically improve in recognizing the tactical possibility when it arises on the board. But by not correctly understanding what weaknesses led to it, you never gain the ability to create those possibilities in your games. You become very good at picking up what your opponent drops, but never acquire the skill of knocking something out of his hands in the first place.
As a class player, that’s not all that big a handicap, because players below 1800 drop things all the time, almost every game. But the farther a player goes above 1800, the less frequently they drop things on their own. So either you end up drawing a lot of games, or you learn how to knock things out of your opponent’s hands.
It goes back to one of my favorite quotes from Rudolf Spielmann. When a spectator once remarked on the depth and beauty of Alekhine’s combinations, he snorted “Given his positions, I would have no trouble finding his combinations. But I can never get his positions!” That’s the trickiest rung on the improvement ladder, gaining the ability to create/induce weaknesses you are prepared to take advantage of tactically.
Once you can correctly recognize one pole of the magnet, the positional weakness, you know what the other pole will look like, so it makes searching for it easier. But the only way to recognize that pole in the first place is by studying tactics in the context of the positional weaknesses they exploit. In your study you work backwards from the effect (the tactical blow) toward the cause so that in your games you will be able to recognize the causes and more easily settle on the effects.
You know, I think there’s a longer essay in that, just waiting to come out.
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Hello,
Just tonight while trying to track down a certain unnamed chess tournament that took place in Milwaukee during 1973, I came across William Martz’s name. I had no idea that Milwaukee (I was born and raised here and currently live in Greenfield, WI) had such a chess star. I also had no idea about his untimely death at the young age of 37 in 1983. How sad for Milwaukee. We had a great chess history here, but it seems hardly anyone knows about it!
Is there a way to contact you? I have some historical questions to ask about Alina Markowski and a player in a 1973 Milwaukee tournament who, on threat of being disqualified from the event, played one move and then left the playing area and “lost” the game.
JN
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:37 pm
I know this is NOT the spot to submit this, but I figured you’ll like it anyways:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article1816459.ece
check that out