A bit pushed for time tonight, so I can't address all the points that have been raised. But I will make a start.

First and most important, I hope nobody seriously wants to discuss what to recommend to young beginners, adult beginners, the typical ChessPub member, Sammour-Hasbun and the young Kasparov all at the same time. Obviously no single recommendation can be given to all of these, and it's bound to lead to a muddle.

The post I responded to specifcally mentioned beginners and traditional general manuals. I get a sense you guys are expanding the subject to players of virtually every conceivable level and pretending I would still give the same one-sided advice! Spoiler alert: Of course I wouldn't.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 07/20/20 at 06:28:35:

I was not in fact thinking of those specific manuals. There are countless similar books in this genre that try to get people started in chess and teach a little bit of everything. I was writing from my general impression of the genre, but if you asked me which specific books helped formed that impression I would probably mention Tarrasch, Wolff, Koblenc, Agdestein, Ken Whyld and Daniel King. Maybe My System too - a lot of part 1 is beginner-level, but only a few tactics are covered.

I read Tarrasch' The Game of Chess as a beginner, but got very little out of it. I only took a leap in playing strength when I added Reinfeld's two classic "1001" tactics book (and a bit later Silman's Reassess Your Chess).

A friend gave me Emanuel Lasker's Manual a few years ago, but I haven't studied it. I will look and check if maybe he's a positive exception and prioritizes tactics higher than the others. As for Euwe, I have five of his books, but I'm not entirely sure which of them would qualify as a true general manual.

I guess you were trying to imply that all these greats were obviously right and I'm wrong, but remember they were mostly writing before the pioneering work of De Groot and Chase and Simon demonstrating the huge reliance on pattern recognition in master-level chess. We know better today, or at least I believe I do. It's a common finding that top performers in a field of expertise struggle to explain how exactly they do what they do so well.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 07/20/20 at 06:28:35:

As far as I'm concerned the studies have been done and there's now little doubt of the central value of pattern recognition and intuition in chess.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 07/20/20 at 06:28:35:

This was just an aside about specific book suggestions for beginners. I wasn't discussing the authors' own development at all.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 07/20/20 at 06:28:35:

This is well put and I largely agree. I wasn't arguing, at least not here, that tactics need special emphasis forever. Again, I was talking about beginners. And further down (in reply #24) you acknowledge that on absolute beginner level not hanging pieces or missing one-move tactics is essential. So I guess our disagreement is really about for how long in a player's development tactics should definitely get special emphasis. I would say that when a player has mastered all the basic tactics to the extent that he can spot them for himself and avoid them coming from the opponent most of the time, he's no longer a beginner and is free to adopt a more balanced training regimen.

About stagnating, I do see quite often adult club players stagnating because they are held back by weaknesses in tactics and calculation. These are the people who dismiss most of their losses with "it was just a random, stupid blunder" and throw the scoresheet straight in the trash. If only they would save those games and look at them calmly and systematically, they could realize those blunders are not random but constitue a glaring weakness and a barrier to further progress.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 07/20/20 at 16:50:14:

Agreed about the diminishing returns, though I don't think there's ever been a human player who hit an absolute ceiling where no further progress was possible in the field of tactics, certainly when conceived broadly to include calculation and threat avoidance.

When a player has reached a level where it's really hard to use tactics to get past one's peers, I'd say we're likely not on beginner level anymore (more like expert or master level, in fact). So it's important to be clear what level(s) we're talking about. Disclaimer: I'm not saying the best way to get to expert/master is doing almost only tactics.

After all of this, maybe it will surprise you to hear my ideal as a player is to be as well-rounded as I can, with no glaring weaknesses, in order to be well set to read my opponents and direct games towards exploiting their specific weaknesses. I don't think most people would look at my games and conclude I'm a one-sided tactician. It's just that, like most sports have their basic skills that must be drilled to "unconscious" (i.e. effortless) competence, so too with chess. And in my mind tactics are at the top of that list of basic skills for chess, even for positional players.

I still try to get in some extra tactics training before tournaments and I do better on average when I manage to find time for that. But I would not insist other experienced tourmanent warriors should do the same if it's no use for them.

ReneDescartes wrote on 07/20/20 at 13:32:21:

Somehow I missed this part when I first read your post.

Talking about leaving things en prise (1-ply blunders, or 0-ply if it was already en prise), of course "tactics" at this level is going to dominate every other skill in chess. It takes no cleverness whatsoever to exploit this. It's the equivalent of leaving a twenty-dollar bill on the bus seat and then walking away. Working by experience alone and progressing to 2-ply or 3-ply will be slow going. (Maybe cover your bill with a magazine first, so they have do some work?) Anybody who does some tactics puzzles, whether it be forks, skewers, mates, or whatever, is going to make rapid progress and jump up in rating.

Tactics can be used both positively, to further our own plans, or negatively, to punish our opponent's lapses. Each one is subject to diminishing returns.

1. After the skill of "I go here, they go there, visualize the resulting position" is learned, "tactics" turns into an entirely different category of knowledge. The correct use of tactics then depends on the player's strategic knowledge.
2. All players, without particularly emphasizing tactics, naturally improve at tactics as they progress through the ratings ranges. Some more than others, but on the the whole all the boats are rising with the tide. Being able to exploit errors more than other players at your rating can do depends on the difference between your tactical ability and everybody else's. By focusing on tactics, you leave behind the old cohort, but the comparative advantage in the new cohort is not that great. Which is okay, but if you try to do the same thing again you are going to quickly run into a wall.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 07/20/20 at 06:28:35:

Put into a crude mathematical model, Stigma's idea is to evaluate weak players' skills and create separate opening, strategy,  endgame, and tactics scores; then create a valid equation with a weighted sum of these these separate skills on one side and overall rating on the other. The tactics score, he claims, will have a much greater coefficient than the others. So where the left-hand side's skill scores are controlled as described by Stigma, the two players will not have equal ratings on the right unless the tactical superiority of the one is very slight. Supposing the players to be evenly matched short-circuits the whole idea by controlling for the right-hand side.

Stigma wrote on 07/20/20 at 04:33:29:

Again, if you stipulate at the start that a player with a strong tactics score is losing (by implication to someone not as strong tactically), then of course the other terms are responsible; but Stigma is saying that he will not be losing to his previously-equal opponents once his tactics score improves (by implication even if their other scores improve).

I would also think that different sets of coefficients would be needed at different overall rating ranges, and that the dominance of the tactics coefficient on the left would decrease as the overall rating on the right increased. It is obvious that for super-GMs, opening and strategic knowledge can win games in a way impossible for weak players. That would be one way to construe AOC's last quoted sentence, and I would agree. But even Kasparov drilled quick tactics problems before his last title match (too bad he didn't get to use them, he he).

Now, a plain weighted sum is probably not how I would relate chess skills, even if they could be well defined. Also, it is an open question whether time spent doing  tactics puzzles improves tactics skill in slow play better than actively reading annotated games (which also show you new tactical ideas) and playing slow games and analyzing them afterward without a computer. Tarrasch's beginners' book and Lasker's manual both treat tactics by presenting extensive sets of examples somewhat longer than typical beginners' puzzles today--annotated game excerpts, in other words. If today's internet-addled readers could go through these with the patience of Tarrasch's readers, I think his method would be effective.

My own feeling is that DeLaMazza poisoned the discourse with claims that are shady, to say the least (see http://empiricalrabbit.blogspot.com/2012/06/michael-de-la-maza-verdict.html?m=1) and yet are still influential. I also think modern methods are structured the way they are because they work for children, whereas Tarrasch was writing for adults, or older children with the attention span of adults, capable of active study from a manual.

I also agree with AOC (and Heisman) that once students largely stop leaving material en prise or hanging to 3-ply tactics, a broad study program is warranted. The fact that players commonly find Yusupov's strategic and positional chapters much harder than his tactics chapters suggests that if anything tactics is a little overemphasized at intermediate levels today.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 07/20/20 at 03:56:40:

You've written so many wise things on the forum that I thought I'd jump in here when I disagree with you for once! I agree with Heisman that tactics and especially material-winning tactics are hands down the most important things for beginners to work on, of course without entirely neglecting other aspects of the game. A player who is superior in opening knowledge, strategy and endgame technique will frequently lose to an opponent who's just better at tactics (including preventing tactical disasters for one's own side). If "evenly matched opponents are gifting each other material at about the same rate", surely that means when one of them gets better at not gifting the other material, s/he has improved and they're no longer evenly matched.

The problem with the "traditional general manuals" is precisely that every single one I've seen devotes too little space to tactics and safety and gives the learner the false impression that tactics is just one skill among many equally important ones. (Heisman's books may be the exception here if you count any of them as a general manual). So when I've recommended a general manual* to someone, I have almost always felt a need to also recommend some tactics work on the side, for instance Chandler's two excellent books, regular training on a tactics server, or a level of the Steps method.

The small number of tactical examples found in most of these manuals can even obscure the need for drilling puzzles by volume to get tactical patterns into one's intuition, leaving people to try to work out all the tactics at the board via some logical method, which is just not practical.

*) The best general manual I can think of right now is Patrick Wolff's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess, but it's mostly for adult and teen beginners, and the idiotic title may turn some people off it. Children might as well go straight for the Steps Method (paper or digital) or the fun workbooks by Coakley or Bardwick. I also hear good things about Susan Polgar's Learn Chess the Right Way series, which is also available on Chessable.

Thanks, Rene. You read me very well.

• Shouldn't this be in a separate topic?
• The number of different mates is arbitrary. Depending on who creates the list, some mates will be considered "the same", another list would have them broken out as "different".
• In chess there is no such thing as "complete", except for marketing, or quitting.

Fianchetto positions can be sharp and they are rarely boring. See Nakamura's games as black with the Leningrad Dutch, which he plays when he needs to win. You can play the Leningrad with white, and that is fun too. As black against 1.e4 the Tiger Modern is easy to learn and again not boring. Personally I don't think improvers should waste too much time on openings. The main thing is to play fun games, not worrying too much about the result. And never accept a draw if there is anything left on the board. Good luck!