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Topic: "Thanks for your Queen", signed E. Colle
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Unfortunately I've worked through Reinfields books and they don't help me. The problem with tactics books is that you know the position is ready for some tactic, but in a real game you first need to figure out if you are in a position where you need a positional or tactical answer. Silmans books are good with the positional side of the equation but once again you know that the answer isn't tactical so you don't bother looking for queen sacs etc and get straight to looking at manuevers. It would be nice to get a book where some of the positions are positional, and some are tactical, along with an explanation of how to determince the difference.
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Maybe playing Fischer Random Chess can help in developing your tactical skills. 
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"Modern Chess is too much concerned with things like pawn structure. Forget it. Checkmate ends the game." — Nigel Short.
Checkmate ends the game. Winning a piece outright almost always wins the game. Winning the exchange usually wins the game (you are not Tigran Petrosian; positional exchange sacs are unlikely). Winning a pawn is often enough to win the game (or, at least, tie your opponent's hand because he can't afford to trade down into a losing pawn endgame).
All of this means that positional considerations are secondary to tactics. You should look for tactical opportunities in every position. After every move your opponent makes, your first two questions should be, "Is s/he threatening anything tactical?" and "Has s/he given me a tactical opportunity?" You determine the difference between tactical positions and positional positions by looking for tactics! If you see a tactic, it's a tactical position; if you don't see a tactic after a reasonable amount of time, you either need to threaten your opponent with one or otherwise improve your position.
Studying a book like Reinfeld makes you better at spotting tactical opportunities. It helps you to see more of them and it helps you to see them faster. That also means that you can more quickly see that a position doesn't have much in the way of tactics. And it means that you are more alert to the tactical possibilities of the more positional moves you might be forced to consider.
I'd be interested to know how you worked through Reinfeld's books. In my opinion, the best way is not to use a board so you get a lot of practice calculating variations in your head. Look at each position and try to work it out in your head. If you can't get it in a few minutes, note it down and go on to the next one. After each page, check your answers and note down which ones you got wrong. Go through the ones you couldn't work out on your own. Then, a week or so later, try again the ones that you couldn't get or got wrong.
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I'm in the opposite camp. I don't think that tactics magically exist, you need to have certain features for them to work. But then maybe that's the type of positions I tend to play (closed games).
I'd love to see a book where rather than just spot the tactic you are told the tactic and are asked whether it is flawed or sound. Like I said, working through the section on queen sacs, you already know that a queen sac wins, and so you just look for Qx? which narrows down the options to a few candidates.
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whyBish wrote:
| I'm in the opposite camp. I don't think that tactics magically exist, you need to have certain features for them to work. |
I never said that `tactics magically exist'. Of course they don't. However, any move by your opponent is a potential mistake that may create tactical opportunities that did not previously exist. Such opportunities are created by the basic elements — forks, pins, skewers, and so on — which, as you say, must be present.
Of course, it's rare that your opponent will hand you a basic tactic on a plate, for example, by allowing you to fork two of their pieces with a knight. However, it's more common to be given what you might call `nearly tactics' — `I could fork his king and queen but he'd just take take the knight with his bishop.' OK, so can you get rid of that `but' by (re)moving the bishop? And so on.
| I'd love to see a book where rather than just spot the tactic you are told the tactic and are asked whether it is flawed or sound. |
Heh. Well, it turns out that some of Reinfeld's analysis is badly flawed and he quite often considers only the most obvious attempt at a defense. Of course, he was writing before it was possible to check your analysis by computer. A handful of Reinfeld's `winning' moves in 1001 Combinations are actually so wrong as to turn a winning position into a lost one, though they're very much in the minority. By my reckoning, there are about ten of these in 1001 Combinations, plus another twenty-five or so where Reinfeld missed a perfectly adequate defense to his proposed tactic. Go find them! :D
| working through the section on queen sacs, you already know that a queen sac wins, and so you just look for Qx? which narrows down the options to a few candidates. |
Of course. But it does get you used to the sorts of positions where a queen sacrifice might be worth considering and, probably most important, it gives you a lot of practice at calculation. In any case, in any given position, most potential `queen sacrifices' fail so obviously that, even if you asked `can I sacrifice my queen here?' on every move, it could hardly cost you more than a couple of seconds each time.
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