Does Strategy Even Matter?

The question is not as dumb as it sounds. If you review hundreds of chess games, what you find is that the vast majority are decided by tactics. Thus beginners are often advised to focus primarily, or even exclusively, on tactics.

Perhaps no one took this advice more literally than Michael de la Maza. Frustrated by his lack of rating progress from gaining chess knowledge, de la Maza adopted a plan of intensively training basic tactics, and little else. He recounted his experience in 400 Points in 400 Days, an article that soon went viral, and later the book Rapid Chess Improvement.

De la Maza’s results were certainly impressive, and no one is going to argue that doing a lot of tactics very intensively will probably improve your results. But does it really make sense to focus on tactics to the exclusion of strategy?

I’ve thought a lot about how to explain the value of strategy, and the best metaphor I’ve come up with is boxing. If you reviewed a large number of fights, you’d find that almost no one was ever knocked out by a jab. Thus, an analytically-minded observer might counsel boxers to stop using or practicing jabs, and instead focus on punches like hooks or uppercuts that result in more knockouts. Would this be good advice?

Well, I’m no boxing expert, but I don’t think the huge majority of boxers are fools for continuing to use the jab. While it is very difficult to knock someone out with a jab, the punch serves other purposes, like keeping the opponent off balance, wearing them out, and ultimately setting up the knockout punch.

Strategy functions much the same way in chess. It’s how you apply pressure to your opponent, sap their attention, and ultimately create a window for a decisive tactic. Blunders can be mysterious, but I do believe they’re related to fatigue and cognitive overload. Your opponent is more likely to blunder if they’ve been under continuous pressure for hours, or have to solve difficult positional problems. Skilled players rarely blunder when they’re under no pressure whatsoever.

This is an area where the engine evaluation can be quite misleading. The moves that produce the biggest evaluation swings are, almost by definition, tactics. But in a practical game there is great value in giving your opponent a narrower or more difficult path to keep the balance, even if the engine can see that they are still surviving with perfect moves.

Another reason to work on strategy is just to have something to do when there are no tactics available. It is easier to play quickly and confidently if you are proceeding according to some kind of plan. I tend to believe “a bad plan is better than no plan”. Computers can play one move at a time with no overarching plan, but for humans, it is much easier to play if the moves are connected by ideas, even if they’re not perfect.

One part of the de la Maza story that I’ve always felt deserved more attention is the conclusion: shortly after his rating jump, he quit chess. Thus, while his approach succeeded in gaining rating points quickly, it ultimately failed at what I would consider a more important goal: pursuing chess in a fulfilling way. At the end of the day, maybe the best reason to study strategy is that it makes chess more fun.