For a beginner focused on reducing blunders, should I study positional theory or tactics more?

Question

I've been playing chess for about a month, learning strategies and principles along the way. Initially, reviewing my games to identify frequent mistakes helped me progress from a complete novice to understanding basic principles, such as controlling the center and developing knights and bishops.

However, as I continue to review my games, I've noticed that my errors aren't usually due to a lack of understanding of these principles. For instance, I often recognize a better move immediately after a mistake is pointed out. Some errors are only evident with the chess engine's analysis, predicting sequences far beyond my current ability to foresee during a game. So, I'm focusing less on these for now.

My main issue is failing to notice critical elements like weaknesses in my defense or opportunities to capture freely. This often happens because there's a lot to consider on the board, and I'm unsure where to focus.

I understand that pattern recognition improves with practice, and I have noticed some progress. Yet, in a recent online class on various aspects of chess theory, it was suggested that studying positional theory might enhance my board analysis skills. However, when I inquired about identifying weaknesses without assistance, the instructor mentioned that this involves tactics, which is a separate topic from positional theory, but equally important.

While I intend to study both eventually, since they're both important and go hand in hand, given my specific short-term goal of minimizing blunders by recognizing critical threats and opportunities, should I prioritize learning positional theory to analyze the board better, or should I focus more on tactics to identify and exploit weaknesses more effectively?

Or should I try to find a resource that explicitly teaches both as a more unified theory? Is asking whether to focus more on one or the other at first like asking if I should focus more on grammar or vocabulary when first learning a new language?

Answer 1

You should train tactics more. Any positional move or longer strategy is useless if the position on the board allows you or your opponent to finish the game in a few moves by a forced continuation, so you have to be able to detect quickly tactical patterns in a position. This can only be done by extensive training. You should not be confident in your practise, not the number of games you play will improve your tactical knowledge, but instead you should focus on the study of specific tactical positions.

For the training, other than dedicated chess literature or test series available to download, a large game database coupled with a good chess GUI is able to filter out for you - or even to create - tactical positions to solve based on the games found in the database. Chessbase or Fritz GUI have this feature.

Answer 2

The real problem you face as a beginner is that you are overwhelmed: there are 32 pieces on the board and you need to be aware of any possible interaction between any number of them - a gargantuan task.

As you progress with chess your brain will adapt and sort out the "important" from the "less important" interactions and better focus on what is really important. This way the task becomes better manageable over time. (Note that this effect has a name: "pattern recognition". A large part of chess playing skill is the amount of patterns one is familiar with. To compare that with verbal skills: grandmasters use the same grammatical structures we mere mortals use but they have a vastly bigger vocabulary, which makes their speech much more precise.)

What helped me develop my calculation as well as develop my "pattern repertoire" was solving chess puzzles. I started with "miniatures": puzzles with 7 or less pieces. Once you have mastered "elementary tactics" (there are special books on that, explaining certain motifs, etc., also Lichess.org and others offer resources on this) I suggest you try your heand at "mate in 2" type miniatures. This will be - very - slow going at first, but continue working at it and it will become easier over time.

I remember using Werner Speckmanns "Schachminiaturen, Zweizüger" (1965, Walter deGruyter, in German) and I started by solving 1 or 2 puzzles a day. That accelerated after a few days/weeks and at the end of the book I solved 10-15 in the same time, without even putting the pieces on the board, simply by analysing from the print.

Solving such problems will do 2 things for you: first, you learn to calculate lines reliably and fast and - maybe even more important - it will make you understand how pieces work together and teach you motifs - the patterns I spoke of before.