Chess Strategy Vs Chess Tactics What's The Difference
You found it. This is the secret to chess. Learning chess strategies can be what separates you from a beginner. Learning chess tactics will undoubtedly improve your game, but understanding a fork is like water an inch deep. Fully understanding chess strategy and becoming a master of chess means you are swimming in an ocean of chess possibilities.
What are Chess Tactics?
A chess tactic is more than a tricky move. In one of my favorite chess books for beginner players, Learn to Play Chess Like a Boss, Grandmaster Patrick Wolff defines a chess tactic as “a sequence of moves, generally a few moves long, played with a specific goal in mind. Often the goal is either to give checkmate or to win material.” He goes on to explain that you can learn these tactics by learning the tactical patterns. I often describe learning these tactics as adding superpowers to your chess game. Knowing about forks, if your opponent doesn’t, will win you chess games.
Why You Should Spend Time On Chess Tactics
Learning these patterns is so useful for your chess game that if you don’t know them yet, you absolutely should spend time learning each kind. Even if you know them, repeatedly practicing these tactics, like a child eating their vegetables, will help you find them easier and easier in your future games.
Where Chess Tactics Fall Short
So why do I need more than just chess tactics? Can’t I just fork and pin my way to victory? Occasionally, yes. However, often, especially as you improve, tactics will not suddenly appear. The player must cultivate the tactics. The seeds of strategy are planted, and then grown, and then, only after working correctly, are those crops yielded. Then the winning position is achieved.
So, if you only look for the finished, grown crops, you may not find them. You need to put the work in on your position to create an opportunity for yourself. That is where good chess strategy comes into play.
What is Chess Strategy?
My favorite book on chess strategy is Winning Chess Strategy by Yasser Seirawan. If you are looking for a further explanation of chess strategies, I fully recommend this book. Yasser defines chess strategy as this: “The purposeful pursuit of a simple goal: to gain an advantage of some sort over your opponent.”
If you remember, Woolf defined a chess tactic as a move that is “played with a specific goal in mind.” And, according to Yasser, a strategy is also about having a goal that gains you an advantage, so what’s the difference? A strategy is moving toward a goal with longer-term thinking, whereas a tactic is a single moment, where you can play a move that achieves that goal. Don’t miss capitalizing on those moments in your game where a tactic can change everything, but as you improve, you will need to set yourself up for success with good strategy.
Types of Chess Strategy
What are some types of chess strategies? Let's examine some chapter titles to help us understand the difference. In Winning Chess Strategies, there are chapters titled “Making the Most of a Material Advantage,” “Stopping Enemy Counterplay,” “How to Use Pawns,” and “Attacking the King.” Let's examine what these terms mean at a basic level. Read the book to understand Yasser's perspective on these ideas, as they provide a good basis for understanding various types of strategy. When evaluating your position, try to identify your specific goal. What is the way that you gain an advantage?
Making the Most of a Material Advantage
Finding a chess tactic can give you an advantage, but one important type of chess strategy is how you can convert your advantage. Consider this position, for instance: should White trade material here? To put it simply, once you are up material, trading is often beneficial.
Stopping Enemy Counterplay
Once you have an advantage, it becomes imperative that you stop your opponent's counterplay. What is counterplay? Take this, for example:
What is the one way that white wins this game? Their pawn! If that pawn makes it to the end of the board, your advantage is gone. So be on the lookout for the ways that your opponent could still win, their counterplay.
How to use Pawns
Speaking of a passed pawn being great counterplay, how to use your pawns can be a next level of chess understanding that can help you win your game. If the goal that you identify, which gives you an advantage, is a passed pawn, for example, then all your moves will revolve around that idea. Don’t forget to consider your opponent's counterplay, but if you successfully build your strategy around your goal of pawn promotion, you can find victory.
Attacking the King
Attacking your opponent's king is a key strategy for winning games of chess, and many chess strategies revolve around this concept. Most chess tactics also revolve around attacking the king, making it a good example of how chess strategy is an extension of chess tactics. Here is a simple example: What move should white play here to gain a positional and strategic advantage against their opponent?
Compared to Tactics
If we compare these chapter titles to those in books about tactics, we can see the difference in focus and definition. In How to Play Chess Like a Boss, the tactics chapter has sections titled “The Fork,” “The Pin,” and “The Skewer.” Another of Yasser’s books, Winning Chess Combinations, features chapter titles such as “Checkmate! Recognizing Patterns” and “Blunders and Boomerangs.”
Learning tactics and combinations will help you improve, they are moves with short-term plans and goals of winning material or checkmating your opponent, but winning a game, at least consistently, requires good chess strategy.
How To Practice Chess Strategy
Practicing chess tactics is easy; you eat your vegetables and do puzzles. But how do you improve in chess strategy? There are several ways to enhance your strategic abilities.
1. Study Through Chess Books
Learning chess strategy is something that can be learned from books! I’ve already mentioned Yasser’s Winning Chess Strategy, but there are a number of other great resources out there that delve into deeper chess strategies. I also recommend How to Reassess Your Chess by Jeremy Silman.
2. Study Grandmaster Games
Grandmasters are there for a reason. They are masters of strategy. By studying their games you can often learn important elements of strategy that you might normally miss. I recommend playing out the game on a chessboard, with a book or annotations, and asking “why.” Why did they play this move?
3. Learn From a Chess Coach
Chess coaches can be a great resource for learning chess strategy. Because chess strategy involves understanding the game on a deeper level, having someone to explain those concepts can be helpful. If you're looking for a chess coach, I recommend checking your local chess club or searching online on Lichess.
Combining Chess Tactics and Chess Strategy
The key to playing good chess and furthering your chess growth is by combining your tactics with chess strategy. These ideas do not exist in isolation; they are the seeds you plant, the crops you grow, and the vegetables you eat. It is all a complete package. But if you have reached the point where you realize you need a strategy, then that means you are learning. You have mastered the basics, and now you want to make more purposeful moves—moves that propel you toward your goal.