I was recently watching this Chess Vibes video, where he tries to coach a ~1200 elo (presumably) adult improver, commenting on his games as he plays, and to use a Christian term, felt mildly convicted as I watched, as SpaceVega's sins reflected my own back to me.

SpaceVega played beautiful openings. Actually watching some of his early Caro-Kann games, and how effortlessly he made it look to getting a really nice position, got me thinking I want to play that opening, and had me watching through Eric Hansen's excellent run.

(I have played the French, for my sins, and the Caro-Kann just looked like a more OP version, as SpaceVega would get the "bad" LSB out early and use it to wreck his opponent's pawn structure. But, really, Dash, you need to learn yet another opening? Is that going to help you stop hanging mate in one? Or playing unsound sacrifices?)

As I watched SpaceVega play more and more, get a great position out of the opening, then missing tactic after tactic, and eventually losing, or winning despite his best efforts to throw the game, making life hard for himself with poor conversion technique, it brought to mind an observation that I made about myself, and other adult improvers, that we often just focus on the wrong things (cough openings) when trying to improve at chess.

I think one reason for this is that as adults drawn to chess, we are often attracted to the aesthetics of the game. We like the look of a nice position. We like to win with an opening trap in 9 moves and feel smart. We like to spend 100 or 1000s of dollars on opening courses, convincing ourselves that just one more course will finally propel us to our "true" rating.

And what don't we like? Complications. Calculation. Fighting. Uncertainty. We don't like when a "pawn pusher" breaks all the opening principles and steamrolls our expensive London system "unfairly". We don't like time pressure. We just want to be left alone to recall our favorite lines and play in peace.

And what about kids? You know, who are playing the game to have fun instead of attaching their fragile self-worth to a matching-algorithm number. Kids love tactics. They love forks. The love knights. They never miss a skewer. The strike at any tactical opportunity like a coiled snake. No sooner have you pushed your sweatily considered queen move when your vertically challenged antagonist has forked you with some bishop move. Instantly. Not even the courtesy to think about it first.

Because chess is about thinking right? You go through your mental check list. You consider the principles of the game. What did Silman say about open files? That knight looks dangerous, but Ben Finegold told me never to push my f pawn.... You spend 5 mins on a move, recalling every book, every YouTube video, every Chessable course, meanwhile the kid just sees the tactic and takes your lady.

Philidor said that "paws are the souls of chess". I think that "tactics are the spirit of chess". And I know, every beginner gets told to work on their tactics. This is not anything new or particularly interesting. But I think it's worth thinking about why tactics are so important when improving at chess.

Because just like I think Silman's books are about thinking and fighting, and not really about "imbalances", I think tactics are about the "spirit of chess", which is to say, honing the instinct to pounce on your opponent's mistakes with a ruthless intensity. You need to somehow foster this mindset, or perhaps "mushin/ non-mind" as the Japanese martial artists may have described it. And that's going to take a lot of practice and pattern recognition. But more than anything, it's about backing yourself, trusting you calculation, and trying to get over the adult mid-wit fear of "what if I miss something?" which causes you to overthink, hesitate, or seek protection through the safety of the known, in excessive study of opening theory.

It's like, you need to play chess to actually play chess, in order to get better at chess, if that makes sense.
Maybe nonsense. Maybe there is just a hard limit related to biological determinism and the idea of chess improvement beyond a certain point is just alchemy. But some arbitrary pursuit of arcane knowledge/ secret wisdom is needed to keep the civilized mind occupied. May as well be chess. At least, it keeps me away from conspiracy theories and politics.