I'm watching round 6 of the World Chess Championship between Topalov and Anand, and a grandmaster named Alex Yermolinsky is giving live commentary on it. During a slow period, they were discussing what the computers saw in the position, and GM Yermolinsky said something almost exactly like the following:



This was on Saturday May 1st, around 11:00 AM EST, if anyone else is watching. It made me laugh We should send some "friendly" e-mails to him explaining to him that, indeed, Go does have tactics

_________________
The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain, and simple to express: Err, and err, and err again; but less, and less, and less!

LOL. What a noob...

_________________
My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Sounds like someone is a little sour about getting beaten in go.

Besides, that comment makes zero sense, even if you have no idea what go is. If a game is poor, it should easy to write a program to beat anyone. See tic tac toe.

Well, this is also the same gentleman who's also quoted for:
So I won't care so much for what he says.

GM Yermolinsky (also known as "the Yerminator") is a former top U.S. Player (by way of the USSR) and a respected chess writer.

At the same time, he is a bit of a character and seems prone to controversial statements; he has made many in the past. You might even call him a curmudgeon.

I would take any strong statement by Yermolinsky (even about chess) with a grain of salt, as he seems to delight in playing the provocateur. I also wouldn't be at all surprised to learn he knows very little about Go (maybe not even the rules).

I have a good friend who probably knows A-Yerm

Maybe I can send a Hatsuyron problem his way

_________________
Tactics yes, Tact no...

Back when I played chess, I used to like Yermo because he was a colorful figure, not afraid to speak his mind.

But to say Go has no tactics is just... ignorant.

Yes, that's ignorant indeed. It seems that he is envious that he can be beaten by computers in chess whereas top go players can beat easily the computers.

I'd say that chess is more like 9x9 go, almost all tactics. So what could be said is that chess has no strategy. An exaggeration, of course, but closer to the truth than it is to say go has no tactics.

I actually interviewed Alex Yermolinsky for a school project. He's a late start GM, pretty rare, and yeah, he is pretty quirky. One of the quotes he gave me was, "Do not worry if you can't find what you want to do in life. If things don't work out, there is always chess, after all. Study hard, and if you don't make it, you can always become a GM."

If you think about it that way...

Chess has, let's say, 90% tactics, 10% strategy? In 19x19 go, I would say it's more like 40/60...

So in comparison, go has almost no tactics, right?

i know too many formal chess players who learned how to play go who quit playing chess.
everytime i ask them why did you quit? they all answer same "because it is boring"

_________________
"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

Chess does have a strategical element, namely the end-game. In the opening and middle game, tactics are more relevant than strategy.
In that sense it is exactly the opposite of go, where the end-game is more about tactics than the middlegame.

It might be true that overall chess is 90% tactics whereas go is 40% tactics. But this still does not mean that this 40% of go is simpler than the 90% of chess

_________________
If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

Interesting, my experience is very different. Much of the opening and early midgame chess is about control of territory and vital squares on the board, which is very much more strategic than tactical. It's only when the fists fly that it turns into a 95% tactical game. I agree, end-games have a strategic element too, but I find the biggest difference between fairly strong chess players and self-learned hobby amateurs is a much more comprehensive of the strategic side - kind of the equivalent of understanding how to use thickness and influence properly.

At the end-game of chess you need to take decisions like whether to build a fortress and go for a draw, or which side to proceed with pawns, whether or not to exchange a knight for a bishop, etc... These are strategic decisions rather than tactical. They don't involve much move reading (chess players call it calculation) but experience and/or knowledge.

In the opening, the obvious strategy is to develop your pieces, and occupy the center. Another obvious strategy is for example, if you gain an advantage in terms of pieces, try to force your opponent to exchange pieces so that your advantage gets more emphasized.
But all these are well known strategies even by beginners and are not much debated.

Other than those you don't have to take so many strategical decisions in chess opening and mid-game.

On the other hand, in opening and mid-game of go you need to decide whether to go for territory or influence at that corner, whether to exploit the aji right now or to wait, whether to invade or reduce, whether to let the opponent live small and gain power or try to kill by nakade, etc. These are all strategical decisions. Once you make up your mind strategically, then the next question is tactical (e.g. where to start the invasion).

In chess, the strategical decisions of mid-game are already almost taken (by the basic knowledge).

_________________
If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

Partly yes. Many rook and pawn endings require a huge amount of tactical calculation though. At least half of chess endings are 50/50 between strategy and tactics.



This I think is not true. Strategy may be limited to that for weak players, but even at average club level you will consistently lose if that is the only midgame strategy you understand. Minor piece imbalances, good squares, good diagonals, open and semi open files, control of the 7th rank, support points for knights, access to the centre, mobility and how to create all of these in favourable circumstances require much more than sequence calculation. You can understand the e5 is a key square for control without reading any sequences, and play accordingly - this decision is entirely strategic.



Only if you don't understand mid-game chess strategy

I don't find it that useful to compare the strategy/tactics ratio of chess and go - they're just completely different games. They both have an immense amount of strategy and an immense amount of tactics, and anyone who claims otherwise probably doesn't know the game in question very well.

That said, I would say that chess is slightly more tactical. If I play a go game with someone significantly weaker, many of their moves will be obviously terrible, and I'll hardly even have to think in order to take advantage of them. But if I play a chess game with someone significantly weaker, and they make a move that "smells funny", I have to do more concrete calculation to ensure that I'm not missing some trick.

Both games are incredibly rich and it makes me sad when people disparage or overly simplify one of them.

(Just to show that I'm at least mediocre at both, my ratings are 1800 USCF, 4k AGA)

Ok, these are strategic decisions but all the issues you mention depend heavily on tactical situations. I mean much heavier than in the Go.

If I have to make an analogy with go, the issues you mention are similar to "second line is the line of defeat, fourth line is the line of victory". Of course these are also part strategy but there is much more in go.

It's difficult to explain but what I mean is the following: It does not do any good to know that this diagonal is strategically important if the tactics does not allow you to control it. Of course you can argue that this is also the case in go. But the probability in chess that the tactics do not allow you to implement your strategic decision, is much higher than in go.

As a result, knowing that e5 is strategically important in chess is less helpful (because of tactical complexity) than knowing that crawling along the second line is bad in go.

That's what I mean. Otherwise I am of course not that out of my mind such that I argue there is no opening strategy involved in chess

Edit: If you see it that way, the whole opening theory in chess is a matter of strategy rather than tactics. How can one argue that it doesn't exist? The discussion is the relative importance of the strategic concepts compared to the tactical calculations.

_________________
If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

I agree with dfan that tactics play a bigger role in chess than in Go, because there is less opportunity to recover from a tactical mistake in chess. (Fewer moves in a game, fewer pieces so that each piece has a relatively big value, etc.)

I also agree with him that, at least for human players, there is a big strategic/positional aspect to chess.

When you start out playing chess, the game is basically almost all tactics because you make many basic tactical mistakes, any one of which can be decisive. However, when you reach a certain level and no longer make so many basic tactical mistakes, the strategical/positional factors start to become more and more important. I have seem many, many games between strong players won by positional means without any complicated tactics at all. There have been some world-class chessplayers who play chess in a style roughly analogous to that of Lee Chang Ho.

Interestingly, one thing that very strong chessplayers seem to share with very strong Go players is their superior judgment in evaluating positions they reach at the end of their analysis. At a New York Open Chess Tournament in the '80s, I sat in the analysis room next to former World Chamption Boris Spassky and GM Kevin Spraggett as they analyzed their game. They would analyze out a tactical line and get to a position where the tactics had quieted down and Spassky would just say very quickly something like "No, this endgame is worse for Black" or "Black has too strong an attack here." Spraggett, who was a pretty young GM at the time as I recall, was clearly not as sure about the evaluations as Spassky, and kept trying to get Spassky to explain his conclusions. Spassky didn't seem to be calculating tactics at all in judging these end positions; he was just going by feel.

I agree, but even just that is a question way above my level in both games to answer honestly. My personal feeling is if you put two USCF 2000 rated players together to play 20 games, at least half of the decided games will be due to tactical errors. If you put a USCF 2400 and USCF 1600 player together, all 20 games will be won through strategic superiority.

To me, this parallels very closely to Go. I do believe more of my mental effort in chess is tactical than strategic - would that be the case if I was a titled master? I have no idea, but to say that Go has very limited tactics or that chess has very limited strategy I think is unjustifiable.

I agree wholeheartedly with dfan's assessment that to even compare them is almost impossible, and normally becomes disparaging to at least one of them.