"A tactician feels at home reacting to threats and seizing opportunities on the battlefield. When your opponent has blundered, a winning tactic can suddenly appear and serve as both means and end. […] Every time you make a move, you must consider your opponent’s response, your answer to that response, and so on. A tactic ignites an explosive chain reaction, a forceful sequence of moves that carries the players along on a wild ride. You analyze the position as deeply as you can, compute the dozens of variations, the hundreds of positions. If you don’t immediately exploit a tactical opportunity, the game will almost certainly turn against you; one slip and you are wiped out. But if you seize the opportunities that your strategy creates, you’ll play your game like a Grandmaster." (Garry Kasparov, "How Life Imitates Chess", 2007)
"Acquired patterns and the logic to employ them combine with
our inherent qualities to create a unique decision-maker. As time goes by,
experience and knowledge are focused through the prism of talent, which can
itself be sharpened, focused, and polished. This mix is the source of
intuition, an absolutely unique tool that each of us possesses and that we can
continuously hone into an ever-finer instrument."
"Against solid strategy, diversionary tactics will either be
insufficient, or flawed. If they are insufficient, you can and should ignore
them, continuing along your path. If they are radical enough to force you from your
path, they are likely flawed in some way - unless you have blundered. Often an
opponent is so eager to get you to change your course that he fatally weakens
his own position in the attempt."
"Any discipline in which access to information is nearly
unlimited but time is a major factor has a strong intuitive element. Stock analysts
search for visual patterns in stock charts, shapes such as 'teacups' and 'rising
wedges, the way chess players look for checkmating patterns. Intuition tells
us not just what and how, but also when."
"Effective tactics result from alertness and speed, this is obvious,
but they also require an understanding of all the possibilities at hand.
Experience allows us to instantly apply the patterns we have successfully used
in the past."
"In chess we see many cases of good strategy failing due to
bad tactics and vice versa. A single oversight can undo the most brilliant
concepts. Even more dangerous in the long run are cases of bad strategy
succeeding due to good tactics, or due to sheer good fortune. This may work
once, but rarely twice. This is why it is so important to question success as
vigorously as you question failure."
"It’s true that to be a great chess player you must have a
good memory, but it is much harder to explain what, exactly, we are
remembering. Patterns? Numbers? Mental pictures of the board and pieces? The answer
seems to be 'all of the above'."
"Knowing a solution is at hand is a huge advantage; it’s like
not having a 'none of the above' option. Anyone with reasonable competence and
adequate resources can solve a puzzle when it is presented as something to be
solved. We can skip the subtle evaluations and move directly to plugging in
possible solutions until we hit upon a promising one. Uncertainty is far more
challenging."
"Opposite pairs working in harmony: this has become a theme
of our quest to perfect decision-making. Calculation and evaluation. Patience
and opportunism, intuition and analysis, style and objectivity. At the performance
level these elements come together in management and vision, strategy and
tactics, planning and reaction. Success comes from balancing these forces and
harnessing their inherent power."
"Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if
you're going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is
in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles."
"Solving new problems is what keeps us moving forward as
individuals and as a society, so don't back down."
"Sometimes the hardest thing to do in a pressure situation is
to allow the tension to persist. The temptation is to make a decision, any
decision, even if it is an inferior choice."
"Tactics involve calculations that can tax the human brain,
but when you boil them down, they are actually the simplest part of chess and
are almost trivial compared to strategy. Think of tactics as forced, planned
responses, basically a series of 'if-then' statements that would make a
computer programmer feel right at home." (Garry Kasparov, "How Life Imitates
Chess", 2007)
"The middle game requires alertness in general and alertness to patterns in particular. These are general ideas that anyone can learn with practice; the more you play, the better you become at recognizing the patterns and applying the solutions. That is, to find similarities to positions you have seen before and then to recall what worked (or what didn’t work) in that situation. There is still potential for great creativity, if you are able to relate known patterns to new positions to find the unique solution: the best move." (Garry Kasparov, "How Life Imitates Chess", 2007)
[tactics:] "The means of effecting a strategic plan. Every move in a
chess game has some tactical components. Tactics require calculation and are
the foundation of combinations."
"The worst enemy of the strategist is the clock. Time
trouble, as we call it in chess, reduces us all to pure reflex and reaction,
tactical play. Emotion and instinct cloud our strategic vision when there is no
time for proper evaluation. A game of chess can suddenly seem a lot like a game
of chance. Even the finest sense of intuition can’t flourish in the long term
without accurate calculations."
"There is still a great deal of uncharted territory in the
opening phase of the game. New ideas, new concepts, new plans in old and
forgotten variations, there is still much to discover in the opening. The tactical
patterns and strategic concepts of the middle game have been well mapped out by
generations of Grandmasters, although there are occasional fresh twists. In the
endgame, however, the plans and possibilities are open and known to all, an
almost mathematical exercise. This isn’t to say that everything is
predetermined. With flawless play from both sides, the endgame will advance
toward a predictable conclusion. But since humans are flawed, damage can be
inflicted or repaired. Even if one player is at a clear disadvantage, he may
simply outplay his opponent."
"This obligation to move can be a burden to a player without
strategic vision."
"Whereas strategy is abstract and based on long-term goals, tactics are concrete and based on finding the best move right now. Tactics are conditional and opportunistic, all about threat and defense. No matter what pursuit you’re engaged in - chess, business, the military, managing a sports team - it takes both good tactics and wise strategy to be successful." (Garry Kasparov, "How Life Imitates Chess", 2007)
"But chess is a limited game and every position will have patterns and markers our intuition can interpret. Each of the estimated tens of thousands of positions a strong master has imprinted in memory can also be broken down into component parts, rotated, twisted, and still be useful. Outside of the opening sequences that are indeed memorized, strong human players don’t rely on recall as much as on a super-fast analogy engine." (Garry Kasparov, "Deep Thinking", 2017)
"Machines that replace physical labor have allowed us to focus more on what makes us human: our minds. Intelligent machines will continue that process, taking over the more menial aspects of cognition and elevating our mental lives toward creativity, curiosity, beauty, and joy. These are what truly make us human, not any particular activity or skill like swinging a hammer - or even playing chess." (Garry Kasparov, "Deep Thinking", 2017)
"The human mind isn’t a computer; it cannot progress in an orderly fashion down a list of candidate moves and rank them by a score down to the hundredth of a pawn the way a chess machine does. Even the most disciplined human mind wanders in the heat of competition. This is both a weakness and a strength of human cognition. Sometimes these undisciplined wanderings only weaken your analysis. Other times they lead to inspiration, to beautiful or paradoxical moves that were not on your initial list of candidates." (Garry Kasparov, "Deep Thinking", 2017)
"The main problem of chess programming is the very large
number of possible continuations involved, what is called the 'branching
factor'. Right from the start, the sheer number of possibilities was enough to
stress the resources of the fastest computers then conceivable." (Garry Kasparov, "Deep Thinking", 2017)
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