Tactics, Fast and Slow
Consider this position:
If you’re an experienced chess player, you probably saw Nf6+ immediately without any conscious effort or awareness of how your mind was producing the move. It’s almost like it plays itself. But what about this position?
Most likely, your subconscious mind springs into action again and suggests 1. Qf6, threatening a typical mating pattern with the queen and rook. But you quickly notice that Black will parry the threat with Qg7. Okay no problem, with Black’s queen distracted you dart to the back rank with 2. Qd8, threatening the bishop. Black has to guard it with Qf8. Now 3. Qf6 would only lead to a repetition of moves, so you need a new idea. Maybe you hit upon 3. Bc6, increasing the pressure on the bishop, with the clever point of 3…Bxc6 4. Rh8+ Kxh8 5. Qxf8+ bagging the queen (another typical pattern). But Black isn’t forced to take the bishop: they can calmly defend with 3…Re7, when there is no obvious way forward. It seems that all of White’s pieces are working as hard as they can, but there’s no breakthrough. Hmm…
If you want to get better at chess, almost everyone agrees that you should work on tactics, but there’s less agreement on whether it’s better to focus on “fast” tactics - problems like the first diagram, which can be solved by pattern recognition in a matter of seconds - or “slow” tactics - problems like the second diagram, which require conscious effort and may take several minutes or longer.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman divides thinking into two systems:
System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computation. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
Within this framework, fast tactics are a System 1 activity, and slow tactics are a System 2 activity. That is, while from the chess point of view they’re both “tactics,” from the cognition point of view they’re very different processes. This has serious implications for how and when you should work on each.
The faster the time control, the more System 1 dominates, since you need to make most decisions quickly; whereas in slower time controls, there is more scope to engage System 2. Thus, which one you focus on should depend in part on which time controls are most important to you. If you’re trying to increase your online blitz ratings, you should probably focus on fast tactics; but if your ultimate goal is improving in classical chess, you need to work on difficult calculation.
Of course, System 1 and System 2 aren’t completely distinct entities - there’s a lot of interplay between them. In general, the role of System 1 is to suggest likely moves. The role of System 2 is to sift through the suggestions provided by System 1, interrogating, falsifying, and perhaps prompting System 1 for more alternatives if none of the moves under consideration seem adequate.
Watching Hikaru do Puzzle Rush provides an interesting demonstration of System 1 and System 2 in action. At a first glance, because he’s going so fast, it might seem like he’s relying entirely on System 1. For the first 20-30 problems, he mostly is, but then around 30, the process changes. It’s easy to miss because he’s still solving most of the puzzles very quickly, but there’s an additional layer. Rather than just bashing out the first move suggested by System 1, he’s using System 2 to sift through suggestions. It’s just that his calculating process is so crisp and refined that he’s able to go through it very quickly.
Perhaps just as important as training each system is sensing which system to use in a particular situation. Hikaru is currently the number one rated blitz player in the world. Number two is Magnus Carlsen. Yet, their styles are very different. Hikaru wins many games by calculating more quickly than his opponents. Magnus can calculate very well when he wants to, but my sense from watching his Banter Blitz sessions is that he prefers to get an edge by picking shrewd moments to not calculate. A common pattern is for him to quickly hash out a possible line, reject it as too messy, and play a quiet strengthening move instead. Magnus is so good at maneuvering that it often makes more sense for him to gradually apply pressure on the board and on the clock than to go for a quick knockout.
Indeed, even trying to calculate complicated lines in blitz is often a serious mistake. How can it be a mistake to try? Because it takes time. Getting good at blitz is partly about cultivating the habit of finding good-enough moves that you can play quickly and resisting the temptation of revving up System 2. This suggests that there is a genuine tradeoff between working on blitz and classical chess. You can’t optimize everything at once, because the habits that work in one kind of chess can be counterproductive in another.
And what about this position, anyway? Often, mastery is less about transcendent understanding and more about building out a bag of tricks. One of the most useful tricks for calculating is to try the same moves in a different order. So what if you start with 1. Bc6? System 1 would never suggest this move off the bat, because it doesn’t seem to make any sense. It looks like you’re just giving up the bishop for nothing. However, 1…Bxc6 2. Qf6 Qg7 3. Qd8+ Qf8 4. Rh8+ works perfectly for White. And if 1…Re7 2. Qf6 Qg7 3. Qxe7 picks up the rook. System 2 to the rescue!