No (visible) tactics, and now?

Let's assume that doing all these tactical exercises transformed you into a tactical genius (lucky you, I am certainly a far cry from that). But what if there are no winning tactics for the next move? That is a point when strategy comes into play, although one could argue that strategy is just 10+ moves tactics...

Starting to play chess, I ran into many situations where I was not able to see any tactical opportunity and simply had no idea what to do next. This happened most often after the first opening moves. There are two reasons for this: Firstly, with nearly all pieces still on the board the position is often seemingly complex and therefore overwhelming to novices. Secondly, after one or more pretty stupid moves I am usually pretty busy just trying to survive in the later phases of the game.

What can a newbie do about these problems? I felt that I would profit from studying how other people play and decided to go through a collection of annotated games. A good start is provided by the book "Logical Chess: Move By Move" by Irving Chernev, a classic in the field. The author really comments on every move.

The first part of the book has only games starting with 1. e4 e5 and, yes, even 1. e4 is annotated every time it occurs. This may seem annoying, but it also serves the purpose to "burn" certain basic princiles in the reader's mind. Furthermore, not only the actual moves are annotated, but the reason why other moves, that sometimes simply looked so much more attractive to me, are really not a good idea. The text reads pretty well, too, and to my surprise it is not boring at all to sit down with the book and a chess set to play through a game. In contrary, it is a lot of fun to follow the various ideas throughout the games.

Does it really help to study games that were played a long time ago? For my part I think it helped me a lot. I can now look at position and actually get some ideas on how to win the game in a timescale that is beyond the 1 or occasionally 2 move tactics that (may) come to my mind. It is not that these plans become reality very often - after all there is somebody on the other side of the board who also wants to win. But al the very least playing with a plan in mind is much more fun, even when it has to be changed right after the opponent's response.

Up to now I worked my way through roughly half of the book. I like to think that me playing worse in games starting out with 1. d4 compared to 1. e4 is due to the fact that all games I studied so far started with the latter. This gives hope and motivation to play through the rest of the games in the collection. So far, the only thing I do not like about Irvin Chernev's book is that white seems to win all the time. This feels a bit like reading a murder mystery while already knowing the end.