> Eventually, I want my Chess games to come to me naturally with muscle memory and gut instincts, just as I wish I could solve the Rubik's without the formulae

> Eventually, I want my Chess games to come to me naturally with muscle memory and gut instincts, just as I wish I could solve the Rubik's without the formulae already muscled into my hands. There's a lot in chess that is very oblique and loads of Columbus Egg moments/plays. When you learn those they become quite obvious in hindsight but it'd take you a long time to actually instinctively get to those strategies. Also, a lot of intermediate-higher level playing comes from predicting moves in advance, those come from pattern matching and studying strategies is a very good place to hone your skills into finding these patterns. It can take thousands of games instead of some hours of playing around with different puzzles and understanding the fundamentals of why some positions are weak or strong even if they aren't clearly obvious for the next 5-10 moves. I think you can brute force a lot of this learning by playing a lot but there are some key aspects that you could unlock by studying strategy that would take you much longer to learn by simply playing.