[tygorius]

In chess below the master level tactics will dominate. How do you get really good at tactics? Not just by playing lots of chess, but by consistently devoting effort to studying tactics via printed collections of positions and/or tactics training software.

As to becoming great, after years of running chess camps for young players IM Greg Shahade formed his somewhat famous hypothesis:

   There is one very reliable sign to how much potential and how strong a young chess 
   player is or is going to be, and it’s probably not what most people would think. 

   It’s not how quickly a student solves tactics or sees combinations (although 
   these two things always seem to be correlated with the main point of this article).
   It’s not the student’s positional understanding. It’s not even how much they 
   claim to study chess.

   Instead it is “How likely is this student to recognize a famous game/position
   and know the players involved?” [1]

As one data point illustrating Shadade's point, the current world champion seems to be a whiz at what ordinary people would consider chess trivia. [2] Carlsen's comment:

   "I like chess, I like chess books. You'd be surprised – I do read 
   as much chess as I can."

[1] http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12551/745 [2] http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12985/806/

Editing for formating: how do block quotes work here?