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Zigzag toward a mark you cannot sail straight at, and turn when the wind turns against you.
The mark sits directly upwind and no boat can sail straight into the wind, so you climb toward it in zigzags. The button flips you between the two tacks. The wind keeps swinging: when it swings your way your bow points closer to the mark and you are lifted, so stay put; when it swings against you your bow points further away and you are headed, so the other tack is now the faster one. Judge it from the angle between your boat and the dotted line to the mark. Every tack costs speed, so you cannot simply keep tapping, and sailing the whole leg on one tack is worse still. Beat the rival boat and the next one reads the shifts faster than you do. Your score is the number of races you win.
Your boat is an instrument. You never need to guess what the wind is doing, because the angle between your bow and the dotted centre line tells you exactly: a narrow angle means the wind has swung in your favour, a wide one means it has swung against you. Most beginners stare at the wind arrow and forget that the boat itself is the better display.
The rule that wins races is: stay on the lifted tack, turn on the headed one. Sounds simple, and the mistake almost everyone makes is the reverse — the boat is pointing badly, it feels slow and wrong, and the instinct is to hold on and hope the wind comes back. It does come back, but by then you have sailed a long way in the wrong direction. The wide angle is not something to wait out; it is the signal to turn.
What stops this from being a tapping contest is the cost of turning. Each tack throws away most of a second of speed, so a shift too small to be worth that second is a shift to ignore. Roughly: turn when the angle is clearly wrong, not when it is slightly wrong. Six or seven tacks over a leg is normal; twenty is a disaster, and the finishing time shows it immediately.
Watch the two dashed side lines. They are the edges of the course, and touching one turns you whether you like it or not — which usually happens at the worst possible moment, right after you finally got a good angle. Staying nearer the middle keeps the choice in your hands, and in a close race that freedom is worth more than any single well-timed turn.