Grandmaster Preparation: Positional Play

by Jacob Aagaard

Have there been times during a game when you have tried to calculate like mad, but can find no rhyme or reason to your lines? Have you ever felt that the computer’s suggestions in your post-mortem analysis make no sense to you? Ever felt like the man with a hammer, suspecting that the world may not be made up entirely of nails after all? In Positional Play Jacob Aagaard shares his simple three-step tool of positional analysis that he has used with club players and famous grandmasters to improve their positional decision-making. Working from the starting point that all players who aspire to play at international level have a certain amount of positional understanding, Aagaard lays out an easy-to-follow training plan that will improve everyone’s intuition and positional decision-making.

Genres: Chess, Reference

312 pages, Paperback

First published November 9, 2012

Reviews

[Junta · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging book of exercises, suited for ambitious players. The main point Aagaard wants to teach you is that to be a better positional player, you should ask yourself the three questions, especially when tactics or calculation by themselves probably won't be able to enlighten you as to what you should play:

1. Where are the weaknesses?
2. Which is the worst-placed piece?
3. What is your opponent's idea?

As a player with a ELO in the low 2400's who has always been pretty poor at positional play, I scored the following for the key moves of the exercises in each chapter (the first three chapters are on each of the three questions, followed by 150 more exercises with a general positional slant):

Chapter 1 - Weaknesses: 18/24
Chapter 2 - Pieces: 21/24
Chapter 3 - Prophylaxis: 17/24
Chapter 4 - 104/150

Total - 160/222, or 72% (over 7 months!)

As with most chess books, I won't know if working on this book will have actually helped my chess for a while, but I'd never solved so many positional exercises so I'm glad I did, and I'm sure I've learnt some new things on the way. As with Aagaard's other books in his Grandmaster Preparation series, of which I've worked on all of except for the endgame one, this one is highly recommended. I've been working on his Strategic Play book as well, which I find significantly harder!





May 24, 2018

[Bibek Mahato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tis is an amazing book by Jacob Aagaard's on of the best trainer of chess for chess improvement

[Lyubomir Gospodinov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeah you guys should def read this one