Test Your Positional Play

by Robert Bellin, Pietro Ponzetto

Designed to improve a player's middlegame performance by analyzing the strategic and tactical elements of a position, these tests also explain how to form a plan and to check that is it sound. Over 100 positions test the reader's ability to formulate the correct plan using a multiple choice format. This thought-provoking work provides a unique method of improving strategic understanding through self-evaluation.

Beginner

Genres: Chess

191 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1985

Reviews

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

The year this came out I was in London, hanging about the super GM tournaments and buying chess books. It had been seven years since I played a tournament game, but I had time on my hands and a lot of good books were being published. This one was hot of the press and really suited me. It takes a position from GM games and suggests various positional plans. You consider these and come up with an answer.

I loved this book! Not only that, at the end it grades you and I was a grandmaster - too easy!! The benefits still show. I think I'm still better in this area than the rest of my game and I'm sure it's this book's doing. Of course it's hard to be tactically sharp when one doesn't play but I never had a great love for that sort of hard analysis, the I go here and he goes there and .... As for Kotov and his goddamn trees, honest to God I would have happily started a forest fire and burned the lot of them. No amount of trying made me comfortable with this way of thinking.

Whereas looking at a board and making plans, visualising the future to me is a bit like science fiction. You are looking at an arrangement on the board and seeing some new world connected, but not the same.

Losing oneself in visualisation is for me the greatest joy of chess. Is that okay, any chess superiors reading this?

[Serge Pierro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book for the aspiring positional chess player. The reader is given a position and then presented with three choices as to what you would do in the position. You are graded on your choices, and at the end of the book you are given a "rating". I learned a great deal from this book!