There are three initial ways to deal with a chess position. And why repeat what Mark has written there? Additionally I could have included a chapter on 'missing bishops', a concept I have a great affection for, but I felt that it was too marginal compared with the rest of the book. There are issues about which I could have written independent chapters - prophylactic thinking is one such example, but I feel that this is a rather complex concept and players ready to deal with this are also ready for the books by Dvoretsky/Yusupov (Positional Play and Training for the Tournament Player in particular). In the exercises I have discussed issues that I felt required the most attention, being not the only considerations in positional chess, but nevertheless central - and not particularly well described in other sources. The chapters lead the way and the exercises are the path. The exercises in this book should be enough for you to advance from struggling in the dark to making strong positional evaluations at the board.īut this is not just a workbook, of course. My claim is that it is a smart method as you get used to thinking positionally. Of course there are many ways to study positional chess, and solving exercises is only one of them. My main aim has been to show the method in practice - not that I suggest an algorithm for solving positional exercises at the board, but because I suggest that the development of intuition and the general ability to play good positional chess can be learned by solving exercises in the right way. Most of the ideas are borrowed from Excelling at Chess, but here they are explained and used in a practical framework. In this book I have focussed on the method of abstract positional thinking. In Excelling at Chess I came with fundamental arguments and a number of different chapters focussed around thinking like a human instead of thinking like a computer, something I will discuss again below. In many ways it is a remake, and in many ways it is a quite different book. This book is a product of 'post-Excelling' thinking.
I could see it in my own games and in the games of my students. Over the more than a year that the program ran I became sure that I was right in my ideas - even more so than I had believed. I wanted to pick a wide variety of examples of a positional or tactical nature and expose them to critical study. This was one of the main catalysts in starting the positional exercises program. In other words, I was afraid of having adjusted the results to the ideas, instead of having drawn the ideas from die empirical material. I had some ideas that I thought to be correct, but my beliefs in myself were limited and I had yet to test these ideas with substantial material. I also suffered from other forms of insecurity. The book is (thus far) clearly my best-selling work. When I wrote Excelling at Chess about a year and a half ago I was sure that nobody would want to read it. His previous works for Everyman include Queen's Indian Defence, Meeting 1 d4 and Excelling at Chess, which won the prestigious 2002 Book of the Year award after being very well received by reviewers and the chess public alike. Jacob Aagaard is an International Master from Denmark who has earned himself a deserved reputation as an industrious and no-nonsense chess author.