The Complete Guide to Positional Chess

Many of the world chess champions excelled at positional play and often hardly lost including Jose Raul Capablanca and Tigran Petrosian. Petrosian was an inspiration to Anatoly Karpov who made comments in a key Gibraltar interview that he essentially used Petrosian's style but to win and not be content as much with drawing. The more modern world champions such as Vladimir Kramnik and Magnus Carlsen also excel at positional play.

This course looks at the foundations set out by the first official World chess champion Wilhelm Steinitz and consolidated by Emanual Lasker and shows how the positional world champions took the concept of accumulating advantages and managing counterplay to new levels.

This course provides important positional patterns for making slight improvements to your position and accumulating small advantages. Doing these things whilst also making sure control is kept of the position through minimizing the opponent's counterplay can lead to very one-way controlled games.

A positional chess pattern architecture

The course does not wish to be overly prescriptive as this may result in concepts being the driver of one's own games instead of one's own thinking about the unique challenges and resources one faces. Instead of "principles", the course makes use of "Patterns". The "patterns" are structured in this course into:

Control Patterns - making sure control is not lost in the position and therefore it becomes much harder to build any sort of advantage. Control patterns including simplification and minimizing counterplay.

Imbalance Patterns - how differences in the position can be a great way to both liven up games but also provide key winning opportunities with positional play focused on one's own favorable imbalances

Structure Patterns - Philidor has indicated "Pawns are the soul of Chess" and it seems the positional players really aim for pawn structures in general that are healthy and have great prospects for supporting the pieces and great positional plans

Waiting Patterns - how the opportunities to win can often be amplified if only the opponent is given the opportunity to weaken their position further or crack under the positional pressure

Endgame Patterns - showing how the Endgame has its own particular positional themes

Overwhelming Patterns - showing how positional pressure can be made to overwhelm opponents

Piece Quality Patterns - showing how small improvements to piece position can really be important

Center Patterns - showing the importance of the center and the hypermodern view of control vs occupation.

Weapon Patterns - including passed pawns, thorn pawns, bishop without a counterpart

King-safety patterns - Checkmate still ends the game even for positional players

Activity patterns - making sure one's pieces are active

Crowning patterns - standard ways of making use of positional advantages

Game examples

Full game examples are taking for the positional great players such as Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Petrosian, Karpov, and modern super grandmasters such as Michael Adams. Games are analysed in great detail using the very best modern engine technology with Neural network capabilities which make their analysis more positional grounded than in the past.