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Improve Your Positional Chess Reviewed by Rick Kennedy
Fortunately, there is so much more to Hansen’s “practical guide to making positional decisions” (as the book is sub-titled) than mere aphorisms, although I suppose I should give the author his due, first: "I think that chess is at least 90% based on positional factors." Improve Your Positional Chess, by the well-known Danish FIDE Master and columnist for Chess Café, came out in 2004. If you somehow missed it, I’d like to try to persuade you to give it a look. If Seirawan’s Winning Chess Strategies was a shot in the arm for the new or developing chess player, Hansen’s book is a double shot for the top-club-and-better warrior. If you’ve ever wondered why positional players like Petrosian and Karpov were also excellent tacticians, Improve Your Positional Chess will give you some pretty good insights. What Hansen excels at is choosing the right examples to illustrate his points – and providing illuminating words to make them accessible to the reader. Each chapter then has Exercises at the end to test and expand the reader’s understanding. Let’s take a quick walk through the book. Part 1: General Terms 1 Understanding Imbalances: “I hope the subject for this chapter doesn’t scare you off completely. If it sounds way over your head, please trust me: it isn’t half as complicated as it sounds. Imbalances are the factors in any given position that determine who is better, who has the initiative and who can play for the win.” [Reviewer’s Note: Everyone seems to be using the word “imbalance” these days, and it would be nice if someone at least nodded in the general direction of Jeremy Silman, whose Reassess Your Chess gave an in-depth and accessible explanation of this valuable idea.] 2 What is the Initiative?: “In this chapter, I provide an introduction to the initiative, and examples of what kinds of initiative you can have. This is not meant to be an all-exhaustive study of the initiative, but rather to open your eyes to what it can consist of, so that when you play your games, you can establish who has the initiative and possibly find a good way to counter it.” 3 The Quest for Weaknesses: “Even those with just the most basic understanding of chess will have some ideas as to what constitutes a weakness, much like what constitutes a strength. For example, an isolated or doubled pawn will often be a weakness that all of us will recognize. However, as players become stronger ,and the more experience they gain, they become adept at detecting even the smallest and apparently insignificant weaknesses.” Part 2: Relative Value of Pieces 4 Cats and Dogs: Knights and Bishops: “On the point scale, the knight and bishop are worth about the same, approximately three pawns, but that’s about where the similarities between these two pieces ends.” 5 Not Only Open Files – Working With Rooks: “The rooks on the surface appear to be fairly simple pieces a they are only able to move along ranks and files, but I want to convey to you that food understanding of proper rook handling is an open door to many points on the scoreboard.” 6 The Exchange: “There are about as many reasons why you would want to sacrifice the exchange as there are ways of doing so. There are, however, some common denominators that are worth familiarizing yourself with. Note that many players have hang-ups about sacrificing material and therefore will not consider sacrificing, nor that the opponent will do so.” 7 The Worth of a Queen: “My personal opinion is that the queen is a fairly overrated piece. Many players place far too much emphasis on the queen and consider it almost priceless.” Part 3: Dealing with Pawns 8 Structural Weaknesses: “One of the keys to successful positional play is to understand the impact of structural weaknesses. These com in all shapes and sizes, and knowing how to identify them and exsploit them is a major difference between stronger and weaker players.” 9 Pawn Sacrifices: “The point is that the sooner you start realizing the importance of understanding material imbalances positional imbalances, the sooner your level of chess will improve.” Part 4: Big Decisions 10 Where to Attack and How: “A key element in positional chess is identifying weaknesses and determining which are more significant than others, and thus deciding where to attack.” 11 Your Turn – Exercises: “These exercises vary tremendously in difficulty so don’t be discouraged if you cannot solve them. And take your time to solve them…” [Reviewer’s Note: The thirty exercises in Chapter 11 are in addition to those that follow each chapter. The latter range from two to six exercises in number, with an average of four.] 12 Solutions to Exercises Index of Games The instructional value of Improve Your Positional Chess turns on how well Hansen can make positions played by masters and grandmasters turn into object lessons for the rest of us. After working through a few, I was impressed at how much the author could reveal. It was like I was a “grown-up” in that scene in Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince…
Let me give you a couple of examples. I will give only the starting positions and the initial evaluation provided by Hansen. He annotates each game to its conclusion in similarly helpful style:
Z. Almasi – Züger
Example number two:
Karpov – Ivkov
Improve Your Positional Chess is well laid out – double columned, good use of fonts, bolding, italics, white space and diagrams – as is expected from a Gambit publication. I did not notice any typos or dypos. The explanation of Symbols and the Bibliography (!) at the beginning of the book were well appreciated. In the Foreword and Acknowledgements the author writes:
I couldn’t have
put it better myself.
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