Hi there.
In this introduction lecture, I want to address, why is positional chess important?
If we don't know the why, it's less motivating.
It's good to seek out the whys, to have conviction.
I want you to have maximum conviction when you study the methods and goals of this course.
So basically, you may have seen my other courses like The Complete Guide to Tactics or The Complete
Guide to Attacking Chess.
Those are very important.
But what if there is no role, no tactics in the position that you have?
There is no easy way of attacking.
What can you do, which is maybe more subtle and would help improve your capability to have tactics
later in your game or attacking potential later in your game.
And even if you don't, you could end up winning end games.
How can we do this?
We could think of it as a metaphor.
We want to serve a lightning bolt at the downsides of an opponent's position.
But we need to increase our electricity somehow to throw that bolt at the opponent's.
Or we need to wait for clearer downsides to strike.
So there is a famous quotation by Survey Atletico, one of my favourites for Chess Quotations.
I will check out his quotations.
So here's one of his great ones.
Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do.
So the opponent might have an unprotected piece or a weak king.
And you can look for like ways of exploiting those concrete downsides.
So that's like tactics.
There's something concrete to do.
You do it.
You you actually do increase your advantage or check Mating absolutely wins the game, end of game.
So not even a small win.
You've just won.
The war strategy is knowing what to do when there's nothing to do.
So this is really witty.
Yeah.
When when you haven't got anything clear, there's no clear downsides.
What do you do?
So that's like the missing jigsaw.
Which piece?
Which I hope to give you.
With this course, we need to be able to subtly improve our position.
It's about improving the position slightly.
But how do we do this?
What are the small wins to look out for?
The course structure is in methods and goals.
So that's like the how and and what to look for and celebrate.
So basically another great quotation from task, you know, strategy requires fought.
So that's like the logic of position.
How plan structure could evolve.
For example, there's a lot of thought help piece activity could evolve.
KING Safety.
You're looking at the elements and looking at them logically, where they are now, where you want them
to be and looking at overall, are they in your favor?
So have you got a safer king than your opponent?
And it's the whole mixture.
You might have a better pool structure, but they might have better pace activity.
So it's the whole mixture and the overall, you want it to be slightly better for you and ideally maximize
that overall balance in your favor.
So.
Tactics requires observation, he said.
So that's like very detailed variations sometimes, and sometimes as humans, we don't really want to
think tactically all the time.
There might be a flaw in our analysis, so bear that in mind, Fisher indicated tactics flow from a
good position.
So this is an interesting metaphor about flow.
So it begs the questions, you know, what is a good position?
How do we at least improve our position?
And we're basically saying the tactics and the attacking potential will increase if we can improve our
position.
And even if there's no tactics or attack, the positional superiority can flow into endgames.
Capablanca Capablanca has a role.
Capablanca, a classic positional player, was often winning and games.
His advantages were persist.
The future world champions like Anatoly Karpov would also win in games.
The advantages, even if they're like tiny, can win in the end game.
You don't need necessarily an attack or winning tactics.
You just win in the end.
Games were often past.
Pawns will be winning.
That will be the kind of end game tactics if you want to use the term tactics in end games.
So it also a knowledge of positional play helps us in new and unfamiliar positions.
We can improvise better with positional considerations, our type of moves.
It's nice not to always have to play an attacking move or a tactical move, especially if there isn't
one.
What do you do?
A bad move now You want to play a useful positional move which will reinforce either your tactics,
moves or your attacking moves, or just win end games basically.
And Camp Blanc was great winning end games.
See my Capablanca course he would often simplify and that would be a way of reducing counterplay and
just win games.
So it's not sometimes it's not going out of our way to do anything spectacular.
I would say positional play helps motivate the discovery of finer grained elements and element management
principles and how to convert temporary advantages into more permanent ones to look out for permanent
advantages which you can accumulate even tiny, permanent advantages.
Will accumulate into potentially a winning advantage or a combination or attack or a winning end game,
basically.
So for me, for example, a big discovery in recent years form -- elements from neural networks.
The importance of a bishop without a counterpart.
I see that as not just a weapon.
It's a kind of downside of the opponents position.
So if you can evaluate these patterns and find and grains patterns of how you evaluate positions, you'll
get better at seeing if you're better in a certain position in your mind's eye.
Maybe ten moves down, you evaluate the positions and that motivation for the discovery of the finer
grain elements.
When you go over master games and establish those patterns, that will improve your ability to evaluate
positions and know if you're actually better or not.
So you might have previously thought more your two pawns up here and you've got activity.
But what if they have a bishop without counterpart and that might actually motivate even further calculations
and say, Look, can I do damage of that Bishop, that counterpart?
So the elements also motivate sometimes a deeper investigation.
You're not just taking some basic elements or your material up and your shortcutting or calculations.
So it's actually driving sometimes your calculation, your evaluation can drive your calculation.
And at the end points of calculation, it's good to be very good at evaluating.
If you can't calculate further, at least your evaluation will be good.
So I want to give you a concrete example of an attacking player.
And so the emphasis is not so much on attacking players on the scores, but it's still a very nice example
because positional play was used by Alexander Alekhine to accumulate advantages and he increased and
increased them until there was a beautiful combination.
So this is his game against Yeats in 1922.
Yeats has made some positional errors here.
There are some weak squares and this bishop can't really drive on that side of the road, so, so to
speak.
It's dark squares which are weak here.
And we can see here how Alekhine increased this advantages and it was crowned with a really beautiful
combination.
So the first thing that might be threatening kind of a four to stop might be free.
So if White wants to use five, this is the moment to maybe use the C five square and try and get rid
of the Knights, which is the guardian of C five and E five.
So we see a gradual increase of advantages here.
We see Knight be free.
So now a four is played and we see 95 and now Knight takes C five.
So White's advantage has been increasing and he doesn't mind the Queen's coming off.
He's quite confident that if he possesses this C4 has the knight 25 this will be enough.
So he didn't play D take C five and positioning.
We need to consider things like mobility of pawns as well.
So e five might be useful even though we've got a passport, you know, black might have e five and
generate some counterplay.
We want to minimize counterplay.
So Queen takes C five is actually a very nice solution to the possession and with the Queen's coming
off, that's less counterplay.
But is there enough for White to win?
Here we see Rook FC one bishop a six, knights E five and now we see Rook E to be eight and Alekhine
finds a way to slightly improve his position.
Three He realizes something very powerful about this position.
Let's move on a little bit.
Be free.
Avery H six.
So I wonder if you spot what we can do to increase our advantages here.
What's the key move here, you think?
Yeah.
He makes his actual king.
There's a reversal of values of king safety.
That's another tricky thing about evaluating positions and the mental game.
We.
We give a priority to king Safety.
In the end game, there's a priority for the king sometimes being a fighting piece.
And here king F2, the king in the end game.
It's interesting to consider that reversal of roles, the king's and the aggressive piece.
So H4 is played here.
Rook fighting the King comes to G three and we are subtly increasing our advantages here.
Black They're not trying to simplify with the rooks coming off because the knight will be better than
the bishop.
So we have this rook infiltration.
Bishop B five we have Rook one, C five, Bishop a six and one is making progress here, Rookie ain't
and the king comes F for King J and H five.
So this fixes the pawns now Bishop F one and now G three.
So that's safeguarding our position, strengthening our position further by taking pawns on the other
color to the Bishop.
Bishop a six and now rook f seven.
So the idea of doubling rooks is emerging on the seventh rank, which is a great positional principle
in its own right, both within middle game and in endgames.
So we have the Rooks doubling.
So black is tied down, we see now 97 and now King eight.
And it looks as though, well, how do we crown all this positional play?
So what would you play here and why for 100 points.
So we're now trying to crown the positional player.
We can't really optimize our position further.
We can't really improve our position further with positional play.
But this is where knowledge of tactics can help.
So 96 was played and you might think, Well, hold on, there's a snag here.
Black is skewering Oracle Knight now.
So what do we do here?
Well, once you think once you play and what's the punch line?
There is a funny punch line here.
Okay, 100 points.
We play Rook, takes GS g seven off, the rook takes F six.
What's the punch line?
Are we mating?
Just by checks.
So there's a final insertion, you could say, of a positional move to improve our position ever so
slightly, to make all the tactics work ever so smoothly.
It's like applying WD 40 or something to something which, you know, is rusting, you know, improving
our position ever so slightly makes the whole thing much, much more effective.
So what's what's the move here, which makes all our tactics much, much more effective for 500 points.
So a subtle positional move creeps in quite often into alekhine combinations.
So yes, the positional move is king E5 and there's a big threat against the rook.
And actually Yates had to resign.
If Rook be eight, we're just going to play check and check and take on F6 and we're going to be meeting
the next move.
Yeah, without King E5, this makes the tactics work so much better without King e5.
If we checked and checked and played King f6 sorry King E five here this also it is it is also dangerous
as well.
King five can be potentially played in this move order as well.
This is dangerous here, but it's nice that Alekhine played it in the other move order.
So King E5 is playing an instrumental role that positional move.
So yes, it's basically demonstrated the gradual improving of position and a combination to crown the
positional play.
If Rook have seven, we're just going to take and this is trivially winning.
Basically we can make use of King of six here to checkmate again.
So yes, this was a very very nice game.
Example how outposts and weak squares can be used by king and an endgame king marches.
And so the positional play is looking at these factors like weak color complexes, you know, sets of
squares which are weak.
There's quite a few things demonstrated in this game for accumulation of advantages.
And it was also kind of made more instructive because players nowadays don't usually give such a wholesome
position with lots of positional holes.
So it seems to be, you know, is very good tactical player.
Yates, but he seemed to be positionally, not understanding holes and outposts as much as maybe Alekhine.
So Alekhine really improved his positional play to boost his overall game, became much more well rounded
player but is not all the world champions are great positionally, but we focus in this course on really
amazing positional players which really loved positional play more than trying to go for the attacks
or tactics.
So we see that ingredients more emphatically that we can use on our own games to to really try and strive
for better positions.
But Alekhine is a beautiful role model, don't get me wrong, of positional play, preceding beautiful
combinations and attacks.
But there are other future, more modern world champions like Petrosian, like Karpov and modern super
grandmaster like Adams, which will take a particularly keen interest in, and also Nimzowitsch, who
kind of invented the positional terminology that many modern players take for granted nowadays, like
blockade restraints, prevention or prophylaxis.
As Nimzowitsch liked to call it slightly different meanings sometimes today, but it can be seen as
prevention.
So this game here was pretty controlled.
We see that this is a kind of one way game, so there's less of a randomness to the result of the game.
It was in positional control and is a great example of why positional chess is important.
Important Even if you are a major attacking player or tactical player, we can see how subtly improving
the position increases the thresholds just ever so slightly to the tipping point where if we have an
aggressive king on E5, it just makes everything work beautifully.
So the whole combination is working beautifully because of this idea of offering the knight and in this
king E5.
So yeah, positional chess is very, very important.
It is an essential part of our toolkit.
When there aren't immediate tactical or attacking solutions, they can improve our abilities of our
position to have either tactical or attacking solutions or just win in the end game.
So I hope that's an interesting introduction for why positional chess is important, and I hope you're
inspired for this course to really take each and every lecture seriously and make sure you understand
each lecture before going on.
Okay, This is really a foundational course, a very, very important part of the jigsaw for any improving
chess player.
Okay.
That's very much.