Excelling at Positional Chess

Rating:
Summary: Another Great by Aagaard
Review: "I can see the combinations as well as Alekhine, but I cannot get into the same positions." - Rudolf Spielmann

This book addresses exactly that problem. If when a position breaks open, you're on the wrong end of nasty tactical shots, your position must have been weak to begin with.

This book teaches you to spot the weaknesses and strengths on the chessboard. In a sense, it preaches what Silman does in Reassess Your Chess or Dvoretsky does in Attack and Defense and his other books. The difference is this is a concise, understandable shot-in-the-arm for those with positional malaise. (Silman's information is excellent, but his here's-where-the-patzer-screwed-up approach is distracting. In contrast, Mr. Aagaard says here's where I screwed up ... and what I should have seen on the board.)

The writing style is conversational and involving. The positions are adequately diagrammed and well-chosen, for Aagaard chooses understandable positions, which are, nevertheless, crucial moments that lead to the outcome of the game.

While Aagaard's previous book Excelling at Chess was all instructional text, more than half this book is positional exercises to study and solve with detailed solutions. (No mate-follows-in-20-moves notes.)

The previous book Excelling at Chess won a book of the year award at a chess website, and this book really should, too.

Rating:
Summary: Another Great by Aagaard
Review: A famous chess GM once said "I too can win from his [another GM's] positions, I just can't reach them."

This book addresses exactly that problem. If when a position breaks open, you're on the wrong end of nasty tactical shots, your position must have been weak to begin with.

This book teaches you to spot the weaknesses and strengths on the chessboard. In a sense, it preaches what Silman does in Reassess Your Chess or Dvoretsky does in Attack and Defense and his other books. The difference is this is a concise, understandable shot-in-the-arm for those with positional malaise. (Silman's information is excellent, but his here's-where-the-patzer-screwed-up approach is distracting. In contrast, Mr. Aagaard says here's where I screwed up ... and what I should have seen on the board.)

The writing style is conversational and involving. The positions are adequately diagrammed and well-chosen, for Aagaard chooses understandable positions, which are, nevertheless, crucial moments that lead to the outcome of the game.

While Aagaard's previous book Excelling at Chess was all instructional text, more than half this book is positional exercises to study and solve with detailed solutions. (No mate-follows-in-20-moves notes.)

The previous book Excelling at Chess won a book of the year award at a chess website, and this book really should, too.

Rating:
Summary: Very Good, but Very Advanced
Review: About one-third of the book is positional instruction by the author. I enjoyed this portion. It includes some good insights into the game.

The heart of this book is 108 positional exercises. I like these types of books. I have found that chess puzzles, whether tactical or positional, are the most effective way to improve my playing strength.

There are unfortunately not many chess books with positional puzzles (as opposed to tactical). Among the ones I know of, this book is certainly the most advanced. I believe the puzzles are geared toward players with a playing strength of 2100 USCF/FIDE and over. For example, some of the problems are from Grandmaster games in which the GM failed to find the solution!

My major complaint with this book is that the problems are not organized by difficulty. So some of them will be fairly simple, while others may stump Grandmasters. This can make training with the book difficult, because I don't know how long to devote to a particular exercise. I don't want to waste 30 minutes on a single puzzle if it's one of the GM stumpers.

If you are looking to improve your positional play in chess, I would recommend selecting a book based on your playing strength:
1400-1600: "It's Your Move", by Chris Ward
1500-1900: "The Reassess Your Chess Workbook", by Jeremy Silman
1700-2100: "Can You be a Positional Chess Genius", by Angus Dunnington (this one is my personal favorite!)
1900-2300: "Test Your Positional Play", by Robert Bellin and Pietro Ponzetto
2100-2700: "Excelling at Positional Chess", by Jacob Aagaard (the book reviewed here)

So, for advanced tournament chess players looking to improve their positional playing strength, I recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: A superb self-teaching guide for serious & dedicated players
Review: Authoritatively written by an international chess master Jacob Aagaard, Excelling At Positional Chess is a technical proficient, in-depth, instructional guidebook specifically designed for intermediate and advanced chess players seeking to improve their strategy by mixing calculation and evaluation. Offering original exercises, numerous examples with diagrams, and enhanced with a wealth of fascinating insights, Excelling At Positional Chess is a superb self-teaching guide for serious and dedicated players of the game.

Rating:
Summary: 100+ positional exercises to test your skills
Review: Earlier, I plan to get this book to improve my kid's chess but when he put it away, I have to evaluate it. I feel some of the chapters is in the wrong order. Chapter 5 or 3 should come first. I also hate it when Aagard keeps refering to Dvoretsky and Silman and other books. The author should just explain what he meant. The publisher should work harder to improve Aagard's draft.

What I feel Aagard should do is categorizes each positional theme such as: (1) release one piece to attack (2) release one piece to defend (3) moving out one piece to release rook (4) draw one opponent piece away (5) prevent counterplay etc etc

The good part of the book is Aagard has 100+ of positional puzzles to test your skills. I spent a good time reading this on my KL-Dubai flight. For some puzzle "Black to Move" is actually black turn's to move and not necessary Black wins !! For these puzzles he is using a lot of chess plays from his IM tournamenet such as Kramnik, Gelfland, Anand and Short.

I am getting my kid the David Lemoir "How to be a Deadly Chess Tactician" to replace this. Wait for my review.

Rating:
Summary: Concise text plus lots of exercices with detailed solutions
Review: I believe Aagaard gets right to the point- that creative problem solving-.learning to think for yourself (originality)- is far more important than strictly memorizing opening variations or rigidly approaching middlegame problems. While the bulk of this book is comprised of 100 positional exercises, the first few chapters sum up many key concepts of positional chess using carefully chosen examples. This book is much easier to read than the stuff Dvoretsky cranks out- Aagaard selects the critical ideas of trainers such as Dvoretsky and condenses them in a way so that a Class A player such as myself can absorb some really useful information without devoting a lifetime to the study of chess books. As Aagaard states, often positional chess (and the middlegame in general) is a difficult subject to write about because many of the topics are already part of a strong players subconcious thought, that these positional subjects are often learned from sheer experience anyway, and that putting these ideas into words would be redundant, but Aagaard has done a better job with this book than Reshevsky did in his Art of Positional Play. I dont have forever to pour through the rather superficial analysis of Reshevsky's 60 complete games in the Art book, when Aagaard provides me with enough signposts to follow, plus more than 100 positions displayed as exercises where I need to guess the correct plan and basically play out the rest of the game for a win- you can also use your chess computer to play against many of these positional exercises if you prefer direct involement. The detailed solutions give all of the moves up to the finish of each game. Players featured in this book include Karpov, Short, Khalifman, Timman, Gelfand and Svidler. Other books in the same vein include Marovic's new book Secrets of Positional Chess, which is useful for the last two chapters on rooks and minor pieces. Karpov's Best Games (Batsford 1996) would probably be a book likely to be suggested by Aagaard, along with Tal's Life and Games. A new tactics book that I like very much is The Magic of Chess Tactics by Meyer and Muller (Russell 2002), which is better than the entire Lev Alburt series of chess books, and replaces my Tactical Chess Endings by John Nunn!

Rating:
Summary: He does it again
Review: I've been conditioned by Hollywood to expect a let down from anything labelled part II. This book though fully lives up to the high standard set by Aagaard's award winning first book "Excelling at chess". It will change the way you look at a chess position.

Rating:
Summary: Excelling at Chess was superb but this one?
Review: This book looks like a bad sequel of a good book by Aagaard called Excelling at Chess. I go back to that book every now and then to review some points and to better understand conceptually chess. The idea of excelling at positional chess is interesting but wasn't that covered alreay in the first book? Other than the positional exercises (that you can craft for yourself by examining a middlegame position from a great game) I didn't find anything novel or worth reading in this book... Frankly, Aagaard he is becoming a Schiller by doing this type of book factory like production. I was frankly saddened by his book on the Grunfeld and this book about excelling at positional chess... Poor quality books from a guy that created a good name for himself by publishing a very good book of chess: Excelling at Chess. IM Aagaard just entered the dog-house of authors I don't want to read ever again that include: GM Neil McDonald (His book on the French Winawer was hideous), IM John Watson (The third edition of Play the French was terrible), Schiller (Ugh!), and GM Larry Evans.

Very poor book! Don't buy it!

Rating:
Summary: Excelling at Chess was superb but this one?
Review: This book looks like a bad sequel of a good book by Aagaard called Excelling at Chess. I go back to that book every now and then to review some points and to better understand conceptually chess. The idea of excelling at positional chess is interesting but wasn't that covered alreay in the first book? Other than the positional exercises (that you can craft for yourself by examining a middlegame position from a great game) I didn't find anything novel or worth reading in this book... Frankly, Aagaard he is becoming a Schiller by doing this type of book factory like production. I was frankly saddened by his book on the Grunfeld and this book about excelling at positional chess... Poor quality books from a guy that created a good name for himself by publishing a very good book of chess: Excelling at Chess. IM Aagaard just entered the dog-house of authors I don't want to read ever again that include: GM Neil McDonald (His book on the French Winawer was hideous), IM John Watson (The third edition of Play the French was terrible), Schiller (Ugh!), and GM Larry Evans.

Very poor book! Don't buy it!