Positional Play

Rating:
Summary: Dvoretsky is the worlds's best trainer!
Review: It has long been known that Dvoretsky is the world's to chess trainer; he has played an integral role in the development of such strong players as Dolmatov, Yusupov, Zviagintsev, and Kramnik. This book reveals much of his wisdom considering positional play, in a very practical format. Honest and informative, Dvoretsky teaches not of the fundamentals of a position but of how to approach positional problems in general. Especially interesting is the chapter written by GM Bareev on what decision making is genuinely like at the top. An excellent book!

Rating:
Summary: Atypical, but quite worthwhile
Review: The reader from Brazil has noted that this work is not a primer on positional play (for that, see Nimzovich's *My System* or Euwe and Kramer's two-volume *The Middlegame*). And I would agree that some of the material isn't overly thematic, either.

However, there is much of value in this book: the discussion of prophylactic thinking, for example, raises a topic of fundamental importance in the formation of a strong chessplayer. And to discuss briefly the three chapters ridiculed by the Brazilian reviewer: the section on not managing without combinations is really a short addendum to the section on opposite-colored bishops in the middlegame. And the latter is an *extremely* worthwhile chapter, particularly for those of us who learned that opposite-colored bishop endings have strong drawing tendencies and just assumed the same would be true of the middlegame. I have used this chapter a number of times with my own students, and have benefited from it as well.

Finally, the chapter on the Dutch Stonewall is a wonderful case study for illustrating positional play. The Brazilian reviewer seemed unhappy about this, but elsewhere in his review suggested that the isolated pawn should have been covered. Well, isolated pawns don't arise in a vacuum; they arise from particular openings. So why not cover a different sort of pawn structure, especially given that treatments of the isolani abound? I should add that one need not play a particular opening to benefit from knowing something about it.

In conclusion, if you're looking for a middlegame primer, then look elsewhere. But if you're looking for a book that will broaden your knowledge base and offer some new concepts with which to approach the game, then this is a book well worth considering, particularly for USCF 1600-1700 and up.

Rating:
Summary: Lousy Work
Review: This is one of the worst possible books on the very important subject of positional play. It's even questionable if it should be titled Positional Play. A more appropriate title could be "Yusupov is my Hero." That's what the book, to a large extent, is : nauseating praise of the great Yusupov, whose greater achievement in chess was to play second for the mediocre Anand(one of the many Kasparov's "Bogoljubows.")The book is a mess. When positional concepts are explained at all, they are done so in a haphazard fashion: there's no listing, classifying, and defining them. You have to apprehend them through the author's comments on the game(Kotov's "Play like a GM" is much better). Since the author didn't have much to say, he stuffed up the book with things that either are not of primary importance to positional play or,worse, have nothing to do with it. To wit: there's a chapter on "New Ideas in the Dutch Defense." Can you beat it? Another one on "You can't manage without combinations!" In a book on positional play!And what about "opposite-colored bishops in the middle game"? Much more important than open line, backward pawns, isolated pawns, don't you think? Well, stay away from this mess if you're smart.