Grandmaster Preparation: Positional Play - Aagaard

Have there been times during a game when you have tried to calculate like mad, but can find no rhyme or reason to your lines? Have you ever felt that the computer's suggestions in your postmortem analysis make no sense to you? Ever felt like the man with a hammer, suspecting that the world may not be made up entirely of nails after all? In Positional Play Jacob Aagaard shares his simple three-step tool of positional analysis that he has used with club players and famous grandmasters to improve their positional decision-making. Working from the starting point that all players who aspire to play at international level have a certain amount of positional understanding, Aagaard lays out an easy-to-follow training plan that will improve everyone's intuition and positional decision-making. Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard won the British Championship at his first and only attempt. He is the only chess author to have received the Boleslavsky Medal as well as the Guardian, ECF and ChessCafe Book of the Year awards. He is a FIDE Senior Trainer, and on his retirement from professional chess he has taken up the post as trainer for the Danish elite. His training material is used by amateurs, grandmasters and World Champions alike.

Specifications

• 312 Pages
• Paperback
• Publisher: Quality
• Published: November, 2012

Reviews

• "Positional Play offers the reader 222 well-chosen positions to solve, drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from recent practice. These positions are arranged around three themes: weaknesses, pieces and prophylaxis. Even those unable to solve the positions will derive benefit from the effort and the thorough solutions. Accepted practice holds that all chess players should incorporate thirty minutes a day solving tactics. An extra half hour going through Positional Play would be time well spent. Highly Recommended." - IM John Donaldson
• "The best three chess books: The brilliant Grandmaster Preparation series (Strategic Play, Positional Play and Calculation), which I would warmly recommend to anyone wanting to reach the next step with their chess." - James Adair, CHESS Magazine
• "Aagaard is an excellent writer and a skilled pedagogue. His examples clearly illustrate the themes he is trying to describe, and the solutions to the exercises are clear and comprehensive. Positional Play, like all of the books in the Grandmaster Preparation series, is not a book for the faint of heart. Effort, however, will be repaid with increased understanding and perhaps even Elo points to boot. It can be warmly recommended to players over 1800 and those slightly lower if plucky and willing to work." - John Hartmann
• "All exercise positions in this book are from real games involving at least one player of IM strength. The positions are quite modern, most source games were played in the last fifteen years... It is evident that Aagaard has put a lot of work into acquiring these positions for use as training material, and [Positional Play] may well be a terrific addition to a chess player's library based on the quantity and quality of the exercises. Contemplation of the positions should provide many hours of enjoyment for chess players." - Vijay Raghavan, ChessCafe.com
• "Each chapter brings a lot of fresh material to the reader for training purposes in the form of exercise positions... great workbook to raise your playing strength." - Martin Rieger, Rochade Europa
• "A challenge for the aspiring player, an invitation to some high class training sessions." - Uwe Bekemann, www.bdf-fernschachbund.de