Temposchlucker

 Since May 1st I experimented with tactical puzzles that are 3 moves deep (5 ply). That definitely worked. Somewhere in the summer, I decided to give 4 movers a go (7 ply). After a few months, my conclusion is, that that works too, but it is not as efficient as 3 movers.  So I'm working with those 3 movers again. My picture of both the openings and the middlegame is pretty much complete, so I know exactly what to study positionally the coming years. The boundaries are clear: Piece exchanges Restriction of enemy pieces by pawns Increase piece activity by pawn moves CM Kabadayi is my guide here. This means there will be one loose end the coming years: the endgame. I will study my five new openings and the related middlegames positionally, and do tactics on a daily basis. Since I don't want to divide my attention, energy and time too much, I accept that I will screw up a won endgame regularly. I consider that as a luxury problem. For now.

 The problem with chess training always has been that there is way too much good advice. With tactics, it took me 18 years to separate the wheat from the chaff. The book of GM Hellsten about middlegame strategy contains 826 potential relevant variations. But learning them is like learning an encyclopedia by starting from the letter A. Nobody can do that, unless you are an idiot savant of some sort. I just have the idiot part covered, so I got to turn to some chaff separation first. I was happy that I could separate quite some chaff, until I found the two subjects that are the place to start: exchanging pieces and pawns . It turns out that there are about 10 types of positional exchanges , and the actual study of them is pretty straight forward. But studying pawns is a different animal. Here again, there is way too much material to study.  In the book Hellsten dedicates 475 variations to pawns. After some time I found that the two most important areas are where the pawns have...

 Since pawns and exchanges are the essence of positional play, I started to look for information about the subject. I found the extremely well written book of CM Can Kabadayi at Chessable about The Art of Exchanging Pieces .  Every piece of the puzzle falls into place. A definite recommendation! Since I train tactics on a daily basis, I couldn't help to investigate the role of exchanges in tactics. That is something that is not covered in the book, which is purely about positional exchanges. After all, for tactics you look at Checks, Captures and Threats. It is smart to investigate the logic behind the captures in tactics. The book of CM Kabadayi provides 10 good positional reasons for exchanging pieces or for to avoid that. This means that the 750 tactical positions that I am learning can be used to materialize a favourable positional exchange. 750 how times 10 what is 7500 opportunities to force a favourable exchange. I already won a few games with my newly adopted strategy....

 In chess education the hardest part is to find out where to begin. It took me 18 years to find the beginning of how to train tactics.  In the same time I have often looked at positional play, but I didn't find where to begin. I solved a few riddles, like developing the PoPLoAFun system, the sitting ducks and to give an exact definition of piece activity , but I couldn't find the beginning of the rest. The problem with positional play is that there is way too much good advice. For years I waded knee deep trough the well intended positional guidelines. The problem is twofold. First you have no hierarchical framework, so you don't know if you spend your time on the right things, and secondly the given rules are given without the exact why , so you don't know the precise conditions under which the rules must be applied. Take for instance the adage "to take is a mistake". Without knowing when to apply it and when not, it is just another silly well meant advice. ...