Foreword

First of all I would like to

congratulate the readers of this book on
making a
very good choice!
As with all books by Jacob Aagaard, this is a
quality work! It combines clear explanations and
careful y selected material, mainly from very recent
games, which you won’t find in other books.
As a chess trainer, I know how dif icult it is to find good positional exercises. (On the contrary it
seems a
relatively easy task to look for tactical positions -

computers are a
big help in showing us

how poorly we can

play chess!) The examples from this book wil make the life of chess trainers a

lit le bit easier and the life of their students and readers much more
interesting!

Because you are

holding this book, it means that you want to
improve your positional skil s and

perhaps to make an
important step towards grandmaster level (or to brush up your positional
play if you are a
grandmaster already). Then you may be interested to learn the answer to the

popular question: “What is the dif erence between an amateur

player and
grandmaster?” a

Many might think that it’s mainly the ability to calculate that helps grandmasters fathom the
depths of the position. In some cases this is true, but it also true that grandmasters have generally
better opening knowledge; they know typical more
plans and pawn structures as well. Perhaps
they are better (at least some of them) in endgames too. Stil , I would put certain other qualities
in first place. By working with amateur players, I have noticed that very often, even if they have
the necessary knowledge about the position, they can’t use it properly. Grandmasters are trained
to make decisions and have much more
practical skil s.
The second factor that struck me was
seeing how much energy amateur
players waste
analysing
or
calculating moves that a
stronger player would simply ignore.
This hints of a
huge dif erence in the levels of positional understanding. As a result, an amateur

player may spend too much time on weak moves and ideas; meanwhile a
grandmaster concentrates

on the heart of the position and looks for much better solutions.

It is not easy to improve positional understanding. One way is to work on

good books with the

games of strong players, and to

pay special attention to their explanations. Also the careful analysis
of your own
games may help you to
improve your evaluations and to correct some mistakes.

Although Aagaard’s “approach with this book is not to teach positional understanding, but to

teach positional judgement and decision-making”, I am sure that solving the many positional
exercises from this book wil help readers to raise their positional level too.

The tools that Aagaard uses in this book look simple. But his method of three questions and his
rather modest approach shouldn’t deceive readers -

if you fol ow the instructions careful y and

concentrate on these important questions, you wil most likely focus on the central elements of
the position, which wil help you to find the solutions of the exercises. Working with this book
wil train your positional judgement and develop your chess intuition. You wil improve your
decision-making process and learn some new
practical skil s. And maybe you wil be able to make
another step forwards..

Artur Yusupov
Twice Candidates Finalist
 Series Introduction

Ever since I was a

junior I have been a chess trainer. At times my dissatisfaction with the conditions for
trainers has caused me to be a
player as well; and not without some success. But at the end of the day I
have had to
accept that my destiny is not to feel comfortable on the stage, but rather in the anonymity
of the locker room. I have always cared more for the results of my students than my own, just as I have

always had lots of passion for training others, but none for training myself.
Over the years I have developed some of the skil s necessary to become a decent trainer, not least of
all the ability to earn a
living by other means! Among other things this means I have become a chess
writer. From the moment I started taking pride in my work, I have developed into a not entirely bad
one, to the degree where I am
finally comfortable enough to
publish this series of books, which I have
been dreaming about for years.

The series title Grandmaster Preparation is of course a lit le joke, as the five books originally planned do
not include any coverage of the opening. But it is also a serious point at the same time. Grandmaster
play does not occur in a vacuum, and it consists of much more than opening preparation, random
intuition and even more random calculation. There are rules and methods that have been successful
for many decades and wil continue to be so in the future. One of my main objectives with this project
has been to
merge this classic understanding of chess with my own ideas and create a serious training
plan for ambitious players.

This is the most ambitious project I have undertaken in my professional life, and there is no
escaping
the unavoidable imperfection of the execution. I hope the reader wil forgive me in advance for any
mistakes, but at the same time offer me the confidence to believe in most of what I claim throughout
these books. They are
heavily researched and based on
my experience of working with close to a

thousand individuals over the years: from my own

daughters, who recently discovered the joy of

capturing a
piece, to friends who have been involved in World Championship matches. So, please
develop your own
understanding of chess by questioning everything I say, but at the same time, please
never
disregard anything I say as unfounded.
When I was a
young man I had no access to a classical chess education, and many other grandmasters
have had the same
experience. It is my hope that this series wil help to
change this picture in the
same
way that Mark Dvoretsky’s books have, and the way that Artur Yusupov’s series of nine books
{Fundamentals, Beyond the Basics and Mastery) have given juniors and amateurs a
clearly-structured
method of improvement.

The ultimate goal for this series is to show a

path towards playing chess at
grandmaster level for those
who do not have access to a
good trainer. I have worked with some
grandmasters who had the kinds
of holes in their chess understanding that would baffle the average man on the street. Obviously they
excelled in other aspects of the game simultaneously, but over time their weaknesses became obvious
to their opponents and their results duly suffered. This series is meant to
help those players as well.

Jacob Aagaard, Glasgow 2012

 My Intentions with this Book

There are a lot of good books on the market that wil help you to improve your understanding
of positional and technical chess. Mainly I would recommend games collections for the person
with all the time in the world, but there are also other books that cut
positional play into small

pieces and explain them well. Sure, this has been done in dif erent ways, but all of them in ways
that makes sense and stick in the mind. I absolutely believe that this is a
never-ending process and
that more books with better explanations are
always needed and wil therefore always be writ en.
But this book is not one of them.

My approach with this book is not to teach positional understanding, but to teach positional
judgement and decision-making. My goal is not to make you understand chess better -

although
I admit that might come as a side-effect none the less -

but to use the extensive knowledge you

wil no doubt already have of chess if you are
reading a book in the Grandmaster Preparation
series.

So rather than providing you with answers, this book presumes that you have already been

supplied with plenty of those and that what you need are the right questions. Actually, I would

go so far as to say that in order to train your positional judgement:

All you need are three questions!

It is probably a decade ago that I sat down and tried to make a list of all the relevant questions I
could ask my students to make them pay attention to nuances in the training positions I provided
them with. I think I had about nine. But some of them I felt were not really relevant to a lot of
the positions I looked at; so I ditched them. Others tended to have very similar answers to each
other in otherwise quite dif erent positions; merging them seemed reasonable. And bam! All I was

left with were three questions.

1. Where are the weaknesses?

2. Which is the worst-placed piece?
3. What is your opponents idea?

I have since used these questions in training with club players of average level (and below) and

strong grandmasters. They are

equally useful for all levels for a
simple reason:

Hie purpose of the three questions is to direct your focus

Whether we are
talking about a
strong grandmaster with a
great international reputation as a

dangerous attacker or a
junior with no
reputation at all, both need to focus on the same
things
in order to make better decisions on the board. After all, the pieces move in the same
way for

everybody, even
Kasparov (despite Bareev’s claim to the contrary).
8 Grandmaster Preparation -

Positional Play

We wil look at the three questions one

by one and look at
positions in each section. But as
always
in my books, what I am
looking for is not that you understand the theory, but that you can drive
the vehicle. Theoretical comprehension is not
enough; you need to be able to do it, before you
can
ful y understand it.

Hie dif erence between theory and practice is that

in theory there is no dif erence, but in practice there inevitably is

True knowledge is skil -

all other types of knowledge are fakes. As an

example, I am
quite well-
read in nutrition, but my severe addiction to chocolate meant that no one would ever have paid
any attention to what I said, had I decided to lecture about it. (Now that I have rid myself of this
addiction and look more like a man than a balloon again, I no
longer feel any pressure to lecture.
Funny that, but that is another story, of course.)

So what I wish for you to

get from this book is the practical ability to make better decisions at the
board, so that you can
play better moves. This on its own does not
separate my approach from
many others.

What makes this book a bit dif erent from most of the other
books on the market is that the
emphasis is on the decision,
more than on the understanding behind it

The prevailing view in Anglo-Saxon chess literature is that good chess comes from calculation,
opening preparation and good intuition; the lat er clearly being the factor dealing with positional
judgement. This is a model that sums
up the practice of already strong players in action.

Those of us who focus more on

general principles as a model for explaining chess and what is

going on, are

searching for a model that can
replicate good play consistently. By breaking wins at

the board down into a

high number of small skil s or
principles, we feel that we can communicate
and replicate the process that leads to
strong moves at the board with a
higher frequency.

While the first model has a Western bias, the second used to have an East European bias. I would
claim that the Soviet domination of chess in the 20th century would be a
strong endorsement for
the idea of a “classical chess education” with lots of general principles and division of chess skil
into small chunks that can
easily be explained. Modern examples of this are the books by Mark
Dvoretsky and Artur Yusupov.

But you do not have to

agree with this stance in order to
get the ful benefit from this book.
This book is not
seeking to theorize chess, but to make it practical. And for those interested in
the argument for general principles, I recommend reading Thinking Inside the Box, which is the
theoretical arm of this project.
 My Intentions with this Book 9

To make chess practical we need to make it simple

This is my number one
teaching principle. This does not mean that the exercises cannot be

painstakingly dif icult for some

people. Chess is like that -

it is dif icult to find the various

connections in a
position when we look at it, tactical, positional and otherwise. But once we

know what the best move is, we cannot turn it off and somehow it is easy to understand. This is

certainly one of my goals with the solutions writ en in this book: to

give you exactly what you
need to know to understand the position after you have struggled to solve it.

Another goal is to make the process as

simple as
possible. You would think that it would be easy
to remember three small questions, but experience tel s me otherwise. And even if a
pupil is able
to remember the three questions, he is often unable to remember the bigger question, which
should spark these three questions in his mind: What am I looking for in this position? Instead,
most
players and students wil just start
calculating.

Calculation is a
very important skil , but stil ,
it’s only one of the analysis tools available

The purpose with the three questions is for you to look at the positions in front of you dif erently.
I want
you to start
looking at the pawn and pieces dif erently. It is a
process and there are a few
things I want to state about this that might be obvious, but none the less are
good to
keep in mind
(because have you noticed how often we do not
pay attention to obvious things, despite being
highly intel igent creatures?).

In order to
get the most out of this book I would like you to focus on
style over
speed. Please
take the time to ask yourself the three questions, answer them out loud (or maybe even better, on

paper) before you start

applying the knowledge by looking for the best move. If you do this, you
wil soon see how focusing your mind on the three important parts of chess that these questions
relate to, makes a
big dif erence.

Doing it right is more

important than getting it right
Please remember that although we want to solve the positions, what we are
doing here is building
your intuition, by repeating these questions to your subconscious so
frequently that it wil pay
attention to these three aspects of chess and their nuances.

What level is this book supposed to be aiming at?

This book is a
part of the Grandmaster Preparation series and therefore aims at
developing the skil s
needed for grandmaster performance. However, the level of the chess is not extensively dif icult in

this book. The positions in Strategic Play are more elaborate and wil probably be more suited for

players over 2300. Having said this, some of the positions in this book do offer grandmasters a

bit of resistance. One interesting experiment I did with a GM who at the time was rated 2625 or

thereabouts, was to
give him 12 of these positions and use half an hour on them. He scored 9/12.
 10 Grandmaster Preparation -

Positional Play

He did not want

any feedback or
help with his own
play, so the knowledge that the three exercises
he had failed at were
quite similar from where I was
standing did not
impress him.
However it does underline an
important benefit you can
get from this book, even if you have
reached a
high level of positional play already.

Pay attention to the exercises you fail to solve

As the exercises in this book to a

great extent are constructed with the idea of there being a
simple
solution, failure to solve an exercise wil give you important feedback about your own
positional
judgement. I would encourage you to write down the mistakes you make and when you repeat
them (as we all do), note it down as well. In general I do not believe we
pay enough attention to

our mistakes if we
keep the realization of them purely in our heads.