Improve Your Positional Chess

Publisher: Gambit, 2004, Pages: 192, Paperback

Throughout a game of chess, the players must constantly make judgements and decisions that cannot be determined simply by calculation. They must then rely on their positional judgement. Good positional skills are primarily developed by experience, but they can also be learnt. In this book, Carsten Hansen provides a wealth of advice and ideas that will help give readers a helping hand up to new levels of positional understanding. Paramount in this discussion is the player's need to weigh up positional elements at the board, and decide which are most important for the situation at hand. Topics include: the quest for weaknesses, "what is the initiative?", understanding imbalances, the relative value of the pieces, decisions regarding pawn-structures, structural weaknesses, and where and how to attack.

Carsten Hansen is a FIDE Master from Denmark who currently lives in the USA. He has a reputation for writing well-researched books on major chess topics, and is known to many through his painstaking book reviews on the Internet. This is his fourth book for Gambit: see also The Gambit Guide to the English Opening: 1...e5, The Symmetrical English, and The Nimzo-Indian: 4 e3.