How to Avoid Positional Mistakes

Avoiding positional mistakes has proven to be one of the hardest things to do in modern chess. Even with computer engines on our side, we still have hard time understanding the positional mistakes that we make over and over again in our practical games.

I devoted today’s post to positional chess, in order to help you improve in the area where the great majority of aspiring players have problems. While tactics can be improved easily, simply by solving more tactics on a regular basis, understanding your positional mistakes and preventing them from happening in the future take a great deal of grasping a number of theoretical concepts that, only when combined together, can give us clear answers to why a certain move would be deemed ‘weak’ from a positional point of view. 

In the video, I am using a highly instructive game in which I point out simple, yet memorable examples of positional mistakes. The game is a classic and it shows that even top grandmasters are not insured against making yet another positional blunder, ruining their nice position and giving up whatever slight advantage they have been clinging to over the past 20 moves. What questions should we ask ourselves during games to prevent big positional mistakes and save a lot of time on the clock which we would otherwise waste on calculating moves that are simply wrong? What things to study in order to boost our positional understanding even more? These and other questions will be answered in today’s video which I hope will prove helpful to you. I am looking forward to reading your feedback, comments, and questions on this new training material I’ve prepared for you!