6th sense, sense for position

There is a special sense owned by the best strategists. It is the sense for position which allows them to consider objectively a position and decide for the most destructive move. Every one can receive such a sense i he makes effort a bit.

When a chess player plays, there is always about one to four moves he considers deeply. Among those moves he chooses the one he likes the most, or as we said before, the one which suits the most to his nature.

However, there are some players for whom this is not enough. They try to find always the move which the position on the board demands. What does it mean?

Practically, it means making obscatles for your opponent to make it difficult for him to play. Let me explain. I'll show you what I mean on an example of an simple endgame:

As we have seen, White Bishop has taken all possible fields of movement of the Black Knight so it was useless. And that's the key to understand positional play. If you want to become a positional player, you are about to consider all probable moves to find the one which causes the most destruction in the lines of your opponent.

Some players, like Bogoljubow, developed a very sharp sense for position and almost didn't miss a chance to make the lifes of their opponents harder.

Here is one of his game as an example:

There are many things to learn about positional traps and combinations. To learn the basics, I recommend the book My System by Aaron Nimzowitsch.