As mentioned in the notes, we are thinking about elaborating newfisher's list of positional considerations in a way that makes them more accessible for practical play.

To that end I'd like to write some lengthy forum posts, explaining one of these items at a time, after which we could add some exercises for the readers to solve.

There are several books about strategy I have been reading recently, and most of them reduce positional aspects to an amazingly small amount of questions. The problem with these books is imo that they have been written for a target audience of 2000+ so they take a lot of things for granted. Obviously nothing to go by for our purposes.

Instead I will go by the books which have influenced me in my early stages, namely "Stellungsbeurteilung und Plan" by Karpov and Mazukevich and "My System" by Nimzowich. As this basically means rewriting my own club training this is obviously going to take a lot of time, but there should be a regular output to keep up interest. This will probably mean that I have to reduce both my activity in team matches and in votechess considerably to make this happen, but it might be well worth it.

I will go by the seven strategems as described by Karpov:

Material Balance
Immediate Threats
King Security
Open Files (and Diagonals)
Pawn Structure and Outposts (weak and strong squares)
Central Control and Space
Activity and Development of the Pieces

Apart from the usual "How to lead an attack against inferior development and/or insecure king" this will include:

Strong and Weak Squares and Colour Complexes
Open Files
Doubled Pawns
Backward Pawns on Semi-Open Files
Pawn Chains
Closed Centre
Mobile Centre
Open Centre
Static Centre
Dynamic Centre
Using a Space Advantage
Theory of Two Weaknesses

This may sound quite complicated, but actually it's not sufficient by a fair margin to describe chess and its many dynamic factors. Nonetheless these long-term factors constitute a major factor in planning, and becoming aware of them in time is one of the many steps which turn us into better players eventually.

Obsessive Analysis Group

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