To get better at positional play: Is it better to study annotated games than to play games?

The reason I ask is because I'm at the point where I'm fed up with playing so many chess games, it just feels like making the same mistakes and reinforcing bad habits. What if I did the inverse where I limit myself to just one chess game a day, but with the rest of my time I study Capablanca or Karpov's games?

Om

 :delicious

Great question.
Everyone is different and you need to decide what is best for you.

I for one never studied master games however im tempted to get into it. The challenge is in itself ensuring whatever you are doing is enjoyable.
I think limiting yourself to 1 game a day isnt enjoyable.. nor is forcing yourself to play 1 game per day. You should do what makes you happy. If it gets to a weekend and you have the time to play multiple games and you want to play, go and play!

I personally have fallen into traps of "i must play 1 game per day" and then I find myself playing a game and getting frustrated. Now however, I play as many or as few as I like, and I feel the results are showing more positively for me.

Studying games is great (i hear) but you also need to be making your own mistakes and analysing your games! Turn off the engine, review your games, ask questions and move pieces

But I think yes you have made a good choice of masters to follow

Yes — if your goal is to improve positional understanding, then studying annotated games (especially from players like Capablanca or Karpov) is more valuable than grinding tons of your own games.

One to two 30 min games per day will be OK. The rest can be dedicated to study and analysis of your own games.

How about books? I'd recommend How To Reassess Your Chess by Jeremy Silman. It's about positional imbalances. We're around the same elo and it's helped me a lot. Maybe consider giving it a shot. Otherwise I'm sure there are other positional books people here could recommend.

I strongly believe tha studying master games is a much better way to improve than simply playing online games against others at your level.

dont limit yourself to one game a day. And don’t struggle over the game so that it becomes tedious.

Find books that provide insight into how the master evaluated the position and formed a plan. There are writers who explain chess thinking at every level, so you may have to go through several books before you find one that works for you.

Playing through 10 grandmaster games a night will teach you much more about chess planning and positional play than spending the same amount of time playing blitz against others at your level.

Master games are very helpful! However, these ideas are very often much too deep for somebody who just needs to start “dipping their toes” into the positional waters. I think I’d be much more instructive to see games from people just above your rating level show their thoughts and ideas behind good positional play.

For example, you’re 1200 rapid, and I’m just under 1600, so maybe my annotated game will make more sense than one from Petrosian or some other great.

Here’s a positional onslaught I played yesterday, complete with my post-game annotations:

My opponent lost on time, but it wouldn’t have mattered.

I suggest you also get a basic positional book. I recommend Simple Chess. Some other good ones are any of Silman’s, Yusupov’s Tigersprung series, and Jason Aagaard’s Excelling at positional chess, although that’s more of a workbook, the positional equivalent of a tactics book.

Yes, a well annotated game collection is a good idea. I'd aim for players from the first half of the twentieth century, or maybe the immediate postwar years. Once you get past about the 60s, you get such sophisticated and lengthy opening prep, with its wheels-within-wheels nuances, that it becomes hard to see the basic ideas that are going on. Games from the generations of Lasker, Capablanca, and Alekhine tend to be more instructive. It doesn't have to be just the "positional" players like Capablanca -- the Alekhines and Tals of the world had to have great positional sense to generate the attacks they're famous for. While the nineteenth century may not, on the whole, be as helpful, you might even throw in Morphy, who shows a great deal more positional understanding than his contemporaries.

One game collection I find particularly instructive is Chernev's "Logical Chess, Move by Move." He also has a good book called "The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played." If you do find you want to tackle more recent games, Nunn's "Understanding Chess Move by Move" does the best job of making semi-recent (90s and 2000s) games instructive at a reasonably basic level. Everyman has a series of "Move by Move" books for famous chess players. I've only sampled a few, but they may be helpful.

In general, I think this slow approach to really working through a game carefully to be most helpful. So the books above all annotate virtually every move of the game. (A few exceptions might be obvious recaptures, checks with only one reply that makes any sense, endgame sequences that require multiple moves to execute a single idea, or the early moves of the opening, especially if they're explained elsewhere in the book.) The more traditional approach is to offer annotations only at key moments, perhaps every 4-10 moves. There are many good books of this sort too, of which my favorite is Bronstein's "Zurich International Chess Tournament, 1953," which became something like a bible of Soviet chess understanding. But at your level, I think you might get the most out of a really close reading of every move of a game.

1. Nobody cares.

2. The O.P. mostly plays 30 min games here.

I also recommend Chernev’s books. Other books that do a good job of explaining master thinking and are accessible to players <1500 are Fine’s books (Lessons From My Games and The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings) and Reinfeld’s Complete Chess Course.