Schacksnack

A solid method to improve in chess is to learn five positions per week. This ”less-is-more concept” was developed in the late 1970s in consultation with Robert Danielsson, who was my coach at times when I was a teenager. At that time, I was supposed to learn five positions per week from GM Ludek Pachman’s Mittelspielpraxis im Schach and Endspielpraxis im Schach. The downside was that, especially for a junior player, it could be challenging to maintain discipline over 12 months. However, with the help of 300 Most Important Chess Positions, this can be addressed, creating an excellent educational structure.

An affordable opportunity to take chess lessons based on this concept is to acquire the book where the 300 most important positions are presented. By assimilating and revisiting these positions over a year, you will significantly increase your playing strength in proportion to your rating. If you are familiar with all these key positions, you will have significant opportunities in practical chess to recognize the themes in the opening and the middlegame (150), as well as the endgame (150). Five positions per week are what you should focus on according to this time schedule. For example, if you know a specific pawn endgame, it can be equivalent to knowing 50 pawn endgames, but you need to know which key position it is. By learning a crucial idea in one position, you can apply this idea to many other positions. This is essentially the only shortcut available if you want to improve rapidly.

Before each position, you make an assessment and try to find the best move or the best continuation. It can take 5-30 minutes depending on your playing strength and familiarity with chess ideas. If you find it too difficult, you can wait for the solution to come and then play through it. One week later, you repeat the position to see if you remember the solution and the specific idea to memorize. A small sample of how it might look is presented below with three positions from each phase. Solutions will already be published tomorrow, so try to immerse yourself in at least one position to see how the game continued tomorrow. Save the other two positions for two other days following the ”less is more” principle. It is better to do too little than too much since the risk is greater with the latter option that nothing at all is being done.

Position 86 – Middlegame – The Bishop Manouevre – White to move Bogoljubow – Alekhine, World Championship match 1929 (14)

Position 91 – Opening – The Rook Manoeuvre – Black to move
Karpov – Kasparov, World Championship match, Moscow 1985

Position 231 – Rook Endings – Black to move
Kasparov – Short, World Championship match, London 1993

Thomas Engqvist