Chess Strategy from the Ground up

Introduction

After reading the responses to my previous post, I started to flesh out my ideas for an book on chess strategy. Below is a first draft of an introduction.

“I want to understand chess more deeply.”

This is what many players say when I ask them what they want to get out of chess coaching. Often, they want to be able to understand the grandmaster games they encounter in books or live online broadcasts. They want to be able to see the game within the game, understand the reasons behind the moves, and why the game evolves the way it does.

But those who dip their toes into the turbulent waters of competitive chess – whether online, on a site like Chess.com or Lichess, or live, in over-the-board tournaments – soon find that winning at chess is not about understanding. At least, not only about understanding. Because before you venture into the vast field of strategy, you have to cross the river of tactics.

If strategy is appreciating how the seasons change, how spring turns into summer turns into fall, tactics is getting mauled by a grizzly bear. Until you learn how to stay clear of the grizzly bears, you can’t really appreciate the changing of the seasons. In chess terms, your grand vision of turning your queenside pawn majority into a passed pawn isn’t worth much if, halfway through executing it, you get hit with a fork that costs you a whole rook.

So, for the chess players who care about winning, their focus turns to tactics. They work through puzzles until they can confidently execute forks, pins, skewers, and so on. And they learn to guard against getting hit with those tactics by their opponents. And it works: a player with a solid command of tactics will almost always beat one without. If you can confidently spot forks and pins, you can obliterate your uncle when you go home for the holidays (unless your uncle is Garry Kasparov).

But chess is a big world, and as you climb the rating ladder, at some point you start to encounter stronger opponents. They’ve studied the same tactics books you have, and they no longer allow themselves to get caught by simple tricks. Now the game becomes a glorified game of chicken. Both sides know how to defend themselves against the other’s tactics, and neither has a good idea for how to apply pressure beyond that.

What now? Well, you are finally ready to accomplish what got you into chess in the first place: to understand chess more deeply.

But this requires a profound shift in mindset. Tactics have an immediate, obvious effect on the board: capture a piece, checkmate the king. The purpose of strategy is more subtle. It is to arrange your pieces so that future conflicts are more likely to turn out in your favor, even if the exact shape of these conflicts can’t yet be predicted. This is what is meant by a “good position”.

This involves, in the words of the first world champion Wilhem Steinitz, the accumulation of small advantages. Most obvious of these is a material advantage – more pieces, or more valuable pieces – but also more subtle advantages, like better coordination between the pieces, or a weak square in the enemy position.

Once you learn to recognize and create these advantages, you will forever be a step ahead of opponents who only play for tactics. Time and again, their ingenious move-by-move machinations will fizzle out, and you will emerge on top. To them, this will seem like luck, but you’ll know it is the result of hidden features of the position that they cannot yet perceive.

My hope for this book is it will allow you to finally realize the goal that got you into chess in the first place: to understand the game more deeply. And, of course, crush your opponents.