How Should a Chess Strategy Book Be Structured?

There are a lot of good sources for tactical puzzles, but when my students ask for recommendations for books on strategy, I’m never quite sure what to recommend. Almost all of the books out there seem to share the same handful of issues.

The problems with strategy books

Issue #1: Lack of coherent structure. While the titles of many strategy books give the impression that they’ll provide a well-rounded guide to strategic play, what they actually offer is more often a grab bag of concepts. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but students can be confused when they sign up for a comprehensive course, and get a series of loosely connected ideas. Furthermore, there is often no indication as to the relative importance of the ideas. Universal, bread-and-butter concepts are mixed in with highly specific one-offs. For players looking to simplify and organize their approach to strategic chess, this can have the opposite effect.

Issue #2: The level of instruction is too advanced, and (closely related) the examples are from games that are too high-level. Almost all chess books primarily use examples from master games. I think this is a mistake. For learning purposes, it is better to use examples from games of players at the level of the intended reader. Games between masters – and especially grandmasters, which make up the majority of games in many books – often come down to subtle mistakes that are difficult for newer players to understand. Compounding this, the commentary often glosses over a lot of what is going on under the surface. I think grandmasters, who write a lot of the chess books that are out there, often just don’t have a sense of how difficult chess is for the average player. The vast majority of chess players in the world make many simple mistakes every game, and cleaning these up will have a much bigger impact on their results than trying to appreciate the nuances of grandmaster chess.

Issue #3: Not enough examples. As you’re probably aware, chess is not so much about what you know, but what you can do. For that reason, it’s not enough to see an idea once. You usually have to see and practice it many times before you can apply it effectively in your games. In a lot of books, each idea is demonstrated through one example, maybe with an exercise or too. Ideally, you should have many exercises for each concept.

Let me shout out one book that I think does a great job: Mastering Chess Strategy by Johan Hellsten. This book avoids most of the problems above. It’s organized in a very logical way, with lots of examples, and extensive, clear commentary. For my money, it’s probably the best chess strategy book ever written. However, most of the examples are from grandmaster games, and I think this book is best for players 1600+, probably 1800+ to get the most out of it. I’d like to do something similar for players in the 1200 range.

How I would do it

My approach is based on two ideas:

1. Build a coherent, logical framework for thinking about chess positions.

2. Introduce ideas in a sequence where everything you learn will help you win chess games right now.

With that in mind, I came up with a three-part structure: Pieces, Pawns, Gameplans. Let’s go through each in turn.

Part 1: Pieces

This really starts with a question: What is a “good position”? Newer players often struggle with moves that don’t seem to “do” anything. They are more attracted to moves that make direct threats or transform the position in a tangible way. But positional chess is all about arranging your forces in a harmonious way so that the subsequent course of events is more likely to go in your favor, even if you don’t know exactly what will happen. That’s what I mean by a good position. And the easiest way to get started is to understand how to position the pieces. Each piece has its own personality, so it makes sense to go one-by-one – knight, bishop, etc. – and learn to use each to its fullest potential. In line with the principle of ideas you can use immediately, this sets you up to use what I consider the most practical strategic idea, “Improve your worst-placed piece.”

Part 2: Pawns

If the pieces are your army, pawns form the terrain that it’s moving around on, so this section is all about understanding the terrain. I would cover the standard categories of doubled, isolated, and backwards pawns. Rather than weaknesses, I prefer to think of this as a vocabulary for talking about different types of pawns, because whether or not pawns of these types are actually weak is highly position-dependent. In addition to weak pawns, this section would also cover weak squares, which as a concept is often harder to grasp for new players, but equally if not more important. Finally, this section would also cover pawn breaks, which are another of the big ideas to look out for when you’re trying to figure out what to do in a position where there are no tactics or obvious improving moves.

Part 3: Gameplans

With a grounding in pieces and pawns, this section would tackle holistic gameplans that involve all the elements working together towards a goal. Common gameplans include attacking the king, trading down to a winning endgame, or attacking a weak pawn. The key insight here is that your plan should be based on the board, not on what you feel like doing. For each gameplan, there are two big things to consider: 1) What are the conditions on the board that signal it’s a good time to go for this plan? And 2) How do you go about it so it has the best chance of success? Basically, when and how do you use this plan? For example, when it comes to attacking the king, signals that this is a good idea would be…

1. Lead in development

2. Enemy king is stuck in the center or exposed

3. More attackers than defenders near the king

4. Control a lot of space near the king

If none of these factors are present, the attack is very unlikely to work! And ideas for how to execute an attack on the king include…

1. Involve as many pieces as possible in the attack

2. Be prepared to sacrifice material

3. Look for tactics to finish off the attack

Okay, that’s all I’ve got for today. What do you think, does this outline make sense?