Maneuvering: The Art of Piece Play - Chess Strategy Book for Beginners & Advanced Players | Improve Your Game Tactics | Perfect for Home, Club & Tournament Play

"A real chess player is someone who understands where the pieces belong." - GM Jacob Aagaard"There are only 5-6 real chess players in the world." - GM Garry KasparovUnderstanding what to do in "simple" positions can be very difficult, but in a slow game, you generally don't have more than a few minutes per move because you have to save time for the commitments and critical moments. Therefore, you need to know what to look for and how to quickly calculate what you need to do in order to come to a fast and accurate decision. This is really important, especially given that most positions in chess are the "simple" positions that require piece improvement. GM Jacob Aagaard recommends asking three questions (what are the weaknesses/worst placed pieces/opponent's idea) and using the answers (as well as short-term calculation) to determine what move to play. However, answering those questions are far from easy if you don't understand where the pieces belong in the given structure. Many positional books will give you the answers you need for specific positions, but will not give you high-quality puzzles to practice the right thought process techniques to be able to efficiently play positional chess at a high level. This is where Dvoretsky steps in, with hundreds of very high-quality positional puzzles with a difficulty high enough to challenge masters.There are not very many books like this (the only ones I know of are by Aagaard and Dvoretsky, although I'm sure there are books with positional puzzles as a minority of the book) because high-quality positional puzzles are more difficult for authors to find as the answers are less "clear cut" than tactical puzzles. So if a good positional puzzle book comes out, like this one, you should seize your chance! Try to make habits out of Aagaard's positional thought process method and refine your understanding of where the pieces belong. Again - there aren't many books like this - seize your chance!This book is mainly for advanced players (2000-2200+). Don't get me wrong, many of the puzzles are easy enough that 1800 level players have a reasonable chance to solve them if they structure their thinking and give it their all, but the main target audience is 2000+, and mainly masters. The solutions are deeply annotated, generally, the full game is included, so the reason for the answer should generally be clear. Occasionally there are alternative solutions (this is rare), and if you think your solution is just as good, I recommend you check an engine.Almost all of the puzzles in this book involve maneuvering a badly placed piece to a good square, and to solve the problems quickly you are required to understand the worst placed piece/ideal squares/the weaknesses/the opponent's idea. In other words, you are required to answer Aagaard's three questions and calculate the short term variations with a wide tree. Regarding the easy puzzles near the beginning, Aagaard's quote regarding Ulf Andersson's play comes to mind: "While I could have played any of the moves in this game, I could not have played all of them." Consistency in positional play is very important, and after the "warm-up", the puzzles get much more difficult. At the end of the book, there were some puzzles that I (teaming up with a 2400+ USCF) failed to get right after thinking for more than 30 minutes!In conclusion, I recommend 'Maneuvering: The Art of Piece Play' for ambitious 2000+ players. If you want to get the most out of this book, I recommend you read GM Jacob Aagaard's 'Positional Play' first and try to apply his method for the puzzles in this book. Players as low as 1700-1800 can also learn a lot from this book, but hard work will be required and it is unlikely that B or A players will be able to solve most of the puzzles within a few minutes each.