Understanding complex positions

Most of us have run into this dilemma. You're playing through a GM game in your Informants, or your on move 14 in a line of your favorite defence against e4 in your ECO's and you run across a symbol that +- white has a decisive advantage or 13. ... Ng2! is a very good move, but---you don't know why! What then? Occasionally this mystery becomes clear a number of moves later, but often it does not. Strong players encounter this situation less often, but many times this becomes a catch-22 for mid level players struggling to analyze these complex positions.

Any suggestions??

@mchill


The first thing to realize when facing complex and seemingly impenetrable positions is that the approach has a different emphasis. Rather than focus on your "I move here, he goes there" calculations, you lean more to the other side of chess planning, which is the observation and evaluation of positional features. Strong players actually do less move-by-move analysis, and make more decisions based in intuition and instinct, than most people realize.

Of course that intuition and instinct comes from experience, from long hours spent working on challenging positions to come to conclusions and make decisions, but it still starts with the basics. You start your evaluation of a difficult position by breaking it down to its components, and by examining positional features -- which king is exposed more to danger, whose pieces control more open lines, who has the better pawn structure, etc etc etc -- you really do have to go through the entire list, all the positional attributes that books on positional chess talk about.

As you gain experience and increased ability, intuition and instinct build and you begin to see and understand more, and more quickly. More and more, specific moves and variations will begin to suggest themselves as you examine the board, ideas and plans will begin to come to mind more easily.

But it starts small -- in this case, you can't understand the forest unless you know the trees.

@mchill

Get a good book on strategic thinking. I recommend Herman Grooten's "Chess Strategy for Club Players."

@gambiteer said
@mchill


The first thing to realize when facing complex and seemingly impenetrable positions is that the approach has a different emphasis. Rather than focus on your "I move here, he goes there" calculations, you lean more to the other side of chess planning, which is the observation and evaluation of positional features. Strong players actually do less move-by-move ana ...[text shortened]... .

But it starts small -- in this case, you can't understand the forest unless you know the trees.

gambiteer and moonbus - thank you for your input. I'm sure you folks are correct. It's been awhile since I did any serious OTB game prep. 🙂