Strategic Chess Exercises: Find the Right Way to Outplay Your Opponent

This book is not for the faint of heart (at least 1700 OTB), but tackling the material in this book is exactly how you improve your chess. It's structured as 90 exercises (60 middlegame, 30 endgame), where there is no clear tactical win. Rather each position is white/black to move and implement the best positional plan in the position. Sometimes this requires identifying your opponent's best move and stopping it, sometimes this means executing an important pawn break, sometimes this means preparing a pawn break, sometimes this means improving a bad piece. Each position is not a tactic, but it does require patience and calculation if you want to solve them correctly. As I said before, it's not for the faint of heart!I particularly like how the solutions are not just solutions to the positions. Rather, the author seamlessly transitions from a solution to the puzzle to a full annotation of the famous game that the puzzle was taken from. So not only do you get a fantastic selection of positional puzzles in this book, you also get GM analysis of a set of instructive games played by the best players of the past two centuries.10/10. You get out what you put into this book.

I love strategic exercises! I am tired of the overabundance of tactical puzzles. You can get tactical puzzles ANYWHERE! I have another strategic book, "modern chess planning" by Grivas, and I was worried that I'd run out of strategic puzzles; this book will hold me over for awhile! I highly recommend it. When you miss a problem you can read the answer and get educated on the position and what type of considerations you should be making. Each puzzle should slightly improve your game.

The book is very well organized. For example, the solution pages are very detailed. The entire game is given and the reasoning behind the continuation is explained. I like the fact that the solutions have diagrams to illustrate the game continuation. When you turn the page the new page will usually have a diagram which is very helpful when visualising the variation. Highly recommended. I am rated a little above 2000 and I am getting about five out of ten of the puzzles.

I learned what to look for in a position to obtain a advantage

This book contains some very challenging chess problems and instead of looking for specific tactics, you are often trying to find a way to gain a subtle, but concrete advantage. However, even after seeing the solutions to some of the problems, it is not always clear why the achieved position is superior. Furthermore, the problems are not organized into themes, so it is very difficult to learn any useful strategic patterns from the text.It is possible that the book is simply too challenging for someone at my level (~1300 USCF) and is designed for much more experienced players.I originally purchased the book as a Chessable course and found that too difficult. I bought the hard copy hoping that it would be organized differently or provide more context. I was disappointed.

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I love this book. I found it Really helpful.

Very good book for teaching my students.

I liked everything about it.You need to work hard one by one position.Studying chess the right way is not easy as they say.A serious stuff....