The Complete Guide to Positional Chess: Patterns, Not Laws

The official subtitle on Udemy lists the course’s five themes: “Keeping Control, Small Gradual Improvements, Manage Imbalances, Pawn Structures and Endgames.” Gavriel starts from Tartakower’s famous split — tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do, strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do — and calls positional play “the missing jigsaw piece” for players who have studied tactics and attacking chess but stall in quiet positions. The goal is to collect “small wins”: a better piece, a fixed weakness, a safer king, an extra tempo.

The Complete Guide to Positional Chess is built in three layers of model games. First British GM Michael Adams, whom Gavriel has watched and played in person — including a game at the 1993 Lloyds Bank Masters; then Anatoly Karpov; then Aron Nimzowitsch and the ideas of My System. Capablanca, Steinitz, Kramnik and others appear where a pattern needs them, and the games are checked with modern neural-network engines. It sits well beside Gavriel’s attacking course with Igor Smirnov, Crushing the King, and the rest of our chess courses list.

What the Guide Actually Teaches

Steinitz, prevention and the habit of small wins

The first 20 videos are a course in themselves: Steinitz’s accumulation of advantages, why prevention is part of accumulating them, whether positional play is “largely about control”, and when you should attack instead. One lecture is a warning against following rules too hard. Gavriel admits that after first reading My System he lost “a series of games where I had terrible pawn structures” — the lesson being to separate an exploitable weakness from one that only looks bad.

Control: crushing counterplay before it starts

Ten sections on control patterns form the backbone of the Complete Guide to Positional Chess. Karpov vs Bukic (1978) shows “lock and key” prevention: a4 against …b5, then Bg5 and Bf3 so that Black’s freeing …d5 break in a Najdorf never quite works. Adams tames the Marshall Gambit with d3, simplifies whenever the queens can come off, and wins quietly. The positional-zugzwang section includes two classics — Alekhine vs Nimzowitsch, San Remo 1930, and Sämisch vs Nimzowitsch, the “Immortal Zugzwang”.

Imbalances and positional sacrifices

Positional players do sacrifice, and Section 12 proves it with twelve games. The centrepiece is “Karpov’s Immortal” against Topalov at Linares 1994, with a double exchange sacrifice, alongside Karpov pawn sacrifices against Kramnik, Yusupov and Sax, and Adams’ positional queen sacrifice on weak dark squares. For a full course on that theme, see Positional Sacrifices Vol. 1: Pawns by IM Kostya Kavutskiy.

Structures, weapons and endings

The structure sections cover the isolated queen’s pawn (four Karpov games, two of them against Spassky), weak colour complexes, undermining, pawn breaks, provoking weaknesses in the Hedgehog and the classic minority attack, with Capablanca vs Golombek among the examples. The “weapon” patterns cover outposts, pins, opposite-coloured bishops, thorn pawns — starting from Karpov vs Kamsky in their 1996 FIDE title match — and a 13-video section on passed-pawn battles — the largest section after the introduction.

Crowning the position — only when it is safe

The last pattern families are about turning a good position into a win: relative king safety, tempo gains that make a temporary edge permanent, punishing inaccuracies, and “crowning” king attacks played only when the risk is very low. The conclusion ties it to the Art of War idea Gavriel quotes throughout — put yourself beyond defeat before going on to the attack — and to the observation that a positional player’s engine graph often looks like “a mountain climb in a controlled manner”. There is even one of Gavriel’s own games against Adams, used as an example of weaknesses piling up.

Complete Guide to Positional Chess: Course Index

All 184 videos of the Complete Guide to Positional Chess are grouped below into ten parts by pattern family. Runtimes come from the course files; game titles are cleaned up from the original lecture names.

Who Should Take the Complete Guide to Positional Chess

• Improving players who know tactics but drift in quiet positions with “nothing to do”.
• Fans of Karpov and Adams who want dozens of their games explained by theme, not by date.
• Players who learn by volume — the 184 lessons of the Complete Guide to Positional Chess form a pattern library to dip into for months.
• Caro-Kann, Sicilian and Ruy Lopez players — Adams’ and Karpov’s games show the strategic side of all three openings.

If you want a compact system you can finish in a weekend, this is the wrong format. FM Charlie Storey’s Positional Chess Skills covers the core ideas in under six hours, and Karpov’s Positional Style Revealed focuses on one world champion.

Questions Before You Start

Is this positional course really suitable for beginners?

The official page lists beginner to intermediate players and only asks that you know how the pieces move. In practice the introduction is accessible to anyone, while the game sections assume you can follow master games at speed. Advanced beginners and club players will get the most from it.

Is the Complete Guide to Positional Chess the same course as on Udemy?

Yes, it is the Udemy course by Tryfon Gavriel. The Udemy page currently lists 195 lectures and 39h 26m, partly because some lectures are text pages and the author says he keeps adding games; this package contains 184 videos totalling 38h 26m.

What do I download, and how is it delivered?

184 MP4 lessons in 44 folders, a PGN of the course games and the quotation pages — 44.9 GB in total. Digital files. Crypto payment only. Fast delivery is handled manually after payment confirmation. Download links remain available for 7 days; save your files locally.