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u/commentor_of_things 11d ago
depends how much you know about positional chess already. on the upper end there is the sokolov middlegame books, rio's structures book, an aagaard's grandmaster books, although you really want to make sure you have the fundamentals down before tackling upper end positional/strategy book.
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u/Living_Ad_5260 11d ago
What do you mean by "positional book"? What have you read before?
An interesting selection in increasing difficult:
* Most Instructive Chess Games Ever Played - on the easy side, but some of the winning plans are fascinating.
* Reassess Your Chess
* Chess Training for Post-Beginners - 129 game fragments on themes like "Pieces cut off from play", "Open Files", "Strong and weak squares", "weak complexes and weak diagonals", "pawn majority on the queenside", "strength of the passed pawn", "weak pawns", "king in the middle", "good knight v bad bishop", "good bishop v bad knight", "bishop pair in the endgame", "bishop pair in the middlegame".
* Grandmaster Chess Strategy - based on the games of Ulf Andersson, chapters are on themes like "Playing against two weaknesses", "advantage in space", "control of the d file", "prophylaxis", "playing against the isolated pawn", "bishop pair", "exchange of bishop for knight", "fighting against the hedgehog", "positional exchange sacrifice", "positional queen sacrifice", "art of defence", "the catalan endgame", "rook endgames", "rook and minor piece", "minor piece endings"
* Techniques of Positional Play - 45 chapters of usually 10 examples per chapter on common positional mini-plans.
* Chess Structures: Flores Rios on pawn structures
* Chess Imbalances: Flores Rios on how to win with a structural positional advantage.
* Mastering Chess Strategy - a large number of interesting game fragments
There are also puzzle books containing positional puzzles. Among these are
* Drill Your Chess Strategy 1 + 2
* Woodpecker Method 2
Another approach is to look at the games of an individual player. The botvinnik chess school always recommended review of Rubinstein games and https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1054421 is a good set based on a recent book.
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u/DrNotReallyStrange 10d ago
Must read is "Positional Decision Making" by Boris Gelfand. It's not really a "teaching" book, but of course it's highly educational, especially if you are a 1.d4 kind of person (or 1.Nf3, or 1.c4)
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u/Numerot 11d ago
Rios's books (Chess Imbalances, Chess Structures) are IMO great, though very intensive, Chess Imbalances has disgusting AI "art" in it and some people don't like some parts of Chess Structures. Anything to do with openings
Mastering Chess Strategy is just a great collection of examples, GM Prep: Positional Play is also probably appropriate.
Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy and Chess Strategy in Action are amazing books if the subject matter (unintuitive modern positional ideas) is interesting to you. They're not explicitly written as learning material, or at least the author claims they aren't, but they work very well for that purpose IMO.