Book Review: 300 Most Important Chess Positions by Thomas Engqvist


 Okay straight off the bat I was like didn't Grandmaster Lev Alburt already do a book about these 300 most important positions? 



Yes, he did and this was a re-imagining of his book. So the positions and the categorisation of the positions are very different.


This works really well. If you are as busy as me, I am a fully time Fintech programmer, Co-Founder of the world's biggest grassroots chess community, and app developer and Netflix binger. So not much time. 

The question is if you study these positions will you become super strong? The answer is categorically NO, but if you get an ML (machine learning) algorithm to search for all the similar positions and you train your neural network (brain) on those positions night and day in a deep learning training system you will be unbeatable.

I can. I have a couple of hundred million master-level positions in a searchable database and I can specify each of those themes IM Thomas Engqvist has highlighted and can build a flashcard system like my original Chess Master Cube (invented in 2008) and the inspiration behind chess.com's Puzzle Rush (released in 2018).

I might write a chess app called "300" which teaches, trains and tests you on the positions but I'm not sure my last attempt at giving chess fans free apps was hijacked and made chess.com very rich with Puzzle Rush and me with no credit and my reputation in tatters.

Anyway back to the book. I'd recommend it. Buy it and get Chessbase 17 or (whatever the latest version number is by the time you read this) and use their position search to get positions for each of the 300. If you do this you'll be well on your way to mastering the game.

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