Strategy is something many players neglect in their training, even though it can dramatically improve your overall strength. Positional understanding often leads to faster, more reliable decisions than brute calculation or even memorization.
While there are plenty of ways to learn about positional decision-making, there aren’t many ways to practice it through puzzles like you can with tactics.
CM Can Kabadayi is here to change that with a positional puzzle workbook that doesn’t just explain principles, but trains you to apply them under real-game conditions.
The workbook is centered around four positional themes that appear in virtually every game:
➡️ Exchanging Pieces
➡️ Awakening Pieces
➡️ Burying Pieces
➡️ Multi-Purpose Moves
With nearly 200 mixed-theme puzzles from real games, you’ll sharpen your intuition to find strong moves faster.
Let’s see where you stand. How would you handle the following positions?
⬆️ Would you exchange queens here with White, or keep them on? A player who understands the connection between king safety and queen activity won’t hesitate in a situation like this one.
⬆️ Earlier in the game, Black played a positional queen sacrifice here. Now you need to find the move that brings a piece to life and enables a powerful attack. Can you see it?
⬆️ How should Black respond to the exchange offer on the e5-knight?
⬆️ White is down an exchange and …Rg8 is coming. It looks grim, but with the right evaluation, you’ll find a multi-purpose move that defends, and prepares a deadly attack at the same time.
How This Workbook Will Help You:
This workbook aims to refine your understanding until choices like the ones above feel natural. CM Can Kabadayi helps you get there with a structured, psychologically grounded method.
The workbook is organized into three clear parts:
1️⃣ Introduction: concise explanations with model positions for each theme
2️⃣ Multiple choice chapter: select between two plans
3️⃣ Three test chapters: mixed puzzles with increasing difficulty
With these three stages, you’ll build your intuition progressively. First you’ll grasp the core concepts, then practice them with a limited set of options, and finally apply them in mixed exercises where the only cues are the pieces on the board — perfect preparation for real games.
Plus, you’ll learn from memorable examples: many of the exercises are taken from the games of great players like Karpov, Kasparov, and Tal!
About the Author and His “The Art of Chess” Series
Can Kabadayi is a cognitive scientist, Candidate Master, chess coach, and one of Chessable’s most popular authors, with several award-winning courses. His outstanding talent and methodical course creation process even won him Chessable’s Author of the Year Award in 2024.
In his acclaimed The Art of Chess series, Can delivers a dedicated course for each topic covered in this workbook:
🔁 The Art of Exchanging Pieces
🌅 The Art of Awakening Pieces
🧱 The Art of Burying Pieces
🛠️ The Art of Multi-Purpose Moves
This workbook is the ideal companion to these thorough strategy courses. If you’ve studied one or more of them, it’s a must-have to consolidate, deepen, and apply your knowledge.
But the workbook also stands on its own: each theme comes with step-by-step explanations (especially helpful if you add the videos!), so you can learn and improve even if the concepts are new to you. And if you find a weak spot while practicing, you can always jump into the respective course to fill the gap.
So take this chance to improve your chess understanding with positional puzzles you won’t find anywhere else.