Capablanca's SIMPLEST Chess Positional Strategy To Win Easily

He was called the invincible chess machine when chess computers did not yet exist. He was sort of Magno Carlos from Cuba. Today you are going to learn the four main rules of positional play from the legendary José Capablanca. Capablanca is playing right here against Kremborg, one of the top US players at the time. Initially we've got standard development and here we go with the London system. This stuff is really old. The game is from 1910, just think about this. Not many people know, but after the devil convinced people to try out the forbidden fruit, he then taught them the London system. Anyways, let's continue. So we're gonna use this game as a positional master class, because this is a very intricate subject, but Capablanca had such a simple, crisp, clear positional style, that he is really the best guy to learn this from. Here Black goes Bishop d6. And by the way, let me ask you this question. There is this concept of a bad Bishop, right? If you've got the central pawn chain on dark squares, this Bishop is bad. Is that true or not? What do you think? Now, my question is a little bit tricky, because although, yeah, it's kind of considered to be bad, but it's really true only if the Bishop stands behind the pawn wall and it can get out, and then it's indeed passive, it doesn't have many squares to go to. However, if the Bishop is in front of the pawn chain, it is not really restricted, and you can't really say that it's a bad Bishop. It's pretty good, it controls a lot of good squares this way, and therefore Bishop d6 makes total sense for Black. They're not trading off a bad Bishop, it's a very active Bishop. Now, here Capo just traded off Bishops, and that is also something very interesting about his style. He was very simple down to earth, compared to modern pros, who use computers and often play counterintuitive, intricate, complex stuff. For example, modern theory suggests that Bg3 is a little bit more precise, because after the trade, Black can possibly push e5 at some point, or even straight away, and it is supposed to be good for Black. Now, Capomlanca was known for not studying opening theory, not being willing to calculate a lot of variations, not being willing to engage in complex tactical battles, and really, he was just relying on his superior positional understanding, and very few positional rules that he consistently followed, which makes it a really great example, once again, for us to model, at least to some extent. So here he goes Nd2, and Black goes indeed e5. Pretty good move. Usually, in the London system, if Black manages to play e5, they're doing really well, because now the pawn is intending to go forward. This Bishop is now active after the trade in the center. Now Black is active, and after one more trade, we can see that Black has no problems. They've got a really good position. It's about equal. White is even slightly more passive. Here, most players would probably just go ahead and castle, but here's the first rule. Attacking moves are the best. Now, how do you find an attacking move? It's a move that you play on opponent's side of the board that creates a threat. And here, White played Bb5+, check. By the way, does that violate the rule of not moving the same piece twice in an opening? What do you think? Well, technically, it does. However, White does not waste time, because Black has to cover their king. Therefore, they can't just develop. They have to waste time defending their king. And therefore, Bb5 is okay for White here. It's actually a good one. Now Black needs to cover. Now if White traded, that would be perfectly fine. That would push the knight backwards, and it's good for White. Whenever you move pieces forward, it's good. If your opponent is moving his pieces backward, it's still good for you. Therefore, that would be fine. But Kevin Lange decided to increase the pressure by going Qa4, putting more pressure down this diagonal. And Black can't really trade, as after the trade, his king will be in check, and it would not feel good for Black. Therefore, he retreated his queen back to c7 to defend the bishop. And you can see that White's operation was quite successful. He put a little bit of pressure on Black and forced Black to move his queen back. Now at this point, he castled queenside. There is also an interesting point here. Why did he castle queenside and not kingside? Now, all things equal. Castling queenside is actually a little bit stronger, because your rook gets to an open file and can start doing something, while when you castle kingside, you only put your king to safety. So that's the difference. So all things equal, castling queenside is a little bit more precise. However, in this case, I would say that it probably wasn't really the case, as we can't say that all things are equal here. When you castle queenside, your king is more exposed because of this pawn, and therefore, castling kingside would be a safer option. Anyway, that still makes sense. And again, Kevin Blanca was not about finding super precise and accurate moves. He was about playing consistently good chess, right? And he's doing just that. Now Black castles, and at this point, the bishop is no longer pinned to the king. Therefore, Kevin Blanca trades off material. Now there's another important point here. A lot of amateurs hesitate to go in an endgame, because they don't know what to do there. However, Kevin Blanca was always willing to trade pieces, play very simple chess, and outplay their opponents in an endgame. Quite similar to Carlsen. I'd say Carlsen is also known for defeating his opponents in equal endgames, and Kevin was known for the same thing. Now, you can do the same thing, and that's good news, because during this game, you will learn the single main rule to play endgame well, and your opponents don't know it. Therefore, you can trade off pieces, and although the position seems equal, you can still outplay them. Now, here Black correctly captured by the knight. There was also a very interesting variation here, that trading with queens would actually be bad for Black. Because here, White has a very strong move Ne4, which is super counterintuitive. Now, here's the thing. If White tries to use this rook to hit this pawn, the most natural move to play would be something like Nf3 just to open this file. But then Black can just play symmetrically Nf6, guard the pawn, and everything's good for Black. Therefore, White can play a really deep move Ne4. And now, notice that not only we hit this pawn, but we take away this square from the Black knight. Plus, we put pressure down this pawn. Therefore, Black can't defend this pawn, and if they capture this knight, we're going to capture theirs. But now, our rook is super active, putting pressure across the 7th rank. We're controlling the only open file, and that should be winning for White. In reality, Black played the correct move Nxd7, and here White goes Nf3, relocating a knight into a better position, plus opening a diagonal for the rook. And Kavalanka was known for always putting his pieces to active positions, and that is the first rule of positional play. Always make sure that all your pieces are active. By the way, what does it mean for a piece to be active? It means that it should control a lot of squares. For instance, previously, when the knight was standing on d2, this rook was passive. It did not control much of valuable squares, only these squares across the first rank, which doesn't mean much. But once we move the knight off the way, now the rook is standing on the semi-open file, it is putting pressure. Similar thing could be said about the knight. When the knight was back there on d2, you see that it didn't have much prospects. A lot of the forward squares were taken away by Black. But once the knight is here, it is more advanced, and it does control a bunch of squares in the center and forward direction. Therefore, typically, you need to move your pieces into the center and forward direction, and again, activity is just making sure that they have a lot of squares to go to. Right now, Black needs to guard this pawn. He could have done that by just moving the knight, and that would be the best choice for Black. However, instead, he noticed that there is this pressure, there is also pressure across this diagonal, and he decided to neutralize it by going Qc6, which is a very instructive error. By the way, the Black player was very strong. He drew against Frank Marshall, who was the US champion at the time. So we're talking about the master-level player here, who was one of the best at the time. So what's wrong with this move, Qc6? Well, it allows White to trade queens, which is always a bad idea against Casablanca. Just like nowadays, it's always a bad idea against Carlsen to go into an endgame. But objectively, it also creates these doubled pawns, plus this isolated pawn on a7. Now, pawns are strong when they've got this pawn chain, where they all support each other, but when pawns are disrupted, they become isolated and weak, and potential targets for your opponent. However, in this position, you may be arguing, like, but so what? Like, there is no way at all for White to attack these pawns anyhow. So what's the problem? I think it's very interesting to see what Carlsen said about Capablanca, because Capablanca was kind of known for winning absolutely equal endgames, but Carlsen said that it's not quite true. He gained some advantages going into the endgame that almost only he could appreciate. Basically, what Carlsen is saying here is that those endgames were not really equal, because Capablanca understood positional advantages, he accumulated them throughout the middle game, and he only took advantage of them in an endgame, while his opponents were rather clueless of what's going on here. And then he made another interesting confession. Probably some of the same can be said for me. All right, back to the game. At this point, Capablanca played knight to d2, back to where it started from, and it looks a little bit awkward, because just a move ago, we talked about a good idea of moving the knight forward. So why did he play that move? Well, Igazki wanted to potentially prepare one of these pawn breakthroughs to attack those vulnerable pawns. It was still unnecessary, because White could potentially attack these pawns straight away. This pawn on the d-file is actually pinned, and White could attack it by going c4 or maybe e4, and since the pawn is attacked and pinned, Black would need to do something. Maybe to defend it, or maybe to take here, and then with God into this file, we capture here, he takes, you know, somewhere here on f3, and it leads to complications. So basically, give me a second. Yeah, I got the arrows right. If you dislike calculating those, you know, complex variations, congratulations, you've got something in common with the genius. Capablanca didn't like it as well, and he played an inferior move, N2d2, just to simplify stuff for him and to avoid any calculations. And, you know, Capablanca was undefeated for 8 years. Within that time frame, he played the World Championship match against Lasker, and Capablanca also won, so this simple style was still deadly effective. Anyways, let's continue. Black played Ne5. How do you play here? This brings us to the next rule of Capablanca's play. Always watch over opponent's threats. Ne5 is not just centralizing the knight, it creates a threat of Nd3+, and from there, he can capture his pawn f2 with yet another f4. Therefore, Capablanca played Kc2. Although Capablanca did not always play the best moves, he was always careful. He always asked himself, what does my opponent want to do to make sure he doesn't blunder? And he plays consistently well, even if it's not brilliant, but consistently well. Now, Black goes c4, potentially preparing the same entering of the knight to d3. From there, the knight would attack this pawn on f2, and guess what Capablanca does? He just defends this pawn, pretty passively, but again, he's just very, very accurate. He wants to make sure that this knight doesn't go there, and doesn't capture this pawn. Black played f5, potentially getting ready to play f4, and breaking through on the kingside. Here, Capablanca plays Nf3, which brings us to the third rule of Capablanca's positional chess. Neutralize opponent's pieces on your side of the board. Now, if you look at this position, let me take this move back. We've got this pawn on White's side of the board, right? I'm talking about these four first ranks, the White's half of the board, and also this knight, which is ready to jump to d3, deep into White's territory. Now, that is annoying. Therefore, whenever you see, you know, situations like that, it always makes sense to trade off or neutralize opponent's pieces or pawns on your side of the board. It's just prudent to do that. Instead of waiting for your opponent to play Nd3, then Rb8, and starting to create some real threats, it's much better to prevent this situation up front, because if there are no opponent's pieces on your side of the board at all, usually your position is safe. And Capablanca does that by going Nf3, offering an exchange of knights. Black does that, and again, maybe it wasn't the most precise move for White to play, because now he also doubles his pawns, but he was okay with that. Again, he wasn't about finding the most precise moves all the time. He was just about playing well, and about avoiding opponent's threats. Now, Black goes Re8, bringing his last piece into play. Now, what should White do now? Well, let's recall the first rule of positional play. Make sure your pieces are active. Now, we've got two rooks. They both are not doing too much, and Capablanca puts one of them into this central position. Black goes Rf6. Not entirely sure why, maybe he wanted to go after this pawn. Anyways, right here, what would you do next? Let's recall what we talked about just half a minute ago. Whenever you see an opponent's piece or pawn on your half of the board, you wish to neutralize it, because it always annoys you. So, here we've got this pawn that controls some squares on your side of the board, and Capablanca goes Bb3, offering the trade. Once pawns are traded, now there is nothing that potentially attacks our side of the board. The king is ready to go there, you know, and the rook now has more space to move around, and it's all pretty cool. Now, here Black plays Kf7, because in an endgame, your king becomes an active piece, and it makes sense to centralize this, just like you do it with any other piece that you have. At this point, White does the same. Kd3, improving position of his king. Black goes Re7, and gets just covering up his position just in case. And now, what do you do? Same rule. Make sure your every piece is active. Now, our rook is pretty active right here. We centralize the king. These two are doing a good job. We've got only one piece which is doing nothing, and therefore, you need to put it into a better square. What would be a better square for a rook? Rooks love open files, or at least semi-open files. Therefore, you probably wish to put it either here or here. But putting it to the A file makes more sense, as this pawn is much weaker. Now, Black's all pieces are right there on the king side. White probably cannot attack there, but this pawn on a7 is vulnerable. By the way, notice, we talked about this a little time ago, that doubling pawns on the queenside did not seem like a problem some moves ago. However, right now, Black starts suffering because of his disrupted pawns on the kingside. That is exactly what Carlsen was talking about. Opponents of Capablanca did not even realize those positional drawbacks of their position until it was too late. Now, Black goes Ke6. He also wants to centralize his king, maybe bringing it somewhere here. White goes Ra6, this time putting pressure here. Black needs to defend. He played Rc7 to cover this pawn. White goes Ra4, this time attacking the pawn once more. Once your pieces are already active and are controlling a lot of squares, the next step is to keep advancing them and start creating threats. And that is exactly what Capablanca is doing here. Now, this becomes quite unpleasant for Black because White is attacking this pawn, is putting some pressure here. The pawn is also somewhat pinned. And although Black could try to defend passively, that was probably not a good idea. And therefore, although he could play Rf7 just to defend this pawn, he didn't play this move and he was probably right. Because going there would just make Black totally passive. And White could try to enter this territory with his king, attack this pawn, maybe play b4, b5 to attack it because the pawn is pinned. And overall, Black is very passive and it's all very sad for Black. Therefore, instead, he played an interesting move, Ng5. Again, we got to give credit to Black. He was very resourceful, very strong and good player. What's the point of this move? Well, he removes this pawn from the 7th rank. So that after White captures this pawn, which Capablanca didn't play in the game, I'm just explaining why he didn't. In case of this trade, now the rook does not hit this pawn and Black can play Rh6, which would hit two birds, two pawns in our case, with one rook. So it guards the pawn on h7 and attacks White's pawn on h2. Pretty cool plan by Black. Do you think Capablanca went for those complications? You guessed it right! He didn't. He loved simple chess. He realized that this pawn is possibly in danger if Black attacks it and decided, okay, let me trade it off. So he played h4. Again, he was always very diligent, watching over his opponents' threats and stopping them. What can Black do now? Trading here is actually a pretty bad idea because that would again create more of isolated pawns. And he didn't play that move. That would be pretty bad. Now Black would have two more isolated pawn weaknesses, which White can also target. In fact, he's already putting pressure all around and Black's position is just so weak. Therefore, instead, Black played another creative move, g4, which looks bad at first as it looks like White is attacking the square twice. But in reality, Black, of course, had something in mind. His idea was that if pawns are traded, that would open up this file for the rook and again give Black some counterplay. And as you guessed it correctly, Kappa didn't go for this line. Instead, after g4, he played once again a simpler move. He just retreated, came back to e2, just defending this pawn. It also guards this pawn on f2. Therefore, the threat to this pawn is now real. Black traded right here and Kappa got exactly what he wanted. Now Black has these two extra isolated weak pawns in addition to those two on the queenside, which are already weak. In fact, Black has only one pawn, which is not in trouble, this pawn on d5. And the four other pawns are all weak and all good targets for Kappa to attack. After White neutralized Black's counterplay on the kingside, now it's time for Black to worry about this pawn on a7. Black defends it by using his rook and now White goes to e2. Again, probably a suboptimal move, generally speaking, in chess. In case you can move forward, it's usually much better than moving backward. And therefore, if you wonder about the king and where should it go, it should normally go forward. Now, why didn't Cavablanca play this move? I guess it's all the same reason. He just realized that after Kf4, Black can go here, maybe threaten something here or here and he didn't want to go into those complications. Although, objectively, it was still the strongest move to play. White could play f3 to cover up this square and now he's doing perfectly well. All of his pieces are extremely active and Black is barely holding the position. Nevertheless, going back to the actual game, he just retreated the king back. He just wants to bring it back somewhere to the center or at least right here. Again, he is choosing, even if not the strongest move, but pretty decent moves. And he's still making sure that all of his pieces are standing on good squares and the central square is a good square for a king in an endgame. Black does the same, Kd6, guarding this one and White goes b4. Maybe he wants to frighten Black with the idea of b5, taking advantage of the pin. It wasn't that dangerous, to be honest, because this pawn is already defended. But nevertheless, Black decided to stop that just in case with his rook. Now White goes h5. Again, that kind of continues the idea we talked about before. The rule number one is make sure all of your pieces are active. What do you do then? Well, then you can also take care of your pawns and make sure they're strong. You can advance them forward. Same thing with your pieces. If they're already standing on a good square, stage one is just making sure that that is achieved and stage two is to advance them even further so that they start putting pressure onto your opponent. Now here Black goes h6, which is another mistake, which is kind of unnoticed by Black. He probably was just wanting to stop this pawn somehow. However, in an endgame, pawns become the main object of an attack and that is the rule number four. A lot of players don't know what to do in an endgame because you can't effectively attack your opponent's king. You just don't have enough force to create a checkmate. But in an endgame, it's very convenient, as we can see, to attack opponent's pawns. They're immobile, easy targets for you to attack, to pick up and then to promote your own pawns into a new queen. Therefore, one should be very careful with moving pawns and here this advancement creates this g6 weakness which White is going to use in the future. Now White goes f4 to also make sure that this pawn can never move forward. By the way, it was a good idea for Black to actually push f4 themselves to create some counterplay but he didn't and now Cavablanca shuts it down by going f4 making sure that all these weaknesses are immobile and White can keep attacking them. Black goes Rg7 seeking some counterplay therefore Cavablanca moves his king away in advance making sure there are no checks. Black goes back. They have not much to do. What do you do here? Again, rule number one, make sure all of your pieces are active. What can I do here to improve his pieces? The king stands pretty well here. You could possibly advance it forward but at this point it doesn't work too well because Black can deliver a check straight away and push the king back. This rook is very well placed targeting both weaknesses but got only this rook which is not very active. It's active along the a-file but this fourth rank is blocked by the pawn. Therefore Cavablanca reroutes a rook to a better square a1. From here it attacks this pawn but also potentially the rook is ready to enter from the right side and hit the king and pawn. So Black stops that by going Rg7 himself. This time Cavablanca sees that Re4 check is no longer an option. He goes Kd4. Again, what's the purpose of this move? There is no purpose. He just wants to put his pieces to good squares. Again, he played really simple chess but it was excellent chess as well. Black goes Rg2. Looks like the rook is just going after some pawns maybe right here on the king side but don't judge a rook by its cover. The threat is Rd2, mate in one even though it's an endgame. Of course Cavablanca was careful. He played Ra2 to stop the threat and also as we have seen before whenever there is an opponent's piece on your side of the board it's always prudent to trade it off. So he goes Ra2 offering the exchange. Black goes Rg7 to provide some defense and now Cavablanca decided to move the king backwards realizing that sometimes there are those checkmate in threats along the d-file therefore he wants to cover this square. Now Black traded rooks and now he needs to do something. This pawn is still under the attack so he moved the rook right here and now Cavablanca can enter from the other side using this idea of two weaknesses. Black has so many weaknesses that it's hard to defend all of them. And now after Rg2, Re6, he goes Rg7 hit him this pawn Black tries to go back now Rg8 and again it's very unpleasant for Black. You can see that White is ready to attack this pawn or maybe this pawn or maybe deliver a check or maybe deliver that pawn. Again Black has got so many weaknesses that it's just too hard to cover them. He goes c5 offering an exchange of pawns but of course there is a much stronger way for White here. Can you find it? Yeah, White played Rg6 first trying to push the king backwards and if the king moves backwards then instead of an exchange White would just grab this pawn for nothing. Black goes Re6 but it leads to the same outcome after a pawn takes now the king is in check but he can't move away otherwise the rook would be undefended. After the king moved back Cavablanca continues delivering checks Rg7+, and then he captures this pawn on a7 and after Rc5 still in an endgame remember we attack pawns he went Rf7 now this pawn cannot be defended and Black resigned he'll be down two pawns and White keeps attacking. These were a few simple yet very effective rules of positional play from legendary Cavablanca and if you want to see my complete blueprint on positional chess check out this free masterclass right there.