This is the most positional understanding you'll need to play OK chess

Recently, there's been a lot of talking about positional understanding (as well as openings), and how they're important.

Yeah, tactics flow from a superior position, but really, you only need a *basic* positional understanding, really just easy rules, and you'll easily get 98%+ in all of the ranking on online chess, and probably high class B - low class A OTB rating (at minimum) if you focus on tactical skills. 

What you really need to do is listen carefully to those basic positional ideas, and stop breaking them by considering too many other less important things. 

Maybe to become titled or advance further, you need more intricate, specific, positional skills (in fact, you probably do), but the level is estimated way too low for this to start being of any effect. 

Here are 2 games I played in the petroff's defense, the boring variation (I like to play 4.Nxf7 or 5.Nc3), where I just followed basic principles, didn't do anything special, and won quickly. I can tell you easily the opponent's positional mistakes - actually, they were all very basic. 

In fact, I didn't think anymore than I did in the annotations really - no time to think. I just made sure my moves were tactically safe, and tried to take advantage of opponent's tactics. I even made some pretty obvious mistakes (like missing Nxd5) yet by just playing basic positional principles, everything wasn't that hard.

A GM can annotate a GM game and make all the good moves sound obvious... more importantly, I can read the annotations and really believe the moves are obvious.

That's sort of an illusion though... I think all reasonably experienced players can find good moves in nearly all positions. That's not what makes chess hard. What makes it hard is bad moves look good too.

So when you give some 1 line explanation like "development" or "attacking the center" that's not what's holding players back. They see those moves too. It's that they play bad moves and give the same rational (as a silly example, 1.Nh3 development). What experience and study does, is essentially blind you to those bad moves.

All this to say, Although the explanations make sense to you, I don't think they're necessarily useful to your target audience.

Unfortunately, what you said makes sense, now that I look at it. 

At the same time, these things (choosing between several reasonable alternatives) can't be fixed with learning advanced positional concepts. It's just experience, I guess. 

The basic positional concepts still hold, of course - better to follow them than to not.

The principal of material lol..

also,chess is vry complex game.it's good to remember.

The most important principle!

The problem with this kind of approach is that you plateau at about 1700-1800, and need almost complete reprogramming to break that sort of level.

Having said that, there's a strong argument that novices should be taught this way (I think they call it the "lies to children" approach in education circles, or something like that?), and that the reprogramming is a process that happens as the player develops, rather than an event. 

Perhaps you're right, although I'd like to see more players get to 1700-1800 in the first place. 

I probably had some "reprogramming" before I started training with this kind of approach, because I was very aware of the vast amount of specific knowledge available, and more or less ignored it for tactics/calculation practice, although I'm starting to train on more advanced positional topics as of now.

I agree tactics are the most important part of chess and, Cherub, you're certainly a very knowledgeable and good player I admire, but I think you're giving tactics too much credit here.

For example, in your first game you say you developed your Rook to e1.  First of all "develop" is a strategy (positional stuff), not a tactic. Secondly, I would say you had already developed that rook to f1 where it guarded the often-attacked f2 square. You then moved the Rook to e1 because it is good strategy to control open files with a Rook.

Petroff's Defense tends to lead to less-strategy, more-tactics games, but I'm sure if we look through your games we can find cases where you moved a Knight to a 4th or 5th rank outpost because it's good strategy or you used a Bishop to keep your opponent's King from Castling because it's good strategy to keep him wide-open in the middle or you began shifting pieces to the Queenside rather than the Kingside, or vice-versa, because you saw you could place more power there than your opponent and it's good strategy to attack where you have an imbalance.

Personally, I'm hoping to see tactics faster, but I also realize I need work on strategy as well.

I like your posts, you usually have something interesting to contribute

The Igor Smirnov approach.  I know he gets blasted for how cheesey his ads are, but his stuff is very informative.  He breaks things down into simple explanations as the OP points out.  

Igor Smirnov is the reason I went from 1400 to almost 1900 in about 9 months while having school. After that, I still studied him, but I started studying with other things, since his very basic approach in GM Secrets positional-wise was good, but I needed something more nuanced. 

Now that I'm getting back into serious chess, I'm redoing some of the courses from him that I've bought as part of my training. 

And when I look at GM games, often they make very unnatural-looking moves that are based on concrete variation considerations, and that can't be directly explained with general principles. 

It's true that many of their moves, a lot more than I could find probably, could be made to sound simply, but it's definitely not like my moves in my games.

I have some of his programs.  As with most things chess, i havent done any indpeth chess study, but what i have looked at i really like.