How Positional Chess Play Relates to Real Life

What is positional chess play?

 Positional play is simply making sure that you improve the position of one of your pieces, whilst degrading the position of your opponent's pieces. It means that every move you make must be constructive in trying to control the center of the board to open up as many moves as possible or trying to move your attacking pieces to places which put pressure on the opponent to make mistakes. In a chess game on chess.com, there is a side bar which determines whether a move is a blunder, mistake, book move, good, excellent or perfect. Perfect moves are ones which sufficiently protect your pieces or put the opponent under an frustrating amount of pressure. For example, you may move your bishop from the back row to the middle of the board as that opens up diagonal attacking options centrally and can also prevent the advance of some of their pieces. There is also a move where the pieces back up other pieces, for example a queen placed next to your opponent's king to get him in check, with a castle positioned behind the queen so that the king cannot take the queen.

In the most simplistic sense this would involve making your worst piece more active, bringing pressure to the pins, occupation of important squares, improving pawn structure or denying your opponent the opportunity to improve his position.

Positional play's lessons 

From this, we can learn that each important decision we make in life cannot be a static move such as moving a castle sideways unnecessarily, but it must be a direct positional enhancement where you are constantly putting pressure on the competition. It means we do not worry about the tactics of our opponents, but we simply acknowledge that if each move we make improves our position and worsens the position of our opponent, then good things will happen. This emphasizes structuralism whereby you realize that if all your moves are in the 'excellent' or 'perfect' range then you are going to win no matter your opponent. This provides a sense of freedom as you know that you just have to focus on positioning your pieces correctly and that is all that is required for victory.

Real life application: Investing

Positional enhancements are knowledge and reading about how to invest which leads to a direct improvement in your ability to invest better than the market. For example, you learn how to buy gold with as low a spread as possible (say 3%) by investing in Switzerland or Singapore, whereas the competition buys from the Royal Mint with a 10% spread. This 7% difference in spread is a positional advantage which you have over the market.

You might also change your strategy after reading Benjamin Graham to only buy stocks with a low price to earnings per share ratio (of say less than 20). The market may get caught up in enthusiasm of bull markets which become over-priced and buying stocks such as Tesla with a P/E ratio of 180 at the moment, which looks heavily over-priced. The positional improvement is the knowledge that you would sell over-priced stocks and buy under-priced stocks by only selecting low P/E ratio shares. You would not get caught out by the dot-com bubble where people were pouring into over-priced stocks - you would sell any tech stocks you had in the late 1990's and then look for bargains in the early 2000's after the market corrected itself. By adopting this as a policy you stick to regardless of your emotion and the enthusiasm in the market, you are statistically more likely to make higher long term returns than the market.

Real life application: Health

The positional enhancement may be that you commit to working out every day for at least half an hour and that you commit to drinking a fruit smoothie every lunch time. You might decide to eat whole foods only: meat, rice, vegetables, fruit etc. and avoid anything packaged in supermarkets: packaged meat, packaged sandwich fillers, branded sauces. Each day will give a slight improvement and over time these positional improvements in your health will add up big. Don't worry about comparing how you look compared to others, simply free yourself by acknowledging that if you make these positional improvements and stick to them, then good things will happen slowly. It also means that even if you do get ahead, you are still detaching yourself from emotion and sticking to the same structural principles that got you ahead in the first place and do not relapse - remember every move should be excellent or perfect even if you have the lead.