Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 10:01:28 12/30/97
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The positional tests that I have seen have been tests of exceptions, where a positional rule is violated because of considerations specific to the position. So to get this right, you either have to understand the positional rule and understand that it needs to be violated, or have no understanding of the positional rule, so you don't even know you are violating it. If you have the positional knowledge, and fail to understand that you should make an exception, the tendency is to try to remove the positional knowledge in order to get the problem right. And this is typically the wrong thing to do. What needs to be done is to identify the primary positional principle that is causing the problem to fail, and to recognize that this positional principle is over-ruled for dynamic reasons (in which case this is a tactical position, kind of), or to recognize that there are secondary positional principles involved, and to properly understand the relation between all of these principles. For instance, if the solution requires you to accept a doubled isolated pawn in order to inflict a couple of backward pawns on your opponent, the right thing to do is to understand that these doubled pawns can't be exploited and those backwards pawns can be, rather than unconditionally reducing the penalty for doubled pawns and unconditionally increasing it for backward pawns. bruce
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