Book Review: Mastering Positional Sacrifices by Merijn van Delft
One of those "Love Letters to Chess" kind of books.
I originally wrote this review for the Chessable version of the book.
First off, I adore this book, because the author clearly adores chess, particularly for its namesake: positional sacrifices; and he wants to make sure he's done all he can to infect you with its praise as well.
Consider this position. What would you play here as White?
What's a positional sacrifice? This book contrasts positional sacrifices with tactical sacrifices: you get strategic compensation of a long-term nature. You make the sacrifice, and then continue to play as if nothing had happened. I find this to be an intuitive way to understand a positional sacrifice. But we also get some examples of tactical sacrifices to boot, to further cement the difference in our minds.
This book covers multiple subjects, and could be considered in three parts: After the intro, the first four chapters are building blocks: what the sacrifice is intended to achieve: Active pieces, a pawn steamroller, weakened color complexes and diagonals; or some combination of all of these to dominate the entire position.
The next two chapters are all about thematic sacrifices: Benko Gambit, Marshall Attack, Sicilian, French, etc. These all have different pawn or exchange sacrifice ideas inherent to their DNA, and we get a nice exposition from multiple angles on the styles of play you can engage in with these openings. Even if you don't play all these lines, the information here can be invaluable in your toolkit of ideas when you're in the middle of a game. You'll start to see ideas of sacrificing your a- and b-pawns to get two semi-open files and a lot of activity (a la Benko Gambit); you'll see the power of an exchange sac on c3/c6 (a la Sicilian Defense). You'll be much more encouraged to nab that bishop with your rook since it will ruin your opponent's pawn structure and give you power on a color complex on the board. Etc.
The last three instructional chapters are less intended to train you than to awe you. How much material can you give away? Who are the best sacrificiers of all time? What can we learn from AlphaZero and Lc1? In the computer chapters the book may superficially show its age (computer chess improvement moves at the speed of yearly generational increases in computing power, it's not the author's fault). But there are still so many ideas to walk away with. Your head might be spinning, but you're bound to retain some winning or exciting idea or two for the next time you get that irresistible intuitive urge to give away material to establish some other strategic or tactical advantage.
Then you have the exercises. They're divided into four levels of difficulty. Level 1's solutions popped into my head for the most part almost instantly. Level 2 was much more difficult. By the time it's level 3 and 4, unless you're a master, you might not get it. But that's still a great part of the learning process. You don't need to get all of these right -- you just need to see the idea to see that it's possible.
Here’s the whole Bronstein game that I posted earlier. It’s amazing how with a little fortuitous cooperation by the opponent, you can create a veritable masterpiece.
Overall I give this book 5 out of 5, and the Chessable version as well. It's an excellent addition to the library, on a subject that could be discussed more and more deeply. The singular caveat in the Chessable version: in the puzzles, not every game continuation or analyzed variation is given as an "alternative" or "soft fail", meaning you might get failed for playing the "basically as good" game continuation when you were being quizzed on a variation from analysis. This should be relatively easy to fix, and it's only a slight annoyance and frustration, so I'm not docking a half-star, but I wouldn't blame others for doing so. Hopefully the Chessable staff can resolve this issue and then I can completely remove this caveat and update my review.