Perfect Your Piece Placement + PGN Nov 14, 2025

How Positional Play Actually Works in Practice

There are many courses to teach you where to put your pieces — in isolated exercises. But few courses teach you how to consider positional moves in the context of an ongoing game, where you have to weigh tactics and other considerations like counterplay and king safety at the same time.

GM Nikola Nestorovic’s course helps you find the right plans for your pieces amid real-game complexity. You’ll learn how to make effective positional moves, optimize each piece to reach superior positions — and convert them into game-winning tactics.

The goal is to build strong intuition for the right piece placement in any position. And the best way is to study how strong players do it in real games.

GM Nestorovic walks you through instructive games by top players like Carlsen, Nakamura and Karpov that showcase positional play in action.

Let’s see a few examples:

Magnus Carlsen – Pentala Harikrishna

The path to the ideal square isn’t always direct. Sometimes you need to clear a few obstacles to get there, and that can mean playing a counterintuitive move, like the pawn move Magnus found here. With g4!, he mobilizes his fianchetto structure with two goals in mind: control f5 and improve the knight.

It’s the kind of move you only find after identifying your piece’s best plan, evaluating your opponent’s counterplay and your king safety. And if you know how to use your pawns to improve your pieces. In the course, you’ll get a full chapter on pawn play to learn exactly that.

Another core theme is bringing your pieces into the attack through smart maneuvering and rerouting. Sometimes you’ll need several moves to reach the ideal square, but if the position allows it, that time investment is worth it and can make your attack succeed:

Oscar Panno – Raul Castelli

With the h-file open, White had real attacking potential but was missing a piece. So the knight commenced its journey. Once it reaches g4, the attack is unstoppable.

Good Piece Placement Leads to Good Tactics

In the course, you’ll revisit timeless piece principles like “rooks belong on open files,” “bishops on long diagonals.” But your study goes beyond these. You’ll practice the next step: converting good piece placement into clear, concrete tactics where your pieces work together.

When your pieces are ideally placed and you know which must spearhead the attack, you can sometimes even sacrifice heavy material to reach the target squares with the best effect:

Michal Krasenkow – Hikaru Nakamura

Note how all pieces flow into the attack almost effortlessly. A perfect illustration by Nakamura of placing your pieces for maximum effect, then exploiting the tactical chances that follow.