How can I improve positional chess? I keep losing because I get myself into a bad position

Two ideas to consider:

1. Generally, the stronger the player the more of their thinking time spent on trying to understand what their opponent is threatening, aiming for, trying to achieve, even mental & emotional state. This comes with practice so try to do it more and you'll find you miss opponents threats less.

2. When less experienced people talk about not understanding positional chess, it is often like preSocratics talking about atomic theory: they dont know the component parts that combine. As a complete beginner I read 'Point count chess' and it (at least) had a list of atoms of positional evaluation (with a try to give each a value like 1/3 pawn). If you list what Horowitz awards points to & understand their meaning, you will at least know the atoms of positional chess.

Bill

ps-- 'Point count chess' is not a great book, and importing a bridge bidding system to chess generally failed, but it is extremely reductive which is helpful for beginners.

One should perhaps be warned that the Horowitz book is in descriptive (P-K4) notation, whereas the Batsford edition of the Chernev book is in the now-standard algebraic (e4) notation.

@spectraltheory said in #1:

I don't think my problem is tactical chess, as my puzzle rating here is around 1700.

Your problem cleary is time. Why in the world would you play blitz when you need around 5 minutes to solve a single move? This is your mistake. Play classical and no blitz. Blitz is made for fun and for masters, even I try to stay away from it. Once you've played 50 classical games where you USED YOUR FULL TIME - get back to me. When you are still unsatisfied with your result (I predict you can have a rating of at least 1300-1500) you can come back to me and I teach you to reach 1700 or more.

I looked at your games, you have a lot of blunder in 1, even if you improve your positional chess any blunder in 1 will cost you the game.

This is tactic, your 1700 is what you can do when there is plenty of time to analyze and you're focusing on trying to find the best move, it's not what you can do in a blitz game.

So I think maybe you should either play longer games so that you always have time to fully analyze the position or improve your tactic to a level where you see those blunders in 1 instantaneously.

Only experience will fix this.

I play way too much yes but I could have 140 games in a matter of two or three weeks no problem. (In bullet or ultra one day is enough but let's not go there!).
When I started at your level I played 10min. rapid it's fun enough and you have time to breathe. Classical is slow (which tends to discourage and make you lose focus) and blitz is a lot of instinct you don't have yet.

It is simple stop playing like a fish!

@kindaspongey said in #49:

"Fear is the mind-killer."
During those ~9 seconds, did you settle on anything specific as a suitable reaction after 4 exf5 e4 ? Did you think about whether or not there would have been anything specific to fear after 4 d3 fxe4 5 dxe4 or 4 d4 fxe4 5 Nxe5 ?

"You must learn to govern your passions. They will be your undoing."
Tactical practice could help you to be aware of opportunities to take advantage of a pinned piece.

"I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."
Tactical practice (and a willingness to use more time for searching) could help you to notice attacking opportunities.

Are you aware that, after 9 Qh5+ g6 10 Nxg6, 10...Qxg6 would also have been possible? Tactical practice could help you to develop the habit of checking for such details.

Was there a reason to consider that more important than king-safety and the activity of the pieces that were still on their home squares?

To get the queen to h5 again, you would have to get the g4 pawn out of the way, and, in the meantime, if you do not do something about the 13...cxd4 danger, you will be losing a knight.
14 f4 worsened king safety while leaving a knight to its fate.

"Try not. Do or do not. There is no try."
The attack-from-another-side would not have got very far if Rolauten had reacted with 14...exf3.

So what is my "biggest issue"?

@swimmerBill said in #51:

... As a complete beginner I read 'Point count chess' and it (at least) had a list of atoms of positional evaluation (with a try to give each a value like 1/3 pawn). If you list what Horowitz awards points to & understand their meaning, you will at least know the atoms of positional chess. ... 'Point count chess' is not a great book, and importing a bridge bidding system to chess generally failed, but it is extremely reductive which is helpful for beginners.
About a year ago, there was a discussion of that book and some others at https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/how-to-strategize . The discussion of the Horowitz book began with #16.

@spectraltheory said in #56:

So what is my "biggest issue"?
I am not sure how to measure the size of an issue. I suppose that one could contemplate giving attention to only one issue and ignoring all the others. One could then wonder which one-issue choice would do the most good. I think that that would be a very bad plan. The neglect of all other issues would limit the benefit of the one-issue attention. The amount of benefit would depend on the choice of the one issue, and also depend on the amount of improvement that would take place on the other issues while you ignore them. There is no way to know that.
httpscolon//lichess.org/FQfZFcX8
Some current unknowns:
During the ~9 seconds that you thought after 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bc4 f5, did you have any specific idea about what you would have done after 4 exf5 e4 ? Did you consider 4 d3 and 4 d4 and decide that 4 d3 fxe4 5 dxe4 and 4 d4 fxe4 5 Nxe5 were both more scary than 4 exf5 e4 ?
After 4 exf5 d5 5 Bb5 e4 6 Bxc6+ bxc6 7 Ne5 Qd6 8 d4 Bxf5 9 Qh5+ g6 10 Qd1 c5, did you consider doing something about king-safety or the activity of the pieces that were still on their home squares?
After 11 g4 Be6 12 Nc3 Bg7, were you aware that the choice, 13 h4, would lose a knight?
If you insist on being a one-issue improver, I suppose that the best guess is that tactical practice should be the choice. However, improving might be much more effective if, from time to time, you take a break from one activity to do something else. Beginner books often try to help the reader in multiple areas.

Reading beyond where you can't benefit in immediate improvement or advantage, can still be good to raise awareness of what king of questions are out there, and what kind of theories try to answer, them. It might give you future tools or the words to keep having clues when reading above your head or discussing above your head.

sometimes heads up, helps the on the nose, but it takes a while to reap the benefits. And we are not all built the same way, in approaching the unknown that is supposed to be knowable, or more knowable than currently understood.

I discovered the long term benefit of above my head late in life, but long ago. It has proven to have an exponential long term benefit in capturing insights from less experience.. (or more how to navigate experience around uncertainty and digested intuition). No translations. i am tired.

"... everyone is different, so what works for one person may likely fail with another ..." - NM Dan Heisman (2002)
web.archive.org/web/20140627084053/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman19.pdf
"... Just because a book contains lots of information that you don’t know, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be extremely helpful in making you better at this point in your chess development. ..." - NM Dan Heisman (2001)
web.archive.org/web/20140626180930/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman06.pdf
"... The books that are most highly thought of are not necessarily the most useful. Go with those that you find to be readable. ..." - GM Nigel Davies (2010)