Making the right strategic decisions is one of the most difficult tasks at the chessboard. But how can we enhance our strategic understanding and methodical play?

For the present video course Rustam has carefully selected games from his own practice which are dominated by positional and strategic considerations, clarifying in extensive annotations which ideas the decisions of the Grandmasters are based upon. He shows how the game plan is made already in the first moves of the opening and then - in the ideal case - purposefully continued step by step in the middlegame. At the end of this entertaining and practically relevant course, you will be familiar with many positional elements like open lines, strong and weak squares, pawn chains, isolated pawns, space advantage, pawn majorities, hanging pawns, etc. - making you ready to use them for your own play. Video running time: 3:54 min.

Rustam Kasimdzhanov was born in 1979, and the Grandmaster from Uzbekistan has for many years been known as a very strong and imaginative player. However, in 2004 Rustam Kasimdzhanov shocked the chess world by winning the FIDE world chess championship title, beating a string of world-class players like Ivanchuk, Grischuk, Topalov and Adams in the process.

System requirements: Pentium-Processor at 300 Mhz or higher, 64 MB RAM, Windows XP, Windows Vista, DVD drive, mouse, soundcard.