The Woodpecker Method 2 Positional Play by GM Axel Smith Chessable 9 Dec 2024

Struggling With Positional Play?
Master It In 7 Cycles With
The Woodpecker Method

Do you…

💥 Drift into a bad position when forcing moves fail to deliver?

💥 Hold a tactics rating of over 2000, but your actual chess rating lags by 400, 500, even 600 points?

💥 Spend hours watching YouTube videos or reading books — only for your knowledge to evaporate when sitting across an opponent?

If you answered “yes” to any these questions, you’re not alone.

The Woodpecker Method 2: Positional Play can break you out of this cycle of frustration.

It’s an immersive hands-on training course, which instills in you the intuition of a master. So you can build strong positions and convert small advantages into BIG wins — even when the flashy moves fall flat.

At the core of the course is a proven training technique, born out of necessity.

Grandmaster Axel Smith was stagnating at the 2000-2100 Elo. It’s a discouraging ceiling that continues to hold many ambitious players down. But then Smith found a way to push past this barrier.

Through intense training with the Woodpecker Method, he soared from 2093 to 2458 in just 2 years. That’s 365 Elo points — the largest leap of his career!

Since then, Smith has shared the Woodpecker Method to players all over the world. He helped countless club players and title-seekers unlock their potential. And now it’s your turn!

Here’s How The Woodpecker Method Works

Originally designed to supercharge one’s tactics, Smith adapted the original framework for positional mastery.

The process is straightforward yet rigorous:

You solve 1,000 positional exercises through 7 cycles. You cut your completion time in half each round. And by the final cycle, you take on all 1,000 exercises in a single day — sharpening your instincts to an edge through intense, focused effort.

What happens next?

You start steering your pieces to their best squares almost by reflex.

You zero in on the pawn breaks that once escaped you, opening lines and creating threats. And you carry out quiet maneuvers to shift the control firmly in your favor.

It’s pattern recognition training on steroids!

Standard spaced reviews might take a year to lock in these exercises and the positional ideas they teach. But the Woodpecker Method speeds up the process by condensing the review cycles.

So that in as little as 4 months, you’ll have developed that master-level positional intuition that knows: