What you will learn:

• Open Centre. The structure with an open center (more specifically, open c- and d-files) arises in a wide range of openings when none of the players is interested in keeping an Isolani or hanging pawns. The play has a certain drawish tendency, as mass exchanges along the open files are hard to avoid, but everything depends on concrete details. With the board crowded with pieces, exchanges do not always take place automatically.
• Kingside Majority. When putting on paper his ensemble of positional ideas, named by himself “The new school”, Wilhelm Steinitz made an important discovery regarding pawn majorities. In the endgame, a queenside majority was likely to yield an advantage, due to the possibility of creating an outside passed pawn.
• Black Releases the Tension with …dxc4. Most of the games examined in the previous two sections have passed through this structure. By carrying out …c5 or …e5 at an early stage, Black transposed to different structures, though. We will here deal with those cases when the structure does not suffer such early modifications.