middlegames - tag
How do you get better at playing middlegames? There is no simple answer; it has to be a complex study. To improve your middlegame play, you should work on your tactics, calculation, positional understanding, planning, and many other things. If there are any shortcuts, it is probably to study typical pawn structures.
Chess Middlegames can’t be memorized. Many ways can help improve at chess, but most players tend to prefer studying openings. It is the easiest way indeed: the exact moves you prepare at home are likely to happen in one of your future games. With chess middlegames, it is more complicated. It is impossible to predict […]
An early n4 move by White and n5 by Black, followed by undermining pawn moves in the adjacent files—and there it is, the true “pride and sorrow” of chess. Not only can it win you games like a rockstar, it can also lose you games like mere simpletons!
It is not a secret that passed pawns are one of the most powerful weapons on the board. A passed pawn can promote into a queen and this is something that happens in endgames more than often. But in middlegames, things are usually a bit different. When there are many inhabitants on the board the […]
Today we are going to study a very interesting and important topic, how to win in opposite side castling positions. And one of the best chess players to learn from is indeed… Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (MVL). Maxime is one of the most aggressive of the super-GMs. With the peak Elo of 2819, he definitely knows a […]
It is never a good idea to disobey chess principles. Although we live in modern days, where the powerful engines have taught us that in chess the principles or “rules” are not always mandatory, for a human it’s helpful to have an understandable guide on how to play the opening phase. Therefore, the principles are […]
Equal Chess Positions: The engines really don’t care about us, humans, who have to play a position that they happily evaluate as equal. Feed it a symmetrical position with equal material and no apparent weaknesses and it will tell you it is “just equal,” sometimes even a “dead draw.”
Positions with the isolated pawn are often misunderstood, which many times leads to the fear of playing this type of position. The common concept is that the isolated pawn is a weakness (and it is!) and we know that we should avoid creating weaknesses in our position. This general idea is correct, but there are […]
Unexpected Moves: “I can’t play this move because my opponent can capture it” – How many times have you heard a chess player say this? How many times have you said it yourself? There are many positions where we believe a move is not possible by default though. Our subconscious tells us that it is […]
“I don’t believe in fortresses.” – Magnus Carlsen I understand Carlsen’s famous quote, not at face value, but rather as an understanding of chess’s nearly infinite possibilities. Carlsen himself has shown in a lot of his games and how seemingly easily drawn games can be won by finding hidden resources in the position. Still, fortresses […]
