middlegame matters

chances are, the middlegame is where the battle is lost or won. it is quite difficult to know how best to practice this phase of the game. i have one suggestion that achieves several goals at the same time. once a week visit an online chess database (i suggest www.chesslive.de) and enter the moves from an opening you use frequently in tournament play



LESSON 1: can we remember the opening variation accurately?

after entering the opening moves, search the database for a game involving two strong players.



next change the size of the browser window so that you can't see the moves!!



ok, now we can't cheat! then begin to play through the game. when you feel that you have reached a critical position - stop and think for a few minutes. ask yourself "what would i play here?". write your move down. continue this process through the game considering options for the player of both the white and black pieces.

at this stage we've achieved some more goals. LESSON2: developing a sense for critical positions & LESSON 3: asking "what are my opponents ideas in this position?" i think that these are 2 important things we can work on to help our middlegame play.

after you've gone through the game, see how your moves compared to the moves played. how many did you guess correctly? (if you're like me, it won't be too many! and if it's a morozevich game... forget it!). ok, now go through the game with a chess engine. we don't really care how many moves we guessed right, we want to know why we chose differently. you should find that you can attribute your alternative move to one of these categories:
A) my move was tactically unsound
B) my move was too passive
C) my move was the start of an inferior plan
D) my move was better than the GM move

if you scored some D's - well done! but it's the other categories that give us something to work on.

if you scored a lot of A's then break down the type of tactics that you're missing (forks, pins etc) and how many moves ahead would you have to think to have spotted the tactic (don't feel too bad that you missed a 7 move combination!).

if you scored a lot of B's it probably means that you don't really have a plan at all. given that we started from an opening we plan to use, then it's worth getting hold of a resource (free stuff on the internet or maybe a book) that explains the ideas behind an opening.

i read somewhere, that a bad plan is better than no plan. i think there is some truth in that - but wouldn't you love to know the right plan for a given position? if you scored a lot of C's then this is an area to work on. again, resources like books and online videos can help explain the ideas behind certain openings. but ask yourself "was my plan really so bad?" if not, then well done for finding a plausible alternative. afterall, maybe the GM moves were designed to trade into a complex ending that he knew how to win and you were less sure about. a plan that's right for you can sometimes be better than the objectively best plan. but you can start to ask yourself about the type of plans you're making. is there one objective (e.g. create outpost for knight on f5) or several (outpost, trade off my bad bishop, expand on Q-side, double rooks on half-open file)? could you begin to try to add strategies into your plan? i think this type of assessment can also tell us something about our chess character (optimistic, too defensive, impatient). we often don't know much about the player sitting opposite us - so we should at least get to know ourselves a bit better.

there's a few more lessons here. LESSON 4: assess your own play & identify the areas you should work on & LESSON 5: plan a way to improve (read up on an opening, practice tactics against a computer, add some strategic goals to your planning, play differently to your normal character and see how it feels)

these are some of the things i try to do to improve. in a later post, i'll blog this for a real example and you can see my efforts, even if they're terrible. if you try this technique too - let me know how you get on. do you have other methods for improving your middlegame play? share them with us. good luck!