Transcription
You guys have told me that you have some questions about the middle game stage. I'm Grandmaster Igor spof, and I'm here to give you a complete guide on how to play the middle game, right?
Imagine that you're playing this chess game, and so far, you did everything right. You developed your pieces, you castled, you sipped your coffee. But what are you going to do next? It's the middle game stage, and it's quite confusing because there are so many options. You can literally play virtually whatever you want. You can take this bishop, you can centralize your knight, you can bring the queen or the rook somewhere, you can maybe bring the king here to solidify this one, you can push this pawn or whatever, right? So how do you pick a move?
I'm going to give you 10 specific strategies which were the most helpful for my students in order to find right moves and also avoid mistakes. All right, so here's the first one, very simple: develop your queen. So far, you've been developing your minor pieces, and therefore, now it's time for your major pieces, meaning your queen and your rooks. So, develop your queen. Usually, you should develop your queen to these central squares of the second rank, and you should just try to find a safe square. Right now, this square is taken by the pawn, therefore the choice is really between these two. So, which one is better? Well, I'd pick this one just because if you go right here, there is a potential opportunity right now or in the future that their knight is going to go there and possibly attack you, which you don't want. Therefore, I'd prefer bring the queen right here to D2. And notice that this little move already helped you in a number of different ways. You solidified your bishop, just in case. You even set up this battery so that maybe down the road you can sack your bishop right there. You also free the first rank for your rooks to move around to better squares. Therefore, a lot of things are achieved with just a single little move of the queen.
All right, let's go next. Let's say your pawn also develops their bishop, which brings us to the second, really, really common situation: to take or not to take. Now, if you're a part of the E-pawn variation, then you know the answer: to take is a mistake. Basically, do not help your opponent avoid exchanges when they give you nothing but only help your opponent, such as in this case. If you trade on F6, guess what? It doesn't really help you in any way. But what changed is this pawn advanced forward one square, and now it controls these two squares so that your knights can't ever be brought there in the future. You cannot jump with your knight forward anymore. Plus, it opened this file for their rook, and what did it give to you? Nothing, really. So avoid such trades. And here you can just play Bishop B3 if, let's say, you want to overprotect your bishop this way.
Now, sometimes you guys tell me like, it's all good, but what if my opponent watched the same video? Let's assume that. Let's assume that Black also goes Queen D8, developing their queen. What are you going to do next? Well, this brings us to the third idea, which is actually a continuation of the first one. We said that you need to develop your major pieces, your queen and rooks. You brought your queen into play, and therefore, it is time to move your rooks, especially this one which stands in the corner doing nothing. Because your kingside rook, at least, made one move. It's, it is involving castling, right? But your queenside rook is totally passive. Therefore, it definitely makes sense to bring it closer to the center so that you also start using it. Otherwise, it's kind of like you're playing without that rook at all.
All right, again, let's assume your pawn does something similar, Rook to D8. What are you going to do next? Still need to come up with some active middle game plan. In general, once you have developed your pieces, it is time for you to start going forward and creating threats. But there was a problem. Very often, there is no obvious way to attack your opponent because there are so many pawn chains that barricade the chessboard, and therefore, it makes it hard for you to somehow even move forward.
All right, so what can you do about that? There are two classical ways. The first way is to sacrifice a piece to open up his king. So, in this case, you break open his castling, and you go for this attack. Now, in this particular situation, probably this attack is not entirely sound because you don't have that many pieces into your attack besides the queen, and with correct defense, Black probably can hold on. However, if your opponent is a little bit careless, let's say they go Queen E7 just to guard this knight on F6, then after Knight to G5, you just add more attackers, and now it's getting really tough for Black. Let's say if they trade on B3, then after any move of Black, you can create this nightmare situation for them, and then it's all over.
If you don't feel like a mill-tall today, then you may go for more sound ways to develop your attack. Now, what can you do about that? There is the second way to open up a position, which is a lot more trivial. It is just to push forward your pawns and to trade them off, especially in the center of the board. So here, there is a move Pawn to D4 that comes to mind. And sure, Black does control the square as well, but you can push it through. You have a lot of pieces that support this advancement, and therefore, it is totally fine. Now you begin creating threats, and therefore your opponent will probably trade off all these pieces.
Now, at this point, you may be thinking like, "So what? We just traded a bunch of pawns and pieces, but I haven't achieved anything real." Well, yes and no, right? Now, of course, you have no specific advantage, but nevertheless, like you opened up some files for your pieces, and generally speaking, they became more active so that in the future, it's far easier for you to start creating threats. Maybe even E5 is somewhere in the near future to start putting pressure onto your opponent.
There's another question that a lot of my students have asked me about: how about your attack going for a potentially unsound attack where you can feel that probably it's not the right thing for your opponent to do? But when you're faced with such situations, especially in blitz, it's not easy to deal with it. Your king is exposed, your opponent can attack it one way or the other with some checks, bringing the knight forward, maybe bring the rook somehow, and like, it's very easy to go wrong and to lose control of the game. So what do you do here?
There's one piece of advice which helped me a lot, so hopefully it's going to help you as well. So here's the core idea: an attacker needs to outnumber a defender for his attack to be successful. And if you really understand this idea, it makes it a lot easier for you for two different reasons. First off, you stop worrying so much about defense. You realize that, okay, if there's a single piece into his attack, then it's enough for me to bring just one piece from my side to balance the situation and to keep it, you know, well defended for my side. So you can bring the queen, or you can bring the rook, and just one piece is already enough to get the job done. So you don't have to retreat all the way back and start being very passive. No, just one piece is enough. But secondly, it also just gives you a guideline of what to do, how to defend. Well, you got to bring more pieces into your defense and balance the quantity of attackers.
So here, compare these two options. I love the move Rook D3 a little bit more because this is also an attacking move, and you're not even retreating. You're actually moving your piece forward and kicking his queen away. Now, from here, the rook is ready to attack the queen or maybe to move right here in the future if it's necessary. But right now, your opponent will need to move the queen away. Let's say your opponent retreats the queen right here to H4, and what are you going to do next?
Well, there are a number of moves to choose from, and again, there is a universal rule which is applicable to perhaps 80% of positions in the middle game that you play. I call it "Victory Lap," and "LAP" in this case stands for Least Active Piece. You ask yourself, what is the least active piece that I have, and how do I activate it? In this position, it's pretty clear that all these pieces are doing something, but there is only one piece which is doing nothing at all, which is this rook on F1. And therefore, it gives you an idea that you may wish to activate it somehow. Maybe you can bring it somewhere closer to the center, but it's a little bit lengthy way of doing so. So you could also play King G2 and bring the rook into the defense slash attack straight away.
Now, after your opponent plays whatever, you can play Rook H1, and now you keep getting more tempo and kicking this queen away, but also your rook is now getting more active. If he tries to deliver this check, you just bring over the other rook and again kick off the queen. So let's say he goes Queen to F4.
Now there is another super, super critical rule for you to neutralize like 50% of your mistakes, and it's really huge. So hear me out: if there is an opponent's piece on your side of the board, on your half of the board, you got to neutralize it, and it is your primary aim. Now, if you let this rule really sink into your brain and really follow it, I guarantee your chess is going to go up straight away like 200 points in one day if you really follow, truly follow this rule. Because usually, this piece is the source of all the blunders that you're going to have down the road and all the troubles that you're going to face down the road. Therefore, it is just prudent to neutralize it straight away. It is the only intruder that you have on your side of the board. Therefore, it is your primary aim to get rid of it, push it back, or trade it off, do something to get rid of this problem.
So here, how do I get rid of this queen? Well, you can't play like this, but after some checks, the queen can stay right there. So I'd play Queen E3 right here just to offer the trade. You're up a knight, and when you're up material, it's worthwhile to trade material so that you neutralize all the threats and you can easily win in an endgame. And if he doesn't want that scenario, he'll have to drop the queen back. But now the goal is achieved. Now your position is much more secure, and in fact, you're just up a piece and you're quite close to being winning.
Which brings us to another very common situation. Sometimes you feel like you're quite close to winning, and you see an attractive move, and you think to yourself, "Okay, I'm going to now play this move, and after this, I'm going to do this, and I'm just winning." So you start thinking about the variation like this: Queen takes H6. You think, "Wow, this must be a brilliant move because the pawn is pinned and attacked, and I'm also attacking along this file, and it's total devastation." But then your opponent is not resigning, and you start suspecting that there was something wrong, and you notice, and then you start wondering, "Oh my God, will my opponent see the move?" Sure enough, he plays Queen takes G3, and now all of a sudden your attacking piece is taken away, and as a result of that, now he's free to grab your queen, and he's just now won your rook.
And at this point, of course, some people start being like, "Ah, chess is not for me. I don't have the chess talent," or "I didn't sleep well enough today." And of course, the all-time favorite, you can unleash your inner crni and just say, "He just must be a cheater, absolutely no doubt." So report him. But to prevent all these things, here's the rule. Let's come back here before that situation, and before playing Queen H6, if you found a brilliant move, think twice. And especially if it involves some tactical complications. You know, you can play a move. Let's turn it back one move. You can play Queen E3 without extensive calculation because it's a simple move, right? Like, you know that your position is very well defended, and therefore, it is quite less likely that you're going to blunder something. But if you initiate tactical complications like this, then you definitely need to be very careful and double-check variations because you can either win or lose straight away. And in this case, you actually lose after Queen takes G3, so the brilliant move turns out to be a blunder.
Let's turn it back. But how do you deal with such positions? There is another rule which allows you to navigate through tactical positions easier, which is called "Look for Force" and moves which are checks, captures, and attacking moves. These are the moves that force a particular response of your opponent. Therefore, he can do whatever he wants, he has to do a particular move which you are forcing with the move that you play. Now, I've listed them in the order of power. So the most forced move is a check because the only thing your opponent can do is to take care of his king. So in this position, what kind of forced moves could you consider? Well, there's Bishop takes F7, there's Rook takes G7, and indeed, you can take on H6. So these are the moves to consider, but the most forcing ones are checks. And indeed, one of them, Rook takes G7, wins the game. Because after King takes, now you play the other forced move that is, once they had a check, your opponent has no time to do anything else but just to move his king away, and now you can finish the game off.
By the way, you can practice this straight away. So here's a little tactical challenge for you. It is White to move, and it's checkmate in two moves. I just took the move back, and I know that White can checkmate in one move, but that's not what I'm asking about. You got to find the checkmate in two moves. And if you can find it, please write it down in comments below. And if you want to practice all these ideas and have a complete system on how to get your chess to the next level, check out this course, "Level Up Your Chess," where I've put together everything that you need. Also, feel free to let me know if you have any questions, and I'll talk to you soon.