General Remarks about the Opening: Entering the Middlegame
What the opening owes the middlegame — development, the centre, and the plan already forming. Chapter 4 of Znosko-Borovsky's The Middle Game in Chess.
"The opening may be described as a deployment of the forces for battle in sight of the enemy." — Znosko-Borovsky, 1922
Every game divides into three parts: the opening , the middle game , and the end-game . Znosko-Borovsky treats them with sharply different weights.
The end-game is the realisation of what was obtained in the middle game — the cashing of a cheque already written. We will not trouble about it here.
The middle game is the real game. It is where the fate of the contest is decided, and where the whole round of ideas that chess contains is born, developed, and finished.
The opening, by contrast, is only the preparation — the mobilisation and development of the forces for battle. It is a mobilisation of a peculiar sort: all the forces are fixed beforehand and can neither diminish nor increase, and the mobilisation is often already contemporaneous with the battle itself. That is why Znosko-Borovsky prefers the phrase "deployment in sight of the enemy." Both armies form up on the same field, watching one another, each move already a small skirmish.
Why You Cannot Really Study the Opening in Isolation
Here Znosko-Borovsky offers a rebuke that has aged remarkably well:
"In order to know how best to open we must appreciate thoroughly all the qualities and characteristics of the middle game. The opening is the preparation for this, and we cannot possibly make a good preparation if we do not know for what to prepare."
His complaint about the chess literature of 1922 — that students memorise long opening variations and long endgame technique, and are then left helpless in the middle game — is, if anything, more true a century later. Databases, engines, and repertoire tools have multiplied the amount of opening theory a club player is expected to carry, without appreciably deepening what they understand about the position their theory produces.
The Endgame Journal collects our writing on openings, tactics, endgames, and the habits that separate players who improve from players who plateau. Every article is written by people who teach chess, not by a content farm.