General Remarks about the Middle Game: Reading a Position
How to read a middlegame position — superior, inferior, or equal — and choose a plan that fits. Chapter 5 of Znosko-Borovsky's The Middle Game in Chess.
"The object of each player in any position is threefold: to value the position and weigh up its strong and weak points; as a result of this valuation, to make a plan of the game; and to bring this plan into effect." — Znosko-Borovsky, 1922
Part One gave us the vocabulary — force, space, time, threats, the character of the pieces, the aim of the opening. Part Two turns to the part of the game where that vocabulary is used: the middle game.
Znosko-Borovsky opens with an admission. The middle game is difficult to study for two reasons. First, it has no fixed initial position to reason from — every middle game arrives with different pieces in different places. Second, it has never been properly classified . Endgames have been catalogued into rook-and-pawn, opposite-coloured bishops, and so on. Openings have been named and analysed to move fifteen. The middle game has been left as a single undifferentiated mass.
Before he can teach the middle game, he has to invent a way of sorting it.
The natural instinct is to sort middle games by their external features — a game on the kingside vs. a game on the queenside, a game with knights vs. a game with bishops, an attack vs. a defence. Znosko-Borovsky dismisses all three:
- By wing. The game on one flank is very often exactly like the game on the other, mirrored. And within a single game the play can shift wings twice. Sorting by wing gives you two piles of positions that behave identically. - By piece. "The game with various pieces is not the middle game, but only a preliminary study for it, because the game involves the use of all the pieces." Studying knight endings is useful; studying "knight middlegames" is a category error. - By attack and defence. These are only small events inside a middle game, not its shape. A single game can contain three attacks and two defences.
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