Manoeuvres of the Middle Game: Regrouping with Purpose
The manoeuvre as a unit of thought — how strong players regroup pieces before striking. Chapter 9 of Znosko-Borovsky's The Middle Game in Chess.
"We are not now obliged to proceed from the simplest to the most complicated, but may observe the normal order of the game and therefore begin with manoeuvres." — Znosko-Borovsky, opening Part Three
The first eight chapters of this series were theory — a systematic account of what a middle game is, what elements it is made of, and how to think about a position once you have one on the board. Part Three, which begins here, is examples . Znosko-Borovsky's method changes, and it is worth naming the change before we walk through it.
In the theoretical chapters, each idea was stated first and then illustrated. In the examples chapters, the position comes first and the idea is left, in his phrase, to "the reader who now knows how to value a position himself." Some of the examples he prints with no explanation at all — only the moves that occurred in the game. The trust he is asking for is that eight chapters of theory have equipped you to see what the game is doing without being told.
He organises the examples the same way he organised the theory — equal, superior, inferior — but with an important departure. Rather than starting from the simplest position and building toward the most complicated, he begins with the normal order of the game itself : opening → middle game → attack → defence → counter-play. And the first stage of the normal order, immediately after the pieces have finished developing, is the stage of manoeuvres .
Manoeuvres are the natural bridge from opening to attack. This chapter is about how they work.
A manoeuvre is not an attack. An attack has an object — a king, a pawn, a square — and its moves are all justified by their effect on that object. A manoeuvre has no external object. Its moves are justified only by the reorganisation of your own pieces that they accomplish. The purpose of a manoeuvre is to move your pieces from the squares they occupy today to the squares from which an eventual attack will be conducted, without giving the opponent the chance to interfere.
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.