Attack: How Middlegame Assaults Actually Work
When an attack is justified, how it is prepared, and how it converts. Chapter 10 of Znosko-Borovsky's The Middle Game in Chess, interactively reissued.
"The reader will note the strict cohesion between White's moves." — Znosko-Borovsky, on Schlechter–Salwe
Part Three, Chapter 3 is Znosko-Borovsky's longest example chapter — eleven positions, each labelled by a different kind of attack. It would be exhausting and beside the point to walk through the moves of all eleven. What matters is the taxonomy itself: the fact that the author does not treat "attack" as one thing. He treats it as at least eleven distinct operations, distinguished by where the target is , what force is being used against it , and what the target's own defensive resources are .
If you understand the taxonomy, you can locate any attacking position you meet in a real game inside one of the boxes below, and instantly know what the strategic literature has already worked out for that box. That is the practical value of the chapter, and it is why it deserves a slow read.
The single sentence that unites every one of the eleven examples is the one at the top: cohesion. In every case, Znosko-Borovsky's praise for the attacker is that the moves fit together — that each move sets up the next, that no move is spent, that the sequence has an internal logic which the defender has no time to interrupt. Attacks in this book do not win because a piece lands on a good square. They win because move 6 was already implicit in move 1.
Znosko-Borovsky's classification, in his own order:
1. The attack in the centre 2. The centre attack combined with a wing attack 3. The attack on the king standing in the centre 4. The attack on both wings 5. The attack on the king's-side castling 6. Pawn sacrifices for the opening of files 7. Breaking up the hostile pawn position by pawns 8. The storm by the pawns 9. The attack with the bishops 10. The attack with the knights 11. The attack on the queen's-side castling
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