Zlotnik's Middlegame Manual: Typical Structures and Strategic Manoeuvres

Zlotnik's Middlegame Manual: Typical Structures and Strategic Manoeuvres

If you want to improve your middlegame play, you will have to develop a FEEL for positions. That's what Boris Zlotnik has been stressing during his long and rich trainer's career. Clicking through concrete variations (a popular pastime in the computer era) is not enough. To guide your thinking during a game you should be able to fall back on a reservoir of typical ideas and methods. That is exactly what this book offers you: Zlotnik's legendary study material about the middlegame, modernized, greatly extended and published in the English language for the first time. As you familiarize yourself with the most important strategic ideas and manoeuvres, you will need less time to discover the clues in typical middlegame positions. You will find it so much easier to steer your game in the right direction after the opening has ended. Zlotnik's Middlegame Manual is accessible to a wide range of post-beginners and club players. It is your passport to a body of instructive material of unparalleled quality, collected during a lifetime of training and coaching chess. A collection of exercises, carefully chosen and didactically tuned, will help you drill what you have learned. "A manual which can open our eyes to the typical structures and manoeuvres we will encounter. Clearly the book is worth it just for the games which have been selected by Zlotnik, because they give us a blueprint to follow in order to improve our chess understanding. If we study this book, and we then begin to watch games, we will discover and find recurrent themes and pawn structures explained here, and magically understand what we have to do in next in our own games." -- Davide Nastasio ― Georgia Chess News "Here is hoping Zlotnik, who coached Fabiano Caruana in his formative years, produces more books of this type." -- John Donaldson, International Master "The analysis is very well done and quite instructive. For anyone who is working on improving their positional play, the chapter on Symmetrical Pawn Structures in this book should be required reading. After all, those positions rely on the accumulation of small advantages, which is one of the hallmark's of positional play. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone rated from around 1200 and up, but with the caveat that the stronger the player, the more understanding about the subject matter you will gain. For those below maybe 1500 this will serve as a well-annotated collection of games and some detailed exercises." -- Chris Wainscott ― On the Road to Chess Master "A must-have for all serious players." -- Fabiano Caruana, Grandmaster "We have to congratulate the author and (publishers) New in Chess: they have created a brilliant, important and extraordinarily instructive book. I devoured it. This book contains a blueprint of a gigantic book, impossible for one individual to write, on all typical structures and strategic manoeuvres. This is how probing, rich and motivating studying chess can be. A treasure trove for every club and tournament player." -- Florian Jacobs ― Max Euwe Center "Almost 400 pages explaining really every tactical and strategic middlegame theme with clear-cut examples." -- Bab Wilders ― Nederlands Dagblad Boris Zlotnik is an International Master from Russia and a prominent chess trainer. For many years he was the director of the legendary Chess Department of the INEF College in Moscow. In 1993 he emigrated to Spain where he continues to work as a trainer and author. Fabiano Caruana is an International Grandmaster and the highest rated American chess player. In 2018 he earned the right to challenge World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen, in a match he narrowly lost. He lives in St. Louis, MO. In 2004, as a 12-year-old, Fabiano Caruana moved to Madrid with his entire family to live near his trainer Boris Zlotnik.