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Product Description
Product Description
The three-times World Chess Solving Champion distils the most useful middlegame concepts and knowledge into 100 lessons that everyone can understand.
Following on from his successful Understanding Chess Endgames, John Nunn turns his attention to the middlegame - the phase of the chess battle where most games are decided, yet the one that has received the least systematic treatment from chess writers. With the outstanding clarity for which he is famous, Nunn breaks down complex problems into bite-sized pieces.
In the case of attacking play, we are shown how to decide where to attack, and the specific methods that can be used to pursue the enemy king. Positional play is described in terms of the major structural issues, and how the pieces work around and with the pawns. Nunn explains how to assess when certain pieces are better than others, and how we can make use of this understanding at the board. Readers will never be short of a plan, whatever type of position arises.
Each lesson features two inspiring examples from modern chess, annotated honestly and with a keen focus on the main instructive points. Both sides' ideas are emphasized, so we get a clear picture of the ways to disrupt typical plans as well as how to form them.
Following on from his successful Understanding Chess Endgames, John Nunn turns his attention to the middlegame - the phase of the chess battle where most games are decided, yet the one that has received the least systematic treatment from chess writers. With the outstanding clarity for which he is famous, Nunn breaks down complex problems into bite-sized pieces.
In the case of attacking play, we are shown how to decide where to attack, and the specific methods that can be used to pursue the enemy king. Positional play is described in terms of the major structural issues, and how the pieces work around and with the pawns. Nunn explains how to assess when certain pieces are better than others, and how we can make use of this understanding at the board. Readers will never be short of a plan, whatever type of position arises.
Each lesson features two inspiring examples from modern chess, annotated honestly and with a keen focus on the main instructive points. Both sides' ideas are emphasized, so we get a clear picture of the ways to disrupt typical plans as well as how to form them.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Déception,
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This review is from: Understanding Chess Middlegames (Paperback)
Je trouve le temps d'attente d'envoi trop long !?? Je suis déçu du service. J'ai commandé ces deux produits début mai. Et voilà que j'observe qu'il ne sont pas encore envoyés et nous sommes le 23 mai 2012. Inconcevable.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.6 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews) 29 of 30 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good for review, for planning your training, expanding your style,
By Derek Grimmell - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Understanding Chess Middlegames (Paperback)
The layout of this book is similar to Nunn's Understanding Chess Endgames. After a couple of short introductory chapters, the meat is 100 fundamental issues in middlegame play. Each of the 100 points receives only two pages of coverage. Because these are middlegames rather than endgames, each point typically only has two examples, rather than the 3 or 4 in the similar endgame book. So this is no in-depth training manual. However, Dr. Nunn has done his usual good job of chossing instructive examples with multiple points. Just as important, he invested a lot of time coming up with a list of 100 fundamental issues that were genuinely a good survey of the middlegame. They are divided into several large topics: Attacking play, certain material imbalances (for example, queen versus 3 minor pieces), themes in defense, pawn structures in the middlegame. He ends with the most common types of mistakes people make during the middlegame, including critical things such as automatically accepting sacrifices, over- or underestimating an attack, and overestimating the value of the two bishops.It's worth listing the pawn structures he points to: Isolated pawn in general; isolated queen pawn; closed Ruy Lopez; Winawer French; Scheveningen; Najdorf; Caro-Kann (also the Slav); Sämisch King's Indian; Benoni. As you can see, this is hardly a comprehensive survey of middlegame pawn structures, but the 8 covered (not including isolated pawns in general) cover a terrific amount of chess knowledge and a large majority of games played. When you consider that other sections focus on pawn chains, hanging pawns, and doubled pawns, most important pawn structures are covered. Similarly, the chapter on the attack nods to several classic sacrifices: Bxh7+ (obviously), sacrifices on H6, g7, and f7; and several standard sacrifices in the Sicilian, as well as looking at Rook lifts, the long diagonal, attacking a fianchettoed position, and more. Overall, this book isn't a comprehensive training manual; such a work would probably be several thousand pages long. Rather, it's a good way to check your grasp of middlegame play. If you play through each section of the book, you'll quickly identify which areas of middlegame play you need to improve on. If you see nothing new in the section on the attack, but the sections on defensive play are a revelation, that's probably a good place to focus. Any unfamiliar theme is worthy of follow-up in your own study. I'm just hoping that Nunn will follow this up with a couple more volumes on the middlegame, as he did with the endgame. There's no hint of this yet, but hey, I can dream, can't I? 17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy it now!,
By Boomer49 "Boomer49" - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Understanding Chess Middlegames (Paperback)
In the first chapter, Nunn rips apart standard, simplistic thinking that evaluates positions by formula. He takes down Euwe, a good author who certainly knew alot about of chess simply by playing Alekhine,and shows how modern analysis depends on more than one plan or formula. The examples are of modern players and positions so this is not just a reprinting of well known games played a long time ago. Although this book contains excellent examples of how to assess, evaluate then plan according to solid positional ideas, the author shows how essential it is to have a vision of the whole board and to be aware of possibilites for both sides. This book will be in the running for Book of the Year.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
More than pleased,
By Paul B. - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Understanding Chess Middlegames (Paperback)
When I recieved this and did my preview of it, I wanted to stop the books I were reading at the time and go through this one immediately. It is one of the best overview/review books on the middlegame I had seen. Its broken down into 100 easily digestable lessons. You don't need 2 evenings afer work to study one concept. I was exceptionally surprised just leafing through it. Better than I expected. Great layout and arrangement of material.
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