Zlotnik’s Middlegame Manual

If you want to improve your middlegame, you need to develop an instinct for positions—something Boris Zlotnik has emphasized throughout his long and distinguished career as a coach. Analyzing concrete variations with a chess engine (a popular pastime in the computer era) is not enough. To guide your thinking during a game, you must be able to rely on an arsenal of typical ideas and methods.

This book offers exactly that: Zlotnik’s legendary middlegame study material, modernized and greatly expanded. For example, the author includes interesting analyses using engines (Stockfish) and compares them with human thinking, giving preference to the human approach when evaluations are similar.

Some of the topics covered in this work include: typical middlegame structures, the isolated queen’s pawn, the Carlsbad structure, symmetrical pawn structures, typical methods of play, restricting mobility in the King’s Indian Defense, whether to exchange a fianchettoed bishop, and the d5 square in the Sicilian.

By familiarizing yourself with the most important strategic ideas and maneuvers in basic opening structures, you will need less time to spot clues in middlegame positions. Once the opening is over, it becomes easier to steer your game in the right direction.

Zlotnik’s Middlegame Manual is accessible to a wide range of club players. It serves as a highway to high-quality instructional material compiled over a lifetime of chess training. A large number of carefully selected exercises are presented in a didactic way to help the reader deeply understand the concepts.

Boris Zlotnik is not only a strong Russian International Master but also one of the world’s top coaches. For many years, he served as Director of the Moscow Chess Department and moved to Spain in 1992. One of his most notable students was Fabiano Caruana, who in 2004 moved to Madrid with his family at the age of twelve to train closely with him.