In designing this book the author was guided by the following consid- erations. If you want to
learn this or that opening you can choose from dozens or even hundreds of textbooks. But what
if you want to get familiar with the middlegame strategy used in positions that have emerged
from exactly this or that opening? Or to put it another way: in positions that are typical for
this or that opening.Of course in every middlegame textbook there's one or the other position
that clearly comes from this or that opening. However their number is negligible in the
context of example positions from all the other openings whose middlegame treatment the reader
doesn't want to learn at all.For example aren't the issues of hanging pawns and minority
attack - the author asks with good reason - just as dispensable for an e4 player as they are
essential for a d4 player? - Why should a die-hard enthusiast of Indian openings care about the
strategic intricacies of positions resulting from all those complicated Queen's Gambit systems?
And of course vice versa: what use are all these subtleties of Indian positions to a player who
by nature avoids fianchetto openings?And it's precisely this conspicuous and astounding vacuum
in the area of middlegame literature that inspired the author to make an appropriate attempt at
improvement: If you want to learn French middlegame strategy you will get a textbook and
exercise book in which only French middlegames are treated. However this book only deals with
positions in which the white pawns on d4 and e5 are opposed by black pawns on d5 and e6 - or
those positions that can arise from this basic structure as shown in detail in the overview
following the preface.It deserves special mention that the 110 exercises have been assigned to
specific topics for the benefit of entertaining diversity - for example the top candidate the
relegation candidate the only move violence or pressure increase but also joke articles and
the like.
