Why The Chess Middlegame Can Take You To The Next Level

The Importance Of The Middlegame

This post is all about taking your Chess Middlegame to the next level. 

Specifically - which area of the game to give your focus in order to get the most “bang for your buck” when it comes to time spent vs. increase in rating.

Of course, every chess player is different. But for most players, the chess middlegame is the most productive area to dedicate the majority of your effort.

In general, most players pay too much attention to studying chess openings.

We can only speculate why this is, but I believe a big reason is that openings are easier to study. It doesn’t take much mental effort to look at the opening database and see which are the most played lines, or to switch on the analysis engine and find which lines the computer likes the most.

By contrast, the middlegame and endgame are more mentally taxing. You have to think hard when studying these areas of the game. Being human, most players tend to gravitate towards the less-strenuous work.

Another reason it’s tempting to prioritize opening study is because it offers the prospect of scoring quick knockout victories. You don’t have to play an endgame (or even a middlegame!) if you have the game sewn up by springing an opening trap on your unwary opponent.

However, while it can be fun to know about the chess opening traps (and even more fun to deploy one successfully), and you may even win a few games that way, this is not the path to long-term chess improvement. The better players are not going to fall for cheap tricks - and if you aspire to be a strong player yourself, then neither will you. 
So, where does that leave you? You need to expect that the vast majority of the time, the opening will not determine the outcome of your games. Instead, both you and your opponent will reach a playable middlegame. Even if you or your opponent play the opening somewhat inaccurately, the game will not be over.

The data backs up this argument. I checked my statistics over the last 90 days on chess.com’s Insights tool along with those of players with similar ratings to my own (as of writing, around 1900 - 2000 in online rapid chess). My statistics are similar to the average.

• Just 2% - 3% of games ended in the opening
• 45%- 49% of games ended in the middlegame
• 48%- 52% of games ended in the endgame

It is striking how few games ended in the opening. Less than three games in 100! Yet opening study is still where most players direct their energy. It’s crazy when you think about it.

These statistics also suggest that the endgame is important - and it is. However, the middlegame is still more important than the endgame. Why? 

• Every game that reached the endgame was preceded by a middlegame, but; 
• The games which finished in the middlegame involved no endgame at all.

That is to say - if these statistics hold, almost all of your games will require you to play a middlegame, but only about half of your games will require you to play an endgame.

Also, your skill at the middlegame goes a long way to determining whether your endgame positions are favorable or not.

Hopefully, you are convinced. So, with all that said - what does the chess middlegame actually involve?

Aspects of The Chess Middlegame

We can break the chess middlegame into two broad areas: tactics and strategy.

• Tactics are the short-term sequences that can lead to gaining material or checkmating your opponent’s king. For example, winning the opponent’s queen with a combination or finding a forced mate in three moves.
• Strategy is about your positional understanding. Coming up with a plan and then executing it more successfully than your opponent. Accumulating small advantages such as improving your pieces, controlling important squares, or creating weaknesses in the enemy pawn structure.

Another way to think about the difference between the two areas of the chess middlegame: Strategy is about building your position slowly in situations where both you and your opponent have many options, and you cannot anticipate (or force) exactly what your opponent might reply with. Tactics is finding a forced way to turn the game in your favor decisively.

Armed with this understanding, let’s turn our attention to practical ways to improve both these areas of your chess middlegame.

Training Tactics

Incorporating tactics training into your routine will improve your performance in those critical moments when you have the chance to win the game on the spot.

• You will become better at recognizing tactical opportunities when they arise.
• You will also become better at calculating the sequence accurately - anticipating your opponent’s best replies and working through them logically without missing anything.
• Just as importantly, you will become more aware of the tactics your opponent might have in the air - so that you do not carelessly allow them these opportunities.

The key to tactics training is to make it a regular habit. It is better to practice 10 minutes of tactics every day than to study for a solid hour once per week.

chess.com and lichess.org both have enormous puzzle libraries. There, you can find tactical puzzles appropriate to your level. You can also train specific motifs (such as deflection, intermezzo, double attack, etc…)

Another way to train tactics is to buy a puzzle book. Set up the puzzle on a real board and solve it there rather than on the computer screen. This can be especially helpful for improving your tactical performance in over-the-board chess. For intermediate and advanced players, The Woodpecker Method is highly recommended.

Reviewing Your Own Games

Reviewing your own games is the secret hack that will see your chess middlegame improve in leaps and bounds. Because so few players study their games, there is an incredible advantage to be gained by the minority who do.

Think about it: how many times have you finished playing a game - win, lose, or draw - only to move on to the next game immediately without checking the game you just finished?

The vast majority of chess players have the same bad habit. In a way, it’s understandable - playing is fun while studying your past games can feel like work. But analyzing your games is the real key to not making the same mistakes over and over again.

Reviewing your games can be beneficial for improving both your tactics and strategy. The analysis engine will point out the missed tactics in the blink of an eye. Strategic thinking is more difficult for the computer to explain - so you might need to enlist the help of a coach or think for yourself why some of the non-tactical moves are better than others.

For example, here is a position from one of my own games, played in a real-life tournament under classical time controls. I am playing White, and it’s my move.

Both my opponent and I are beyond our memorized opening knowledge, and there are no immediate tactics for either of us. The computer evaluation indicates the position is slightly better for White. However, during the game, I did not feel that way. Instead, I felt under pressure due to my very problematic light-squared bishop on b3. It is stuck defending the a4 and c4 pawns. I would love to play Ba2 or Bc2 - but both of those moves drop a pawn thanks to the pressure being exerted by Black’s queen and knight.

The correct strategic idea (which I did not find) is to worsen the activity of Black’s queen with the maneuver Be1 -> Bf2. It is rather counterintuitive to play the retreating move Be1 - but it’s only a temporary retreat to get the piece to a more useful square.

Because I did not find this idea, my position slowly became worse, and I ended up losing the game. But I learned an important lesson that has stayed with me ever since - if you can’t improve the activity of your own pieces, then try to degrade the activity of your opponent’s pieces.

Studying Master Games

As the German statesman Otto von Bismarck once remarked, “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”

Studying your own games is an excellent habit to get into (and already puts you far ahead of most of your competition!), but if you leave it there, you are missing out on an incredible opportunity to learn from some of the greatest chess minds in history.

One of the wonderful things about chess is that we can replay games from decades or even centuries ago and learn things from them that can be applied to our own games today. You may not be able to play an entire game as strongly as a grandmaster, but fragments of their games can still be very instructive.

Take this position from a game played between Wolfgang Unzicker and Bobby Fischer in 1962.

It’s Black to move. The Black rook on a8 is attacked twice - by White’s rook on a1 and the White queen from the d5 square. Obviously, Black needs to do something about this - if he ignores the threat, he will soon find himself down a rook after White plays Rxa8 next move.

The question is: what to do? Coming up with a good answer in situations like this is the mark of a player with good chess middlegame understanding. Here are a few options that may come to mind:

• Defending the rook with Qd8 - this leaves the b5 pawn unguarded. White could play Qxb5 next move, winning a pawn.
• Defending with Qb8 - loses the b5 pawn too. White can play Rxa1, and after Black recaptures Qxa8 - again, White is able to grab the pawn with Qxb5. 
• Retreating the rook - e.g., Rac8 leaves White in control of the open a-file.
• Capturing White’s rook with Rxa1 - similarly hands the a-file to White after he recaptures next move.

There is another option. The best move (played in the game by Fischer with the Black pieces) is Ra4. With this move, Black maintains presence on the a-file and adds pressure to White’s e4 pawn. White can initiate the capture with Rxa4 if he wants, but after Black takes back with bxa4, White’s knight will have to move to a worse square (e.g., Nb2). 

Making Ra4 doesn’t win the game for Black, but it’s these kinds of small positional improvements in the chess middlegame that make the game easier to play. Black later went on to win.

There are hundreds of books on chess strategy. One of the most popular ones is How to Reassess Your Chess.

If you prefer learning in video format, the Lessons within chess.com are a fantastic resource for those who have a premium account. Also USCF Sales has an outstanding collection of chess instruction videos. Agadmator’s YouTube channel is another great place to find master games with commentary.

Final Thoughts

Every area of chess is important. If you want to become a stronger player, you cannot neglect any area of the game. As any experienced player can attest, chess has a way of finding and exposing your weaknesses.

Without a solid knowledge of chess openings, you will burn a lot of time at the start of the game when, given better preparation, it would be possible to play these first few moves “automatically” from memory. If your opening knowledge is worse than your opponent’s, you will also be quite likely to get inferior middlegame positions - you will be starting your games on the back foot.

Without proficiency in the chess middlegame, you will often find yourself lost once your memorized opening knowledge runs out and missing many opportunities to gain the advantage (whether that’s through tactics or strategy).

Without good chess endgame technique, you will be unable to convert winning positions or unable to hold drawn positions. Nothing is more frustrating than throwing away a game where you have done all the hard work but are unable to apply the finishing touches.

Of course, all of us have limited time to spend on chess - so knowing which of these aspects to put your focus on is also vital. You need to have a “strategy for improving your chess strategy” - if that makes sense.

As we said at the outset - most people overemphasize studying the opening and neglect the chess middlegame. But is that true for you?

Working with a chess coach can give you an outside view on what is holding you back, along with their customized advice on creating a training plan to improve it. Or, if you don’t have the resources to work with a coach, then simply ask yourself the question: “Why am I losing games? Which area of my game is the weakest right now?”. You probably already have a sense of which part of the game you tend to fail the most.

Once you know what to work on, the way forward becomes much clearer. Here’s to your success!