The Direction of Play: GM Blohberger on Middlegame Understanding
When GM Felix Blohberger began preparing this course, he returned to a principle that transformed his own understanding of chess: the direction of pawn chains reveals where each side should play. This deceptively simple rule—taught to club players yet decisive at grandmaster level—forms the conceptual backbone of Felix Middlegames, a course designed to bridge the gap between moving pieces and genuinely understanding positions.
The Art of Finding the Right Plan
Blohberger's approach addresses the most common struggle in competitive chess: what to do once the opening ends and familiar territory disappears. Rather than offering a collection of tactical motifs or abstract strategic principles, the course teaches systematic thinking through pawn structure analysis, piece improvement, and positional evaluation. The Austrian grandmaster, winner of the Modern Chess Autumn Challenge, previously created a comprehensive treatment of 1.c4 e5 for Black. Now he shifts focus from opening preparation to the middlegame phase where games are truly decided.
The instructional method centers on recognizing recurring patterns rather than memorizing isolated ideas. Through positions ranging from French Advance structures (where White's e5–d4–c3 chain dictates kingside play while Black's e6–d5–c5 formation points queenside) to King's Indian setups (where the d5-pawn determines the direction of both players' operations), Blohberger demonstrates how structural understanding generates concrete plans. This framework proves accessible to club players while addressing concepts that separate masters from experts: the ability to extract the position's inherent demands rather than impose preconceived strategies.
Course Structure and Technical Details
Finding the Right Plan contains 10 annotated model games demonstrating the principles in action, supplemented by 10 test positions that challenge viewers to apply these concepts independently. Video instruction guides students through the analytical process, while comprehensive annotations are available in multilingual PGN format (English, German, French, Spanish) for those who prefer working through variations at their own pace.
The course targets players ready to move beyond tactical pattern recognition toward genuine positional understanding—the kind that remains effective even when opponents deviate from known theory or when unfamiliar positions arise on the board.
Ready to transform how you approach the middlegame? Explore Felix Middlegames and discover the strategic patterns that define high-level chess.