The move is ...a6, and it has followed him for decades — first in the Chebanenko Slav, where 4...a6 became his signature, and then one move later, in the quiet lines where White declines to force anything at all. In The Slow Slav for Black – Strategic Foundations, Malakhov explains what that pawn is actually doing, and what kind of middlegame it produces.
Sequence: Malakhov's Slav Defense »
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2h 54m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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Every pawn move is permanent — it can never be taken back — which makes pawn play the most consequential decision-making in chess, the element Philidor called "the soul of the game." In this Guided Practice course, IM Siegfried Baumegger trains it in full: creating dynamic chances with your own pawns (space, open lines, a mobile majority, files for the rooks), attacking the opponent's pawn formation, restricting it so he never gets his own breaks, and handling the pawn decisions that settle endgames. Across exercises and annotated games from the players who understood pawns best — Petrosian, Kasparov, Polugaevsky, Gelfand and more — it turns pawn moves from instinct into purpose, so you shape the game on your terms.
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2h PGN Download Interactive Tests
Games are rarely lost because a player failed to find something brilliant — they are lost to the same ordinary errors, made again and again: the line cut off one move too early, the reply that was never considered, the opponent's resource that arrived unseen. In this Guided Practice course, IM Siegfried Baumegger shows exactly where calculation breaks down and trains the discipline that prevents it: calculate until the opponent has no active moves left, take his best replies seriously, and watch constantly for his tactics. Across demanding exercises with guiding questions and annotated games from sharp calculators like Anand, Tal and Shirov, it rebuilds the thinking process from the inside — so the mistakes that quietly decide games stop appearing in yours.
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2h 2m PGN Download Interactive Tests
You cannot choose a good plan until you have honestly judged the position — and a plan built on a faulty evaluation is worse than none at all. In this Guided Practice course, IM Siegfried Baumegger trains the skill beneath all the others: weighing the position against the factors that matter (king safety, material, the centre, piece activity, pawn structure, space and the initiative), filtering the essential from the incidental, and turning that judgement into the right plan. Across exercises and annotated games from great positional planners like Karpov, Geller and Carlsen, it also teaches the crucial distinction between static factors that endure and dynamic ones that must be used before they fade.
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2h 7m PGN Download Interactive Tests
Every training app on the market feeds players a stream of positions in which something is there: a sacrifice, a deflection, a hidden fork. Solve enough of them and you begin to expect the board to reward searching. Over the board, though, most positions hold nothing of the kind — and the search itself becomes the mistake. IM Boroljub Zlatanovic builds Mastering Static Play on precisely that gap between how players train and what they actually face.
Sometimes one side, or both, cannot find an active plan. Very often the reason is simply that no such plan exists. What remains is the quieter work: improving the position where it needs improving — centralizing, maneuvering, exchanging, fixing weak spots — and waiting until a dynamic continuation becomes available.
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3h 40m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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Modern preparation is very good at getting you to a better position. It is much less good at telling you what to do once you are there. This is the gap IM Boroljub Zlatanovic addresses in Mastering Dynamic Play: the player who holds an advantage is obliged to play actively, because the moment activity stops, the advantage begins to drain away — and with it, the psychological edge passes to the opponent. Every single pause, as the author puts it, risks becoming a transition into defense.
That is the leitmotif of the course. Not "attack" as a mood, but active play as a duty that comes attached to a better position. Sustaining it is rarely comfortable: the opponent has resources, the initiative demands accuracy, and there is always a quieter move available. The course is built around recognizing what the position requires and then finding a realistic, promising way to keep pressing.
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3h 56m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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A player who has never once answered 1.d4 d5 2.c4 with 2...dxc4 can still spend a career inside the Queen's Gambit Accepted structure. It appears from the Catalan. It appears from the Queen's Indian and the Nimzo-Indian. It appears whenever the c- and d-files open, White's d4-pawn faces the ...c5 break, and the game can reduce to a fight over two key squares: c3 and c6.
That is the argument at the heart of Queen's Gambit Accepted Structures, the new volume in the Malakhov's Structures series by GM Vladimir Malakhov and GM Pier Luigi Basso. Their premise is that a formation reachable from half a dozen different openings earns study on its own terms — not instead of the lines that lead to it, but alongside them.
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5h 25m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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Every strong player knows the feeling: a comfortable middlegame, no forcing lines anywhere in sight, and yet the clock keeps ticking while you try to calculate something — anything. Yet very often — more often than you might think — middlegame positions contain nothing to calculate at all. The reflex to calculate regardless is precisely what lands talented players in trouble.
This course is built around that reversal. Where preparation ends and no concrete lines exist, the decisive skill is recognition — setting the position beside the many you already carry in memory, and recalling the plan rather than creating it.
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3h 19m PGN Download Interactive Tests
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Chess literature overflows with books on attack, yet the equally decisive skill of defence is left almost untrained. In this Guided Practice course, IM Siegfried Baumegger fills that gap through prophylactic thinking — the habit of anticipating your opponent's plans and neutralising them before they arrive, ideally with a move that improves your own position at the same time. Across exercises and annotated model games from defenders like Lasker, Korchnoi and Tal, it trains both halves of great defence: the strategic anticipation that keeps you out of danger, and the tactical resources that save you when danger comes anyway.
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2h PGN Download Interactive Tests
When the kings castle on opposite wings, the game becomes a race — both sides hurl their pawns at the enemy king, and a single tempo separates a winning attack from a losing one. In this Guided Practice course, IM Siegfried Baumegger trains the whole toolkit of that race through exercises and annotated model games: exchanging the key defenders, forcing weaknesses, timing the sacrifice, and knowing when to switch to counterplay before the opponent's attack arrives first. Drawing on games from Tal and Fischer to Kramnik and Gelfand, it teaches the hardest balance in chess — attacking as fast as possible without ever attacking prematurely.
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2h 18m PGN Download Interactive Tests