Middlegame Courses (173)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Opposite-coloured bishops have a reputation for drawishness — but that verdict only holds in the endgame; in the middlegame, the same imbalance turns the bishop into a devastating attacker with no opposite number to stop it. In this Guided Practice course, IM Siegfried Baumegger works through all four faces of the position across carefully selected exercises and annotated model games: the middlegame attack, strategic play to increase an advantage, converting an extra pawn, and defending the ending. Drawing on games from Rubinstein and Smyslov to Carlsen and Ding, it teaches you to recognise when the opposite bishops draw, when they win, and how to steer the play so they do what you need.

After 4.Bxc6 bxc6 in the Rossolimo, both sides sign a long-term contract: Black takes the two bishops, White the healthier pawn structure. Which way the imbalance tilts then depends on a handful of small pawn decisions. In Middlegame Understanding – Rossolimo Structures – Part 1, GM Evgeny Romanov treats those structures as the real protagonists of the game — the frame inside which every plan either works or quietly fails.

A course built on plans, not theoretical lines
Romanov's starting point is that concrete variations matter less here than in almost any other Sicilian. The doubled pawns fix the position early, so progress comes from knowing the plans rather than recalling moves — which is why the course is organized around eight of them instead of around opening lines.

He is also honest about where the balance actually sits. He points out that several of these plans hand Black the easier game in practice, and notes that White has lately moved away from the sharp long-castling lines toward quieter setups with short castling. What you get is a strong grandmaster's working assessment of who stands better and why.

For most of chess history, voluntarily handing your opponent a broad pawn center looked less like a plan and more like a concession. The King's Indian Defense turned that instinct on its head. After 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6, Black invites White to occupy the center with pawns and then sets out to undermine it with timely counterplay — a hypermodern provocation in the 1930s that, over the following decades, became one of Black's most trusted ways to play for a win against 1.d4.
GM Mitrabha Guha builds the course around that evolution rather than around a wall of theory. He traces how understanding of the King's Indian deepened across nearly nine decades of practice — from the foundational games of the 1930s, through Fischer's win over Korchnoi in 1970 and the Korchnoi–Kasparov clash of 1992, up to Praggnanandhaa–Giri in 2022. The structures repeat and the ideas accumulate, so that following them in order teaches you to feel the opening rather than memorize it.

A complete strategic guide to the most fundamental minor-piece battle in chess: knight versus bishop. IM Baumegger's course teaches you to recognise which piece is stronger and how to prove it — across endgames and middlegames, from the bishop's strengths to the knight's — through 60 test positions with detailed solutions.

A complete strategic guide to one of chess's most powerful and misunderstood advantages: the pair of bishops. IM Baumegger's course covers playing with the two bishops in positional, attacking, and endgame settings — and how to defend against them — through 60 test positions with detailed solutions.