Middlegame Courses (173)

The fourth installment of GM Ioannis Papaioannou's Inside Your Games series is now available — and it begins with an unusual editorial choice. The games analyzed in this course were not selected because they are beautiful, technically clean, or theoretically important. They were selected because they contain the typical decision-making moments where practical games are actually decided.

The second part of GM Davorin Kuljasevic's Understanding the French project is now available. The first course — Understanding the French Defense: Middlegame Structures and Strategy — covered Classical and Winawer structures, the two pawn-structure families that arise from the most theoretically dense lines of the French. With those covered, the project now turns to the three remaining families of central pawn structures arising from 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5: Open French, Closed French, and French Gambit structures.

The Caro-Kann structure doesn't change much from decade to decade—yet the way it's understood has evolved dramatically. What looked defensive in 1927 became flexible by 1974, and today's elite handle it with a precision that would have surprised even Capablanca. The pawn chain remains the same. The depth of understanding does not.
That's the insight driving Caro-Kann Pawn Structures by GM Vladimir Malakhov and GM Pier Luigi Basso—the third volume in the Malakhov's Structures series. This course doesn't teach an opening repertoire. It teaches you how to think in positions defined by the Caro structure, regardless of how you arrived there

While many players associate sacrifices with direct attacks and tactical combinations, this course focuses on a different and more sophisticated idea — giving up material for long-term positional domination. These decisions are not based on immediate calculation of forced lines, but on a deep understanding of structure, piece coordination, and the dynamics of the position.

GM Swapnil Dhopade’s February Tactical Thursday course focuses on one of the most underdeveloped skills in practical chess: defensive thinking and resourcefulness under pressure.
While most players associate calculation with attacking play—forcing sequences, combinations, and material gains—this course shifts the perspective to the other side of the struggle. It examines how strong players think when they are worse, under attack, or facing difficult decisions with limited time.

GM Swapnil Dhopade’s December Tactical Thursday course focuses on a highly practical and often underestimated aspect of chess improvement: calculation in the endgame.
Many players approach the endgame primarily as a theoretical phase. However, a central idea of this course is that a large number of endgames can be played almost entirely on calculation. Strong practical players frequently win endgames not because they know more theory, but because they calculate more accurately.
The course shifts the focus from memorizing positions to understanding how to calculate in simplified structures, where every tempo and every decision carries significant weight.

For over a century, the French Defense has captivated chess players worldwide. Yet understanding it—truly understanding it—requires more than memorizing engine evaluations. GM Pier Luigi Basso's Understand the French series takes a different approach: studying the games of history's greatest French specialists to reveal the strategic ideas, plans, and philosophy behind their play.

Doubled pawns appear in countless openings, yet most players never develop a consistent way to handle them. Most handle them by feel rather than by principle, which rarely holds up under pressure.

GM Ioannis Papaioannou built his latest course around exactly this problem. From the Opening to the Middlegame: Positions with Doubled Pawns is not a theoretical overview of doubled-pawn structures. It is a training system for developing structural judgment — the kind of understanding that replaces rules of thumb with genuine positional reasoning.

There is a persistent gap in chess improvement literature between what engines show and what players actually need to understand. The best move in a position and the right way to think about that position are often completely different things. This gap — between engine output and human decision-making — is precisely what GM Ioannis Papaioannou has been building a methodology to close, one edition at a time.
Inside Your Games – Edition 3 is not a course about perfect moves. It is a course about real thinking, in real games, under real conditions.
As GM Ioannis Papaioannou explains, the goal of this project is simple but rare: to show how a strong player evaluates positions, forms plans, and makes decisions — not how a chess engine assigns numbers to moves.

There is a recurring problem with how the French Defence is often taught: players memorize lines without ever developing a genuine feel for the structures. GM Pier Luigi Basso takes a fundamentally different approach in Understand the French Defence – Rubinstein's Legacy, the opening volume of a new multi-part series on Modern Chess. Instead of cataloguing engine-approved variations, the course asks a deeper question: what did the greatest French specialists in history actually understand, and how can their games reveal the opening's strategic core for us today?
The answer to that question begins, naturally, with Akiba Rubinstein.