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Want Victory? Prepare correctly!
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Want Victory? Prepare correctly!

Avatar of RikLikesTacos1
RikLikesTacos1
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To say planning is necessary to accomplish anything would be an understatement. If it wasn't for careful planning, and meticulous decision making the world would have descended to anarchy a long time ago. In order to have semblance of order and accomplishment, you first need to plan, and this is especially true in chess. 

If you were to enter a tournament without knowing what you were doing, you wouldn't do well, in fact your failure would be practically inevitable. In order to win a chess tournament, or come even close to doing it, you need to plan a lot, and you have to plan correctly. Planning is something you can take lightly, you simply can't study a few tactics, watch a few GothamChess shorts and expect to walk out with the grand prize, you have to carefully prepare your openings, study your middlegames, and prepare for absolutely everything you can come across.

At this point you may be wondering, "How DO you prepare correctly? What does that even mean?", well without further ado, let's dive right in to the fundamental of chess preparationbp

"By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail" ~ Benjamin Franklin. 

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Table of Contents

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Analyzing the Opening

A crucial part to preparing for major tournaments is knowing you openings. Playing e4 and just winging it afterwards just isn't going to cut it, in fact it's good to know up to at least 10 moves in your openings in every variation! For instance, I personally have 4 different analyses of different openings, for just the black piece, so I can safely counter the most common white openings, (King's pawn, Queen's gambit, Jobova London, and English).

However before analyzing an opening, you need to know what opening you want to play. For instance against e4, I play the French, but other options include the Caro-Kann, the Pirc, the Modern Defense, the Scandinavian, and I do advise against playing e5 as it's just good for white, but if you do then be prepared to learn the Scotch, the Ruy Lopez, the Italian Game, among several other openings that are generally just better for white.

To help you understand opening better, I have created a collection of analyses of various openings to give you and idea on how they're played. This way, if you decide to adapt one of these openings, you'll have somewhere to start, and on top of that have some basic knowledge on how it's played or learn about how opening ideas work in different types of openings (such as how certain openings allow kingside or queenside expansion, or how quickly a passive opening can become a tactical minefield, or a positional war).

1. The French Defense

Napoleon charges across the alps to attack Austrian forces in the "Battle of Marengo".

The French Defense may seem passive and just another opening that leads to a closed position, but it's actually quite interesting. It gives black a solid setup with starts slow but quickly leads to sharp counterattacks, and positional solidity. Black can easily challenge the center and put loads of pressure on white's pawns.

it's main drawback comes in that it blocks up black's light squared bishop, but while this seems like a big deal, in my opinion simply means it's saved for later when the position inevitably opens up. The bishop can also be used as a counter to the Milner-Barry Gambit, a popular variation which involves a poisoned pawn.

This is a perfect example on the tactical side of the French defense, so while may look bland at first it's actually a very fun opening that I love to play, due to it's tactical and positional modes, both of which are great for black!

2. The Blumenfeld Gambit

Get it? Because it's a blooming field, because it's the Blumenfeld?

The Blumenfeld Gambit is very tactical, and unorthodox opening, but personally think it's underrated, and just a upgraded version of the Old Benoni Defense. It's sharp, and It'll catch you opponents off guard, but it most certainly works!

It involves starting slow, and then playing sharp counterattacking strikes with the queenside pawns to completely switch up the position, catching your opponent off-guard, but even if they somehow know what they're doing it's still a very fun position for black and one I definitely recommend.

The Blumenfeld is a very underrated opening which most skip by, while it's true potential is yet to be revealed! Just look at the piece movement and positioning, it's crazy how chaotic this opening is. But that isn't it, as while it's very fun to see the Rubenstein and the other lines, that's not all, as in addition to all of the sublines there are, if white takes early, then it transposes into a very fun variation of the Benoni Defense!

The Blumenfeld is just a truly insane opening with loads of tactical opportunities from both sides, and just a fun variation to play, but if you're more into positional games I recommend learning the Semi-Slav. I personally think it's pretty self explanatory, especially if you're familiar with Queen's Gambit, but if you like the idea of a nice positional pawn set up with short positional improvements, it's a good opening for you

3. The Ruy Lopez

Ruy López de Segura, A Spanish writer,
who loved playing chess. He invented the Ruy Lopez!

The Ruy Lopez is a classic opening, and one that really shows why you shouldn't play e5 as black.  It starts with e4 e5, followed by the classic development of knights before the bishop SWOOPS in and instantly attacks their knight. This opening may look simple at first glance, but upon closer inspection you'll see that even the mainline is filled with tricks and twists for both sides of the board! 

 However all these traps aside, if your opponent is smart, and doesn't go off theory, then you still have to know how to play it correctly. After the Rio Gambit in the Berlin variation, if your opponent declines the "free" pawn, the game could go to various different positions.
The Ruy Lopez is a tough opening to play but if you take the time practice all the variations, and your opponent allows you to play the opening, it can be a whole lot of fun! That being said, what if your opponent doesn't allow it?
Another obstacle with learning the Ruy Lopez is that it only comes up if the opponent plays e5. In many tournaments, and even online games at the higher levels, people will start to adapt more, and are less and less likely to play e5, and I'm not saying it doesn't come up, because it certainly still does, it's just that you won't always get to use it, meaning when playing the Ruy Lopez you'll also need to know how to counter the other e4 variants like Sicilian, French, Pirc, Indian, and so on. But if you're willing to take that effort, then I do recommend trying out the Ruy Lopez if you can!

One more thing before moving on to the next section, there's one more thing you need to keep in mind when analyzing openings, and that's to expect the unexpected. When making your analysis, just studying all the mainlines, and some variations won't work. When I talked about the blumenfeld, I mentioned that you could end up with an even better advantage if the opponents slips up, but that's only going to happened if you predict that slip up before hand, if you accounted for every move your opponent might think is good, even if it isn't or your also stuck without any theory and likely won't know how to punish your opponent. And while that is the ideal case, you probably can't memorize that many lines all the time, so it's better to have lines for more common mistakes which you can learn through practice games, and know the purpose of every move for the rest. For instance if you know a certain move is crucial for your opponent and they miss it, if you know the reason they needed to play said move, you can exploit it.

Another key thing to understand tactical openings like the Ruy Lopez and even the Blumenfeld Gambit is the ulterior motives behind each tactics. See, both of these openings are tactical, but they're tactical in very different ways
The Blumenfeld Gambit is tactical because of it's chaotic nature, where the piece's roles are redefined, and pawns are flung to get the quicker development and more solid position, it's about sacrificing to create cracks which is exploited by the rapid development.
On the other hand the Ruy Lopez is much more calm, with normal development, and instead of throwing pawns to make weaknesses, it lays down traps, in fact there's so many traps you can't tell what's a blunder and what's a calculated trap, without performing intense calculations in your head.
Both of them sacrifice pieces for ulterior motives with loads of ideas form both sides, making them tactical, but they way they do it, and the specific reasons and ideas are unique. Understanding these ulterior motives are very important to all openings in general, as it helps prepare for the rest of the game, and punish your opponent for going off-theory as I talked about earlier. In essence what you can take away from this section is that you need to know why you're making your moves, why each move you make and your opponent makes is important, whether your opening is a chaotic tactical, a calculated tactical, a mixture of both, maybe even positional, you just have to know the purpose of everything, and how things are supposed to go.
And with that said, it's time to move on to the next section: Studying the middlegame!
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Studying Middlegame Patterns

How the middlegame is played depends on the opening, for instance, if you were to play the Blumenfeld gambit, it's more likely you end up in a tactical middlegame, so it's good to review your tactics and study traps, study sacrificing, and develop and attacking mindset by learning how to effectively attack the king (pawnstorms, batteries). On the other hand if you learned the french, you'll need to study for semi-open positions, so learning when to maintain pawn tension, how to main good pawn structure, and good times and ways for pawn breaks, as well as positioning you pieces effectively are good target for things to analyze. While the opening you play does matter when deciding which concepts you should focus the most on, it can never hurt to learn the basics, and have a fundamental understanding of things, so for this section of the blog, I will briefly be going over various middlegame concepts.

Fundamental Concept 1: Positioning your pieces

Knowing how to position you pieces is arguably one of the most important skill in chess. In order to win a chess game, you have to be getting the most out all of your pieces in order to effectively make attacks, adequately cover for all you opponents attacks, and restrict your opponent as much as possible while enabling you own. Getting you pieces into the action, and onto good squares is so important, many popular openings involve sacrificing 2 or more pawns in order to get more development at piece activity, so it's very important to know where to put your pieces.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the saying "knights on the rim are grim". This is generally true, although there's obviously some exceptions (like certain lines in the reti). However where you place the knight can still vary quite a lot in the french defense the knight often temporarily visits the edge before rerouting to f5. 

Similarly in many openings the knight doesn't always go to the traditional square of right infront of the f and/or c pawns, so it's important to know where you should move it. In the middlegame, it can be used to set up devious fork traps, if you can set it up, which can be tricky, but not impossible, and very satisfying to pull of. It can come in clutch in the endgame with some unexpected forks to turn the game on it's head, and win a completely equal or even lost position. It's surprising how many times people fall for knight forks in the endgame, but the knight is a very sneaky piece, so it's hard to see it coming. 
The bishop is a sniper, and that's no surprise. It may not be as sneaky as the knight, but it can still do many things. For one bishops are the best support for knights in their sneaky endeavors, as they can work together with a knight to target defended squares. It's long range, and diagonal domination allows for something called fianchettoing, which involves pushing the b or g pawn 1 square forward and then putting the bishop in that square, where it can quietly snipe pieces from afar, while often providing valuable protection to the castled king. It's king and rook forks are invaluable, it can pull of crazy skeweres, and of course there's this very common rook trap that's best done with a bishop
Moving on to the rooks. The rooks may not be as valuable in the opening or that important in the middlegame as they truly shine in the endgame, but there are some uncommon circumstances where a rook can be useful. In a tactic called rook lift, sometimes you can move the a or h-pawn up 2 squares and the lift you rook up to the g file and align it with your queen to put pressure on the castled king. This, of course can only be done late in the middlegame, and if you castled long, while your opponent castled short or vice versa, but it has it's uses, and can be a crucial way to add an attacker to an offensive setup.
For instance, in this position white can move the rook up and then behind the queen to add pressure to the opposing king. On top of rook lifts, after the other pieces have been developed, typically if the position has opened up the rooks can take control of semi-open or open files and put pressure on the opposing pieces. So while the rook is best used in the endgame, it's not completely useless in the middlegame, and never should be underestimated.
Another major piece is the queen. The queen is very powerful and has many ways of using it. It can be used as an anchor the holds the position together by providing crucial defense, or an offensive powerhouse that can make powerful attacks and combine with other pieces to set checkmate threats and put loads of pressure on the opponent. However you want to use the queen, just be careful not to fall for any tricks and lose it, and make sure you activate at the right time, and not keep it stuck, but as open and free as possible
Fundamental Concept 2: Keeping the king safe
King safety is extremely important and crucial to not losing a chess match. You can be up 20 points in material, but if your king is exposed, none of that could matter, as all it takes is on or 2 coordinated pieces to checkmate an unsafe king. Both sides of the board has several pieces at their disposal to checkmate the king so it's very important that the king always has good protection and is being attacked, or left vulnerable to enemy forces. This is why it's a good idea to wait 8 or 9 moves to castle to prevent being pawnstormed and left exposed to attack. You must always keep an eye out for sacrifices that might lead to powerful attacks that end with you having to lose lots of material to defend it, or even getting checkmated. The king should only come out in the endgame when there is very few pieces left and the pawns and rooks are the dominant pieces on the board, but until then it should be nice and safe in a wall of pawns with pieces positioned near it, where they can easily defend any attack.
Fundamental Concept 3: Good pawn structure
Pawn structure is very important, good pawn structure can allow you to restrict your opponents pieces, and build huge pawn chains that really mess with you opponents position.  Doubled pawns (2 pawns in the same rank), or isolated pawns ( a pawn that isn't adjacent to any pawns), are weaknesses because they can't be protected easily and are often lost quickly int he endgame. This is why when you get such pawns you should trade them off as soon as you can, as it could really bite you in the future. On top of that good pawn structures make it easier to defend you pieces, keep your king safe, and move all your pieces around, as the pawns have more mobility and security without the problems of being doubled or isolated. You can make huge pawn chains that are very hard to get rid off, and just grab loads of space at every opportunity. Pawn structure is a very crucial part of every chess match.
In conclusion, how the middlegame goes depends on the opening played, but there are always core concepts and fundamental that are good to know, and it's important to always keep them in mind, however don't let that be the only thing you studied, as once again it's important to know all the niche features, and ins and outs of you specific openings, as which opening you play can heavily vary what things you need to prioritize the most.
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Practice Makes Perfect

Finally all that needs to be said, is that practice makes perfect. You aren't going to be able to study everything about the middlegame of you opening in one day. You can't make a giant complete repertoire of you opening and know the ins and outs of it instantly. Your going to get better and better at your opening as you play it and get used to it, until all the tactics come flowing in like instinct. In essence, it's really just about recognizing the patterns, knowing the openings, and being able to calculate all the necessary lines, and just play chess to your best ability. But who am I to say all this. Maybe the really chess was the friends we made along the way.

Thanks for reading this blog, have a great day, and until next time, happy chessing!bq

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