The Problem of Strategy and Planning
Recently, I was asked by an aspiring player for a book recommendation about strategy. Their problem, as they describe it, was that they know what to do in the opening, and they're pretty good at tactics, but they don't know what to do when they reach the end of the opening and don't know how to continue.
This seems to be a common problem among post-beginners (I remember struggling with this myself), so I gave the problem some serious thought. I'll try to explain the advice I gave this player as best I can because it's not a simple one.
The issue is that the problem of "planning" (which in chess has come to mean the phase between the opening and the middlegame) is a difficult one that even the best players struggle with.
Let me first be precise about what I mean by "planning." It is what you do at the moment that you've essentially completed all your opening objectives (namely, development and king safety) and now have to decide how you're going to go about turning your position into a win.
I could name books that try to deal with this specific topic. The example that most directly deals with this question is Alexey Suetin's Plan Like a Grandmaster. Other books, like Max Euwe's Judgement and Planning in Chess and Peter Romanovsky's Chess Middlegame Planning, say that they're trying to deal with this phase of the game. Some books even state explicitly in the title that they are trying to solve the phase after the opening, like Neil McDonald's Chess Success: Planning After the Opening. However, most of the time, these books really become about the standard list of positional imbalances you find in any modern chess strategy book. This is for a good reason, as we'll explain in the coming paragraphs.
I could not recommend these books to my aspiring friend because all of these books would be too difficult for people at the level where the problem of planning starts to become pronounced. That is because in the final analysis, what all these books end up saying is that the way you plan is to analyze the positional imbalances and formulate your plan to capitalize on those imbalances. For beginners, It makes no sense to talk about planning if you don't understand positional imbalances. The first step is to learn to recognize these imbalances (like better development, more space, better control over a key square or file, or better king safety).
In my own experience, I never found a book that gave me the answer to how to plan. Instead, what happened was that I became more familiar with imbalances and weaknesses, and the problem seemed to have gone away on its own. Most of the time, plans are pretty self-evident and simply emanate from the demands of the position. What happened was that as I became more familiar with positional imbalances, planning started becoming more logical to me. I would guess that most strong players who have reached a certain level of chess maturity will tell you that their plans come to them in the same way.
This insight becomes clear when you compare Jeremy Silman's Third and Fourth Editions of Reassess Your Chess. In the Third edition, Silman presents a method of planning which involves evaluating the imbalances, deciding which side of the board you have an advantage on, choosing candidate moves that utilize those imbalances, and calculating the outcomes of those candidate moves. In the Fourth Edition, Silman largely abandons that approach. On page 13 of the Fourth Edition, he comes out and says it explicitly:
...the passage of time drastically changed my view about the practicality of any complex system of planning... Though I no longer have faith in convoluted planning systems, I have retained the firm belief that fully understanding the imbalances is 100% attainable... This book trains you to recognize the imbalances in any board situation, to understand what each imbalance offers, and to know how to make use of it or diffuse it... Once you gain this knowledge and integrate it into your play, you'll find that something surprising happens: the imbalances alone will often "tell" you what to do...
Jeremy came to the same realization with his students as I did about my own games. You can't really teach novice players how to plan. At the higher levels, perhaps, you can deliberately train planning skills. But for post-beginners, you have to teach them about positional imbalances, and the plans emerge on their own.
This explains why many of those classic books I listed above, like Euwe's Judgement and Planning in Chess or Romanovsky's Chess Middlegame Planning, appear just to be books about positional imbalances. That's because any discussion of planning has to start with understanding imbalances in positions.
Therefore, from now on, when I am asked by aspiring players to recommend a book about how to plan, or they tell me that they are at a loss of what to do when the opening ends and the middlegame begins, I will recommend that they learn and understand positional imbalances from books like Michael Stean's Simple Chess or Jeremy Silman's Reassess Your Chess. The planning will come on its own.
