Zlotnik's Middlegame Manual: Typical Structures and Strategic Manoeuvres

by Boris Zlotnik, Fabiano Caruana (Foreword)

If you want to improve your middlegame play, you will have to develop a FEEL for positions.

That’s what Boris Zlotnik has been stressing during his long and rich trainer’s career. Clicking through concrete variations (a popular pastime in the computer era) is not enough. To guide your thinking during a game you should be able to fall back on a reservoir of typical ideas and methods.

That is exactly what this book offers you: Zlotnik’s legendary study material about the middlegame, modernized, greatly extended and published in the English language for the first time.

As you familiarize yourself with the most important strategic ideas and manoeuvres in important basic opening structures, you will need less time to discover the clues in middlegame positions. You will find it so much easier to steer your game in the right direction after the opening has ended.

Zlotnik’s Middlegame Manual is accessible to a wide range of post-beginners and club players. It is your passport to a body of instructive material of unparalleled quality, collected during a lifetime of training and coaching chess.

A large collection of exercises, carefully chosen and didactically tuned, will help you drill what you have learned. With a foreword by Fabiano Caruana.

Genres: Chess

400 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2020

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the foreword by Fabiano Caruana:
"Boris Zlotnik was my coach in Madrid, Spain, from the Fall of 2004 to the Spring of 2007. It was during this period that my Elo rating increased from less than 2200 to more than 2500, thereby
completing my transition from a serious junior player to a very serious adult player."
And here are some bits from the Preface:
"In 1986... the 50,000 copies of the Russian edition was sold out in two weeks."
"A GM resident in Spain told me he earned quite a lot of money using this book in Russian in his classes."
"My main idea was to keep what was good from the previous edition, to bring up to date and expand the content, and to check it all using current analysis engines."
This book covers the next pawn-structures:
1) The IQP (isolani)
2) The Carlsbad structure
3) Symmetrical pawn structures (new chapter for English edition)

And the next typical methods of play:
4) Restricted mobility in the King's Indian Defense
5) Should we exchange the fianchettoed bishop?
6) The d5-square in the Sicilian (new chapter for English edition)

I remember (in 1988) when I was (as Black) easily outplayed in the King's Indian Defense against the former Yugoslavian junior champion GM Dragan Kosic, after the game he told me that he was just following the strategic recommendations from Zlotnik's Russian booklet.

All in all, I'm happy to revisit an old, slightly forgotten - but precious classic.

[Guirepa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect style to consolidate a bunch of relevant ideas without trying to overwhelm you. Good examples and a lightweighted pace (as the author talks quite a lot about other aspects about the games showcased in the book).