I have been meaning to post something about The Middlegame in Chess by Fine. First is a warning: it has horrible diagram errors! It's obvious that nobody proofread the modern algebraic notation closely, and combined with some pieces out of place it's screwy. I have figured out what moves it was supposed to describe, and it's not a huge problem if I get stumped as most examples are taken from the games of world famous players. The section on mate combinations is vast and much more difficult than I anticipated. This section is organized by kinds of weakened pawns around your opponent's King patterns, and the master games where they capitalize on that in different ways.

I chose to skim over those more difficult parts this time through the book in order to get to the non-mate tactics. I did this because I really help in strengthening my middlegame. I haven't gotten far in this section, but it looks to covers beginner to advanced situations, with some pages taking 15-30 minutes to understand. I almost think of this as a 1950s book version of what CT-Art is for computers today (roughly). All in all, this is a book I expect I will read multiple times.

TCT Results	Circle 1	Circle 2	Circle 3	Circle 4
Step 1	97%	99%	99%	100%r
Step 2	93%	96%	95%	97%
Step 3	93%	97%	97%	96%
Step 4	80%	86%	90%	92%
Step 5	74%	77%	83%	87%*

Posted at 5:32 PM. Click to see this post's 4 comment(s).