Middlegame Tactics
Strategic middlegame concepts: piece activity, open files, space, pawn weaknesses, and attack techniques.
Piece Activity
In this position, black's pieces are about to get active if played right. In this position e5 square is a good place ta have a knight.
White has a strong e5 pawn that controls important squares in blacks camp. Black is a pawn up. Black has very weak dark squares due to missing his dark squared bishop combined with the pawn on e5. Rerouting our bad bishop to a3 would make it a monster bishop!
In this position, white played what's called a wing gambit and sacrificed the b and a pawn. Black being greedy, accepted all of the gambited pawns. White continued development and got a pretty nice position. Black here in search for counterplay, played the move c6.
Bishop on d6 is stopping black from castling. Black king is now in a very vulnerable position.
Sacrifices & Attacks
Open files can be very powerful. In this position black has an open file directly looking at white's king,
This knight sacrifice is the beginning of a series of sacrifices which ultimately leads to the black king being checkmated.
White here went on a crushing attack, sacrifing a bishop. Now black's king is stuck in the corner. White can take advantage of that with the move Rd3!
Positional Tactics
In this position, white's knight on d2 is only protected by one piece: the king. We can take advantage of that by playing the move Bb4
Tunnelvision is when a player doesn't think about the opponent's threats. In this game played between two amateur players, black played the move Bb7
Here Black just played the move d5, trying to capture the c4 pawn. We have the special move "en passant" to capture the pawn!
Pawn structures are a very underrated concepts in the game of chess. In this position we can see that Black has an isolated d pawn. In this position, Black's bishop is forced to always defence the d pawn.
Tactical Combinations
In this position, Black's king is trapped in the corner. White would wish to play b6 and then Nc7 but the King has the legal b8 escape square. We can remove b8 and remove a key defender of b6 by playing the move Qb8!!
When attacking you should always look at what pieces are defending the king. In this case we can see that Black's king is only protected by the Black's Queen, we can use the deflection tactic to deviate Black's queen with the move Rh2
In this position white is down a rook for a queen. If White could place a knight on e7 it would be a fork and white could equalize, so White in this game plays the move Re8
In this last example, the queen is the only piece protecting the d7 knight, can you also notice White's battery pointed at the knight? In this case we need to play an interference tactic starting with Bg4
What tactic is used here?
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