Fra forfatterens forord

Throughout my chess career, I have always found it interesting to study how the world champions approach the middlegame, and how greatly the approach differs from champion to champion.

Two years ago, I had the idea to write a series of middlegame books on the world champions and their respective middlegame approaches – to have players such as Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand and Carlsen in the series. Whether this idea will ever be fully realized, I frankly do not know, but I have decided to start with the current World Champion, Magnus Carlsen.

Initially my plan was to write just one book on Magnus, but during the process I realized that in that case many interesting middlegame themes would have to be omitted. The plan has changed, and now there will be two books, the second volume coming out in Spring 2022. While writing this book, I came to some pretty clear opinions about what Magnus likes and dislikes in the middlegame.

Strengths:

• Space advantage – Magnus loves having a space advantage in general.
• Pawn breaks – Magnus loves to have pawn breaks available.
• Space advantage in a fixed pawn structure – when holding a space advantage, pawn breaks are not necessarily needed!
• Minor sacrifices – you rarely see Magnus ‘sacrificing the house’, usually he opts for a minor sacrifice. This minor sacrifice, usually a pawn but occasionally more, sometimes corresponds to the requirements of the position and sometimes aims to unbalance the opponent.
• Strong self-confidence – Magnus is excellent at giving his opponents opportunities to go wrong. However, to take the decision to unbalance the situation, one’s level of self-confidence needs to be very high. In this respect Magnus has (in my view) ‘stolen’ a lot from Fischer!
• Pattern recognition and knowledge application – Magnus is also excellent at this.
• Finding the best chances in inferior/difficult situations – Magnus is often in trouble, but rarely loses.

Weaknesses (all relative to his high-standard!):

• Positions with less space in general, and definitely positions with less space and no pawn breaks.
• Passive positions.
• Chaotic Tal-like positions. In Tal-like positions, pattern recognition has limited to no value. A person who handles those types of positions well – and is able to impose them on Magnus – would hold the keys to the World Championship!