Strategic Plans: 75 Modern Battles

Russian MI Maxim Chetverik has written a strategy book containing 75 deeply annotated positional games that show players how to design plans to handle a number of key strategic issues, such as when to open the position, how to activate the pawn chain, how to make positional sacrifices and many others. Unlike most other textbooks, strategic plans are seen as battles in which each player's plans collide, and Maxim analyzes why a plan stands out.

Also, unlike most of the other books, all the example games are drawn from 21st century grandmaster games, some were played in 2018, and consider plans from the initial stage. This makes the book especially valuable for players who wish to better understand the strategies to which the openings they play may lead, considering that the author is an expert in openings with ten published openings books. Most of the games are played by elite grandmasters, including Carlsen, Caruana, Anand, Kramnik, Karjakin, Giri, So, Vachier-Lagrave, Aronian, Mamedyarov, Nakamura, Gelfand, Svidler, Ivanchuk, Shirov, Leko, J. Polgar, Topalov, Kamsky, Morozevich, Korchnoi and Spassky.

Chetverik introduces and illustrates the concepts of plans, which provide a simple structural framework for players looking to design plans in their own games. The macroplane is the specific way to achieve the required result (usually a victory), for example, the successful exploitation of a majority of pawns on the queen's flank. The microplane is a way of solving a local problem that involves several movements, such as transferring a Knight from a bad box to a good one. Ideally, a macroplane is a chain of sequentially and carefully calculated microplanes.

This book is mainly aimed at strong club players who wish to improve. The recommended Elo range is approximately 1,800 - 2,200, although, of course, it may be of interest to players a little lower and a little higher than this range.