School of Chess Excellence 3: Strategic Play

This third volume in Mark Dvoretsky’s course is devoted to questions of strategy, and is aimed at improving the reader’s positional understanding. The author also examines a number of positions that lie on the boundary between the middlegame and endgame. As in the other books of the series, he uses examples from his own games and those of his pupils, together with original analyses of episodes from other player’s games. My books may or may not be liked, but it is unlikely that they could have been any different. I demonstrate examples that are memorable to me in the way that I myself see them, and I describe the chess and psychological mechanisms in the same way that I explain them in lessons to my pupils. I am sure that an attempt to deliberately correct, and artificially simplify the material would have led to a significant lowering of its quality, and a distortion of the chess patterns generated in the mind of the author, and, I hope, subsequently also in the mind of the reader … – Mark Dvoretsky