I am reading Pawn Structure Chess right now. Here's the scoop. I have this book for about a year or so, skimmed it when it arrived, and then shelved it like so many others. A typical scenario I guess. I am an endgame player and until now have always spoken negatively about openings. Many authors such as Soltis himself, Dvoretsky, Aagaard, Giddins, and Nunn, just to name a few, have stated that (paraphrasing) openings are fashionable, or exhaustible. That is to say that what is here today may not be here tomorrow, but this in no way means that one cannot adopt any line of one's choosing and play it consistently. In Studying Chess Made Easy, also by Soltis, he pointed to the "paradoxical" (his word) relationship between memory and understanding i.e. between the openings, and the middlegame. He says 'what good is remembering how to reach a position, or tabiya, if when you get there you don't understand what is going on'? And conversely, what good is learning a middlegame position and its typical plans, if you don't remember how to get there in the first place? To my mind this is not paradoxical at all if the game is viewed as an organic whole. (I am not offering criticism of Soltis in any form. I am simply going to state that for me things took a different course. I have nothing but praise for Soltis and I recommend all of his books. I have six or seven. He is the only American chess author I read. He is a wonderful writer in general, and he really understands his audience). What Pawn Structure Chess does is familiarize you with typical methods of play that are organically connected to the opening. For example, I have (intuitively) played a Slav many times for both colors. But I did NOT know about Tchigorin's ...e5 Plan until Soltis brought it to my attention in Pawn Structure Chess. This 'plan' is well over a hundred years old! What does this mean? Well, it means that I have a lot of research to do. Sometimes, as it is this time for me, a chess book comes along at the right time and fills a gap. And so it is with Pawn Structure Chess. Basically the book is about typical methods of middlegame play based on pawn structure. This is why incidentally Pawn Structure Chess is not an openings book, but a middlegame manual. The layout is highly instructive, simple, and beautiful.
