Enc of Middlegames 1.0

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Encyclopedia of MIDDLEGAME 1.0 for Windows 95/NT

Reviewed in 1998

Middlegames is new training software from the manufacturers of Chess Assistant. It's primary focus is to instruct the user on strategic and tactical ideas present in the middlegame, for various popular openings. The program operates in one of several modes:

1. Study - Here the user is presented with 600+ examples of typical ides for the variations he or she is studying. These include typical piece maneuvers, pawn thrusts, and long range plans (i.e. king-side attack, etc.). The examples include a fair amount of text commentary, variations, and graphical highlights on the board.
2. Practice - The user is given a set of exercises to solve. The exercises are graded by ELO, and your performance is tracked by various charts that you can display. This results in a kind of 'rate my play' feature that many people are interested in.
3. Tests - This mode is similar to practice mode, except the user has less control over which exercises are solved.
4. Typical positions - In this mode, 400+ typical positions arising from the opening are displayed, and you can use the built-in chess playing program (called Dragon) as an opponent. You can easily modify the time controls for the dragon engine. You can also use Hiarcs, MChess Pro, and Rebel to play against (assuming you have them).

There are more than 1000 exercises for the practice and test modes. Study mode is the only mode in which you can access information by sub-variation name, i.e. you can look at typical methods of play for the Breyer Variation of the Ruy Lopez. However, while in the practice mode (for instance), all Ruy Lopez exercises are grouped together.

I would recommend that you read my review of STRATEGY for information on the basic structure of this software. Indeed, there are many similarities in operation between STRATEGY, STUDIES and MIDDLEGAMES.

Coverage of the King's Indian Defence, French and Ruy Lopez is pretty thorough. It is difficult for me to comment on some of the other openings, because I do not play them. What I will do is list the opening variations covered below:

Scotch Game	Ruy Lopez	Caro-Kann	French	Benko Gambit
Sicilian (no dragon)	English	Dutch	Catalan
Slav	Nimzo-indian	Gruenfeld	King's Indian defense

Coverage is given for both the white and black sides of each opening.

When looking at the material pertaining to the openings I play, I found that there were a number of good ideas presented by the program. The examples concentrate on typical piece maneuvers and thematic pawn thrusts. The training/test modes contain a mix of positions where a tactical or 'positional' move may be required. In some questions, you must employ tactics to accomplish a strategic objective. You are not told in advance what kind of move should be made, which is good.

There are very few negative things to say about this program. The manual is a bit sparse, but I will be surprised if you need to look at it more than once or twice. While all openings are not covered by the program, I feel that it is totally unreasonable to expect this to be so. Chess Assistant has done a good job of covering many of the major systems, especially the classical variations.

I was favorably impressed with this program. I picked up some new ideas from it. Unless you are an IM or GM, you will also. The program costs about as much as three chess books, and I feel that there is more material than that in the program. I would especially recommend it if you have a bunch of opening books containing a mass of variations, with little in the way of ideas, and strategic plans - MIDDLEGAMES will do a good job of 'filling in the holes'.

Note that I have more reviews of Convekta software at my new site: www.chessassistance.com.

Copy Protection

Must have CD to install. The CD may also needed at some point afterwards for refueling, as in other Chess Assistant instructional programs.