Middlegames

Chess books on strategy, positional play, tactical play, and puzzle collections. They are subdivided into these four categories for easier navigation. The distinction between strategy and positional play may be slightly uncommon: strategy refers to piece plan, planning, and long-term thinking, while positional play mostly refers to pawn structures and pawn play. In other places, and in many books, those two are intertwined and often there’s no difference between them. Books on tactics include those that talk about how to calculate rather than focusing on problem solving. Those in the puzzles and studies section are devoted purely to problems and collections of puzzles.