Prophylaxis | Chess Middlegames

Preventing your opponent’s plans – thinking and playing prophylactically, is just as important as creating your own plans.

Prophylaxis is a very important part of the thinking process in chess and it should and has to be applied on each and every move.

Most weaker players simply take it for granted. When you play h3 to prevent Bg4, pinning your f3 knight, you don’t think that you are a genius at preventing your opponent’s ideas; you do it automatically because you remember the pattern! If you had a monster processor in your head, you could do this for the middlegame too. We are, alas, human, so we don’t, and we have to think on each move to come up with ideas like that.

Prophylaxis is essential in all three stages of the game, but in the middlegame it’s much harder to apply it then in the opening or in the endgame.

The more pieces there are on the board, the harder is to consider all the options and all possible prophylactic move.

The best way to make sure you are not surprised by your opponent’s move too often is to ask yourself one question: What does my opponent want to do?

This is essential to playing good chess. If you know what your opponent is planning, there is a chance you can stop it! If you don’t, stopping it won’t even be an option!

There are two types of plans in chess – positive and negative plans. Positive plans are all those moves and ideas that we want to make happen during a game. Negative plans are prophylaxis – preventing our opponent from creating or making his positive plans happen.

Very often we will not have a clear positive plan we could follow, and we then try to devise a negative one instead, but that approach is wrong. We should first be worried about what opponent is doing. Try to make sure that whatever your opponent is planning to do isn’t too dangerous, or, better, put, that you have time for your own ideas. That way you will miss less, blunder less and play better!

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