Video completed: The Golden Rules of Chess Strategy by Mihail Marin

  

I recently completed The Golden Rules of Chess Strategy by GM Mihail Marin, as part of my "Back to Basics" study series. Although this is one of ChessBase's shorter "60 Minutes" video products and the content description does seem fundamental at first glance - how to strategically organize placement of the pieces - the analysis and guidance provided by Marin is at a fairly complex level; this is probably not a surprise to those familiar with his theoretical products. However, the "golden rules" of the middlegame for dynamic piece placement are themselves universal, and can be recognized in our own games, even if the product's examples are not exactly pitched at the beginner level. 

You can see a description of the contents in the below screenshot, as well as in a list at the above ChessBase link.

As shown above, the videos are divided into three sections:

• The first one focuses on the idea of achieving optimal piece placement prior to effectively executing a strategic plan. Marin uses the concept of piece harmony to describe how they are working together, ideally at their maximal/most harmonious level. He offers examples from three different high-level games, in which the primary plan would fail if extra piece(s) were not brought into play, sometimes in non-obvious ways. At a more complex strategic level, this idea reflects the "always seek to improve your worst piece" general middlegame principle. The examples in this section (and subsequent ones) illustrate a sophisticated strategic approach of envisioning what you want to accomplish, then working backwards from that to calculate where the pieces can be placed to best execute the idea. Sometimes this means they need to move out of the way proactively from the opponent's threats, thereby gaining you a tempo in subsequent calculations, rather than doing something directly threatening. 
• The second section examines the power of looking for moves that do multiple things at once, in particular when they create more than one threat at a time. Here Marin is not talking about double attacks - he even states this in the video - although that is the most basic tactical expression of the idea, such as with a knight fork. Instead he looks at moves that have multiple different positional threats - although threatening material gain could be one of the ideas - that make it more difficult for the opponent to block all of them. There is some synergy of ideas with the first section, in terms of describing optimal piece placements and similar examples of finding retreats (for bishops and the queen) that can do multiple things for the position. These "backwards" type moves are typically harder to spot and we may also think (consciously or unconsciously) that retreating a piece is normally bad, when in fact the piece can become more powerful as a result, and/or enable the success of other pieces.
• The third section shifts perspective to the player defending against threats. As Marin notes in the introduction, one should look for an economy of force in defense - in other words, don't move pieces to over-defend weaknesses or only passively confront your opponent's threats. Rather, if you can, use just the right amount of defensive action to leave yourself more flexibility and opportunities for counterplay. The power of preparatory moves, which is also a theme in the first section in order to enable the main strategic idea in a position, is further demonstrated here, along with the idea of countering threats by following your own "dream plan" if you can.

Marin chops through many of the move sequences rather quickly, so this is definitely not a "move-by-move" type product. Neither does he explain how to find the correct plan in the first place during the middlegame, although he discusses what the principal ideas are for the players in each initial game position. Periodically he makes some useful comments about how to conduct practical calculation of variations during a game, in contrast with some of the longer analytic lines presented. This is a useful distinction and makes it explicit how we (including professional players) should not expect to be able to fully solve and analyze complex lines to the end while at the board. Rather, we need to confirm moves do not lose and also appear to be the best available, then continue refining our calculations as the game continues.

Thanks to Marin's deep level of theoretical knowledge, along with his long study and evident love and enthusiasm for chess, this thoughtful discussion of core middlegame principles and the practical illustrations contained in this video are worth the study time. Just don't expect to keep up with every click of his mouse on the board, or to automatically achieve the same depth of strategic vision (and calculation) as the GM-level players in the examples. As usual with ChessBase products the games are also available in an accompanying database with some annotations by Marin, so that can be a supplemental method of study for those who want to go over them at leisure.