FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES



The Learn Your Chess Classics (from now on referred to as LYCC) book series is aimed at a wide range of players, from post-beginners in search of strategic footings to experts or even masters who want the most efficient plan to mastery in a specific pawn structure.



Each chapter narrates the main characters of the chess plot, the key squares in the battle and how to exploit them, typical pawn breaks, maneuvring of pieces, trades.

In short, each book in this series is a fully-fledged strategic manual on how to understand and play well the pawn formation studied.



Once the magistral part of the book ends, the reader can test his grasp of the material and go beyond it through tests that feature more than a hundred positions, all based on master or grandmaster practice.



In general, every example in those books is selected with the intention to further the student's questioning of our principles. Indeed, "trust, but check" is an important mantra for any person aiming to improve his or her mastery of a subject.



LYCC has the ambition of becoming the reference of strategic exercise books, an area that, excepting Jacob Aagaard and Mark Dvoretsky's oeuvre, has not always given us the highest satisfaction. One might argue that those books are still too hard for the average player.



FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE



The book you have before you was long in the making. Indeed, I collected, in a manner very similar to Lazslo Polgar in his Middlegames and Endgames books, the full instructive content of games played in the Stonewall structure.



Those include all typical maneuvres, ideas, structural alterations and tactics that can be used in the Stonewall. Now this is not only an opening book : I do not care about move orders from the start of the game or the latest rinkle of theory. At least not in this issue. My next book in this series will be Learn Your Chess Classics : A Complete Dutch Repertoire. There I will investigate all ways to play the Dutch, from Stonewall to Classical to Leningrad.



Now this does not mean that the Stonewall structure is limited to Dutch players. In fact, many of the examples taken here come from either the Queen's Indian or the Queen's Gambit Declined, where f5 was played at a later date. It is also possible to sail through the Slav, again via a timely f5, mostly when White is already committed to not putting his light-squared bishop on g2.



Back to the basics. If you had absolutely no idea about what this structure consisted in, the book cover must have alerted your senses by this point. Black is erecting a triangle d5-e6-f5 against White's centre represented by the d4-c4 duo. The battles you will see in this book will show you how the whole board can be a theater of action in this deceptively dynamic structure.



To illustrate this, we'll first study captures on the system's two holes in the centre, namely e5 and e4, followed by other structural decisions, then piece play will be discussed. I'll show you some typical endgames for this structure before going into a hundred-plus exercises test.



This book can be used for at least two purposes : the improving student can derive good and bad patterns of play in the Stonewall and improve his judgement of those positions. He can even build a repertoire based on those observations, in case he is too impatient to wait for the next installment of this series. The second use is related to trainers : the diagrams and exercises offered here allow for several hours of pinpointed questioning of a student with decent variety. It is my opinion that each chapter can fully serve a two to three hours intensive course to a level as high as 2200. In fact, I did use this content for that exact purpose with students of that level.