Book excerpt: AWARDS: Shortlisted for the Guardian Chess Book of the Year Award Runner-up for the English Chess Federation 2009 Book of the Year Award CHESS Magazine: Best Books of 2009 Back in Print! Ever wondered why grandmasters take only seconds to see what’s really going on in a chess position? It’s all about structures, as Grandmaster Ivan Sokolov explains in this groundbreaking book. ‘Winning Chess Middlegames’ addresses the often ignored but extremely important topic of pawn structures, divided into four main types: doubled pawns, isolated pawns, hanging pawns and pawn majorities. With its highly accessible verbal explanations and deep analyses of top-level games, this book helps you to solve the basic problems of the middlegame: space, tension and initiative. Club players studying this book will:greatly enhance their middlegame skills, develop an accurate feeling as to which particular positions suit their style and acquire new strategic and practical opening knowledge. Ivan Sokolov explains matters profoundly, honestly and objectively including lots of inside stories from top-level chess, neither sparing his colleague grandmasters nor himself in his comments. With a foreword by British Grandmaster Michael Adams.