From Mark Weeks,
Your Guide to Chess.
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Most chess games are won and lost in the middle game, where your imagination is your greatest ally. Your imagination will be even more powerful if you possess the fundamentals of chess knowledge.

Improve Your Middle Game

• Patterns : Pattern recognition is one of the skills that makes a master. It's not inherent; it's learned. Why is one chess player a struggling club player and another a master?
  
  
• Combinations : 'The Middle Game is chess in excelsis, the most beautiful part of the game, in which a lively imagination can exercise itself most fully and creatively in conjuring up magnificent combinations.' - Tarrasch
  
  
• Plans : 'The games of the the great masters are not played by single moves, but by concerted plans of attack and defence.' - Capablanca

First Principles of Tactics

• Double attacks : Tactics start to flow when one move does two or more things. For a deeper look into double attacks, our guide is Chess Tactics for Advanced Players by Yuri Averbakh. Don't be put off by the word advanced. Averbakh's advice is for everyone!
  
  
• Open lines : Open lines are the streets and roads the line pieces use to move around a chessboard. Paul Morphy showed us that tactics and combinations have a positional basis. He used pieces placed on open lines to strike quickly and decisively at his opponent's weaknesses.
  
  
• King safety : The loss of the King means loss of the game. The player whose King is well protected has a big advantage over an opponent whose King is poorly protected. Here's the why, when, and where to castle.

Positional Play

• Pawn Structure : (Q) What makes the Pawn structure so important for developing a plan? (A) Because it evolves slowly and a single aspect of that structure can remain fixed for many moves, sometimes for the remainder of the game. Some types of Pawn structure are so common that they have names.
  
  
• Piece Placement : 'Play with your Pieces, not with your Pawns!' Here are some elements of piece play which are in the arsenal of every good player. Our guide is Aron Nimzovitch, the author of My System.
  
  
• Kasparov - X3D Fritz, New York, 2003 : Explaining positional play in a game between Kasparov and a computer is not an easy task. First, computers are not known for their positional play. Second, Kasparov's play is so subtle and complex that it is often beyond explanation. Let's not let that stop us!