Middlegame Encyclopedia

MIDDLEGAME ENCYCLOPEDIA IN XIANGQI

488 annotated middlegame positions, 726 notes in English, Vietnamese and Chinese, a Learn mode and a neural network engine, entirely offline.

布局有谱，残局有典，中局无谱. The opening has its manuals. The endgame has its classics. The middlegame has nothing.

Opening theory fills encyclopaedias and the endgame has been catalogued since the Ming dynasty. Then the pieces touch and the books stop, and what follows decides almost every game between players of similar strength. This app is that list.

THE OLD RULE

弃子须要得先，捉子莫教落后. When you give a piece away, be sure you gain the initiative. When you go hunting a piece, do not fall behind. That is from 橘中秘, printed in 1632, and still quoted at the board today. Three of the six parts here are about giving material away on purpose. One whole part is about taking it and getting away with it.

THE SIX PARTS

• Brilliant Mates by Chariot Sacrifice (弃车妙杀), 52 positions, 289 notes. Giving up the strongest piece on the board, with the reason visible each time. The first is dated 1956.


• Middlegame Mating Methods (中局杀法), 153 positions. Not puzzles but a taxonomy: thirty one named mating structures, each position filed by what you did to the defence and how the mate then arrived.


• Appreciating Practical Middlegames (实战中局欣赏), 99 positions. The oldest is Guangzhou, 1920, against Feng Jingru, one of the Four Kings of South China. Players from Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia and Thailand appear.


• Middlegame Chariot Sacrifices (中局献车), 14 positions, 52 notes. Short, dense and harder: the Chariot given up to break a blockade rather than to mate.


• The Essence of Tactics (战术精华), 20 positions, 163 notes. Eight notes per position. Number eighteen mates with Horse and Cannon and no Chariot at all.


• Winning by Capturing Material (夺子取胜), 150 dated tournament games, 1962 to 2001. Anybody can be taught to give a Chariot away. Knowing when to simply take it is what separates a strong player from a good one.

THE PLAYERS

Hu Ronghua, fourteen times national champion, appears in twenty four games; Li Laiqun seventeen, Xu Yinchuan fifteen, Lu Qin thirteen, Xu Tianhong eleven, Zhao Guorong ten. Forty three are meetings between national champions. Xu Yinchuan against Hu Ronghua in 2000 is the generational handover in one game.

WHAT IS INSIDE

• 488 positions in 6 parts: 52, 153, 99, 14, 20 and 150.


• 11,167 half moves of main line, plus 1,745 more in 352 side variations.


• 726 annotated points across 205 positions, each in Chinese, English and Vietnamese.


• 206 dated tournament games, from 1920 to 2001, and 195 named players.

HOW YOU STUDY IT

• Browse and replay. Four dropdowns put you on the board, and notes surface at the moves that carry them.


• Learn. A board where nothing moves by itself. You take both sides by hand and must find the book move yourself, with optional arrows.


• Go off book. Play the move the annotator did not consider, explore, then return to the point of departure.


• Ask the engine. A full strength NNUE neural network engine runs on your device, so any claim here is checked in seconds.

LANGUAGES AND BOARD

• Language. English, Vietnamese or Chinese for titles and all 726 notes, falling back to the original rather than a blank.


• 13 board sizes, from 1.0x (500x350) to 2.2x (1100x770).


• 35 board themes, bright to deeply dark, plus 6 study board themes, 5 highlight colours you set by hand, 5 board fonts and a light or dark interface.

PRIVACY

Genuinely offline. No account, no ads, no tracking, no analytics, no permissions.

An opening is a preparation. An endgame is a proof. A middlegame is the moment somebody decides to give away a Chariot.