The Vukovic gap

 The opening can be seen as a tree with many branches. But as long as you don't know what kind of middlegame you want to play, you are essentially clueless in the opening. So you just must first decide on which middlegame you want to play.

The middlegame is a tree with many branches, which leads to many types of endgame play. At club level about 50% of the games end by a forced mate and 50% by an endgame. That are two main branches with a lot of smaller branches and twigs.

When you start with the middlegame tree, you are essentially clueless when you don't know in which direction you want to go. So we let us guide by preference, taste, what we are good at and chance.

That is a feeble base. Essentially we have no idea what we are doing. How can you develop a preference or can you become good at something when you have no idea what you are doing?

Between the middlegame and the endgame, we have the "Capablanca gap". Capablanca said about it: "In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before anything else."

Between the middlegame and a forced mate, there is another gap, what I like to refer to as the "Vukovic gap". Another term I will often use for this gap is "the assault". I postulate that a similar statement as Capablanca's will apply to the Vukovic gap:  "In order to improve your game, you must study the forced mate before anything else.".

Essentially the message is "start at the end and not in the middle, to avoid excessive branching".

My games the past few months point in the direction that I can gain the most by filling in the Vukovic gap. Hence that is what I'm going to try.