50 Mistakes You Should Know

50 Mistakes You Should Know

It is not the quality of your best moves that wins games — it is the quality of your worst ones. That is the premise of this book, and the fastest route to improvement it proposes is simple: learn to recognise, and stop making, the mistakes that quietly cost you points.

Spanish grandmaster and coach Jesús de la Villa — author of the bestselling 100 Endgames You Must Know — has the rare gift of knowing exactly what a developing player needs. Drawing on more than a decade of coaching juniors, he has distilled the fifty errors that recur most often, so that once you have seen each one clearly you can avoid it in your own games.

The mistakes are grouped by theme across the whole game: exchanging pieces, calculation, defence, attacking the king, strategy, positional sacrifices, the endgame and rook endings in particular, the opening, basic tactics, prophylactic thinking, and paying attention to what your opponent is doing. Each is illustrated memorably, in de la Villa’s clear, encouraging style.

He likes Eleanor Roosevelt’s line: "Learn from the errors of others — you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself." A genuinely practical improvement book for club players of every stripe.

Jesus de la Villa (1958) is an International Grandmaster born in Spain. He is a successful author and a well-known chess trainer. He has twice won the Spanish Championship. His book 100 Endgames You Must Know is an international bestseller.