The French Defence is one of the most solid and strategically rich answers to 1.e4: Black accepts a slightly cramped position in return for a durable pawn structure and clear, long-term plans, usually centred on the counterstrike against White’s d4 and the eventual activation of the famously “bad” light-squared bishop. This book turns that defence into a complete, ready-to-play repertoire for Black.
The coverage is genuinely comprehensive. Every serious White try gets its own treatment: the space-grabbing Advance Variation, the Tarrasch with 3.Nd2, the sharp Steinitz and Classical main lines, the McCutcheon, the trappy Exchange and its symmetrical lines, and the quieter King’s Indian Attack and assorted sidelines. Across twenty-five chapters the reader is given a clear recommendation against each, with the strategic ideas explained rather than just the moves listed.
The emphasis is on understanding the resulting middlegames — the pawn breaks, the typical piece manoeuvres, and the endgames the French so often steers toward — so that you are equipped to play the positions, not merely reach them.
This is a serious, thorough repertoire book aimed at club players and above who want to take up the French as a lifelong weapon, or to deepen a defence they already trust.
Imagine you are a club player who has been given the opportunity to talk at length with a famous Grandmaster. How would you make the most of this opportunity? This book is the much anticipated follow-up to the highly acclaimed and award-nominated Lessons with a Grandmaster. It bridges the gap between great player and amateur through a series of conversations between teacher, the renowned Grandmaster Boris Gulko, and student Dr. Joel R. Sneed, a professor of psychology and amateur chess player. The lessons are based on Gulko's own battles against fellow Grandmasters. This second volume focuses on dynamic chess, developing chess imagination, the capacity to take risks, the ability to simultaneously attack and defend, and perhaps above all, the ability to visualize the chess board and calculate combinations in sharp positions.
TACTICS TRAINER AVAILABLE! 404 Puzzles for those who are serious about improving their chess! Tactical puzzle books all seem sort of the same, positions where you are being told what the demand is and you then have to figure it out. Typically having to sacrifice or exploit a tactical feature, the answers can typically be worked out sooner or later. The puzzles in this book are different. For starters, the puzzles are recent, from the latter half of 2018 and they are played by players rated at least 2300. Additionally, the solutions are not always a quick tactical solution, and the first move is typically not enough for a complete answer, instead a series of precise moves is required and not always is it a winning continuation but one leading to an advantage, often a large one, but occasionally a clear or even a small advantage is all you can hope for. The key is, the solver doesn't know just as in game situations. Should the puzzles prove too difficult, then there are hints for the solution, although the hints can be rather cryptic as well.
The Morra Gambit — 1.e4 c5 2.d4 cxd4 3.c3 — is one of those openings that club players love and serious study books tend to dismiss. Marc Esserman disagrees. An international master and the foremost English-language expert on the Morra, he has used this gambit to defeat multiple 2700-rated grandmasters, and in this book he makes his case that the resulting positions are genuinely dangerous for Black at any level.
White sacrifices a pawn on move three for rapid piece development and persistent attacking chances. Esserman covers all the main defensive tries Black can employ, explaining both the tactical themes and the positional resources when the attack does not land immediately.
Crucially, the Morra Declined is covered too — 3...Nf6 and other cautious tries — so you have a complete answer to 1...c5 without needing a separate Sicilian repertoire alongside it.
Esserman writes with personality and obvious enthusiasm for the opening. Intermediate players looking for a sharp, principled weapon against the Sicilian will find 360 pages of exactly that here.
In the second volume IM Tibor Károlyi examines some of the golden years of Tal’s career, from 1960 to 1971.
Have you ever wondered why it takes grandmasters just seconds to see what's happening in a chess position? It's all about pawn structures, as Ivan Sokolov explained in his groundbreaking book Winning Chess Middlegames.
In his 2010 bestseller, Grandmaster Sokolov focused on structures arising from 1.d4 openings; in this new companion guide, 1.e4 players get their turn. This new volume covers a dozen topical structures including various pawn formations in the flexible Ruy Lopez, Italian and Petroff openings. But also Black's doubled f-pawn in the Rauzer Sicilian, the notorious Maroczy Bind, the mysterious Hedgehog, the versatile Sveshnikov and the paradoxical French Winawer. Deeply analysed top-level games illustrate the motifs in all these structures.
Club players who study Winning Chess Middlegames 1.e4 or 1.d4 will:
– significantly improve their middlegame skills
– develop an accurate sense of which positions suit their style
– gain new strategic and practical knowledge of openings
Ivan Sokolov's analysis is profound but accessible, and he doesn't take anything for granted. As reviewer Sean Marsh wrote of the first volume: "The lucid and informative explanations convey a large amount of genuine Grandmasterly wisdom. This is easily one of the best middlegame books of recent times."
Ivan Sokolov is a top grandmaster who was born in Bosnia and lives in the Netherlands. He is a former Yugoslav and Dutch Champion and has beaten World Champions Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik and Viswanathan Anand. As a coach, he led Uzbekistan to victory at the 2022 Chennai Olympiad. Sokolov has written a dozen highly acclaimed books.
Sergei Tiviakov was unbeaten in a streak of more than a hundred chess games as a professional player. Who better to share the secrets of Rock Solid Chess and the activity and value of pieces than Tiviakov?
The highly acclaimed first volume of his chess strategy trilogy dealt with pawn structures. In this second volume, Sergei moves on to discuss piece play and unique chessboard situations. Topics covered include the bishop pair, opposite-coloured bishops, centralization and the almost-ignored question of when and whether to castle.
Tiviakov also demonstrates how the value of pieces can vary drastically depending on their exact position. He shows how the entire assessment of a position, and the correct strategy for playing it, can be changed by moving a single pawn from one square to another.
In the final chapters, Tiviakov discusses how to play cramped and passive positions, how to play for a win with Black and how to choose your strategy, based on the opponent’s style and other psychological factors.
Illustrated with examples from classic games and from his own games, and supported by instructive exercises, Volume Two of Rock Solid Chess offers invaluable and unique instruction on topics not covered in traditional textbooks. These strategy lessons will significantly improve your chess and are suitable for all readers, from club players to grandmasters.
Sergei Tiviakov is a grandmaster, Olympic gold medallist, three-time Dutch Champion and European Champion.
Yulia Gökbulut is a FIDE Women's Master, chess author and sports writer from Turkey.
This new book by Mikhail Shereshevsky, one of the most respected chess trainers in the world, is about a very important but little-explored topic: associative thinking. How can a modern chess student avoid drowning in the flood of information? The answer is to stop mechanically memorizing moves and turn on your curiosity. Try to create a vivid image of the technique you are studying and remember it as an association!
During a game of chess, we have associations all the time. We are not talking about specific pawn structures, but about more abstract things. What is the best interaction between knight and pawn? Where should the rook be placed – behind the passed pawn or to the side? On which squares should you place your pawns when you have a bishop against a knight? Generations of chess players before us have answered these and similar questions.
Shereshevsky clearly shows that studying the games of great chess players will help you to improve your associative thinking, especially when the comments come from the players themselves. The author pays special attention to such outstanding grandmasters as Ulf Andersson, Anatoly Karpov, Vladimir Kramnik, and Magnus Carlsen.
As with all of Shereshevsky’s books, this manual offers supreme examples of chess training excellence. Studying this book will improve your understanding of chess enormously and help you on your way to chess mastery.
Mikhail Shereshevsky (1950) is one of the most respected chess trainers and writers in the world. In 2018, he published the best-selling The Shereshevsky Method to Improve in Chess. His magnum opus, Endgame Strategy, is a must-read for ambitious players. It’s been hailed by superstars like Vladimir Kramnik and Magnus Carlsen as their formative guide to handling the endgame.
Maneuvering: The Art of Piece Play
Some of the hardest moments in chess come when there is no forcing line and no obvious plan — when the position simply asks you to improve your pieces. This book is the legendary trainer Mark Dvoretsky’s study of exactly that skill: manoeuvring, and the art of finding the best squares for your pieces.
Piece play is one of the subtlest aspects of positional mastery, and Dvoretsky approaches it the way he approached everything — through carefully chosen, demanding examples and a great deal of active solving rather than passive reading. The material ranges across every phase, from opening manoeuvres through richly complex middlegames to queenless positions and endgames, showing how the same principles of piece improvement run throughout the game.
As always with Dvoretsky, the solutions are detailed and honest: he lays out the reasoning, the candidate moves, and the way a strong player actually arrives at the right regrouping, rather than simply presenting the answer.
This is advanced training material, best suited to strong club players, experts, and above who want to deepen one of the defining skills of high-level chess. Demanding, but among the most rewarding work a serious improver can do.
Move First, Think Later
Most improvement books preach the same method: study the position’s features, form a plan, then choose a move. International Master Willy Hendriks thinks that is largely a comforting myth — and this provocative, much-discussed book sets out to prove it.
Drawing on his experience as a trainer and on research into how players actually think, Hendriks argues that move selection is not the tidy output of a rational checklist; judging, planning, and calculating all happen together, messily and at once, in weak and strong players alike. The dogma that "good moves follow automatically once you assess the characteristics" simply doesn’t match what happens at the board.
In place of method-worship he offers something more honest and more useful: a healthy scepticism toward chess instruction, and a large amount of no-nonsense training material — exercises and discussion designed to build the pattern knowledge that really drives improvement. The tone is sharp, funny, and refreshingly willing to puncture sacred cows.
Best suited to club and online players who suspect the standard advice hasn’t been working — and to any thoughtful improver who enjoys having their assumptions challenged.
TACTICS TRAINER AVAILABLE! In this guide International Master Vladimir Barsky teaches the method created by his mentor Viktor Khenkin (1923-2010). It’s based on an ingenious classification of the most frequently occurring mating schemes. A wide range of chess players will find it an extremely useful tool to recognize mating patterns and calculate the often narrow path to the kill. All the 1,000 examples (850 of them in exercise format) that Barsky presents are from games played in 21st century. He has carefully selected the most instructive combinations and lucidly explains the typical techniques to corner your opponent’s king. More often than you would expect, positions that look innocent at first sight, turn out to contain a mating pattern. This is not just another book full of chess puzzles. It’s a brilliantly organized course that has proven to be effective. Finding mate isn’t rocket science, but you need to know what to look for. Vladimir Barsky teaches you exactly that.
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