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Grandmaster Sergei Tiviakov once remained unbeaten in a streak of 110 consecutive professional chess games. Who could be a better guide to help you find the right move in any chess position than Tiviakov? His style was polished in the famous Russian chess school and hardened by his vast experience in hundreds of strong tournaments.

The first volume of this highly acclaimed series on chess strategy dealt with pawn structures. In the second volume, Sergei discussed various types of piece play, relating it to specific situations on the chessboard. In this third volume, he focusses on the basis: the individual move in a game.

Choosing a move is an eternal dilemma for a chess player. How can we recognize the right solution in any position? How can we gain confidence in our decisions? Where do we direct our pieces and pawns?

In ten chapters, Tiviakov explains in his own clear and unique way how a single move can strengthen your position, weaken your opponent’s position, or simply avoid trouble. Chapters are also devoted to finding the right move by intuition or by weighing up candidate moves, and to more practical advice such as how much time you should spend on one move.

Classic games, as well as many samples from Tiviakov’s own rich practice, are used to illustrate the arguments made. Instructive exercises have been added to help the reader test his newly acquired knowledge. Like the other volumes of Rock Solid Chess, this book will teach you much more than traditional chess manuals do and will help you to greatly improve your decision-making in chess.

Grandmaster Sergei Tiviakov is an Olympic gold medallist, a three-time Dutch Champion and a former European Champion. In 2024, at 51, he still became vice-champion of the Netherlands.

Yulia Gökbulut is a Women’s FIDE Master, chess author and sports writer from Turkey.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a set of rules that always directed us towards the best move in any chess position? That is precisely what Grandmaster Julen Arizmendi has been searching for during his long and successful coaching career, and this is where he shares his verdict: it cannot be done, but we should still be trying!

Practical Chess Strategy will teach you to break down any position into its underlying elements and apply core concepts that will guide you towards the best move and plan. GM Arizmendi deals with cases where our intuition fails us, teaches us how to assess imbalances, refutes common misconceptions about strategy, and provides exercises to test and reinforce the reader’s newfound understanding.

In this, his penultimate work, legendary chess instructor Mark Dvoretsky (1947-2016) explores identifying and dealing with problems on the chessboard.

In this companion volume to the author’s highly-regarded The Nimzo-Indian Defence, the starting point is 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6. The main focus is on 3.Nf3 b6 while Roiz also covers 3.g3 (Catalan) and miscellaneous options."

Chess Training for Post-Beginners

There is a frustrating gap in most players’ development: you know the rules and you’ve picked up some tactics, but nobody has ever taught you how to actually think about a position. Experienced trainer Yaroslav Srokovski wrote this book to fill exactly that gap — a structured first course in positional understanding.

Across twelve focused chapters he builds the core skills of strategy from the ground up: how pieces become strong or weak, the use of open files and key squares, weak-square complexes and diagonals, queenside pawn majorities, the power of the passed pawn, weak pawns, the exposed king, the eternal good-knight-versus-bad-bishop questions, and the bishop pair in both middlegame and endgame.

The presentation is deliberately clear and compact, and every chapter ends with exercises so the ideas stick through practice rather than just reading. The two underlying skills Srokovski keeps returning to are the ones that decide most amateur games: how to assess a position honestly, and how to choose sensible long-term plans.

Pitched precisely at the post-beginner — the player ready to move beyond pure tactics toward genuine positional judgement.

The second part of Sergey Voronkov’s three-volume treatise continues from where Volume I left off. It covers the eleventh to fifteenth Soviet championships, the 1941 match tournament for the title of Soviet Absolute Champion, and the main events in the country’s chess history between these tournaments. Themes include the downfall of Nikolai Krylenko, the persecution and disappearance of Soviet chess players during the purges, and the experience of chess players in World War Two. The atmosphere of the time is captured in contemporary accounts and memoirs of key players and cultural figures. We see Botvinnik and Keres established as leading challengers for Alekhine’s throne, with plans being made to arrange a title match. We encounter for the first time and witness the rise of great Soviet players such as Smyslov, Bronstein and Boleslavsky, and enjoy the games of many other stars including Flohr, Lilienthal, Bondarevsky, Kotov and Tolush. This volume contains 84 games and fragments mostly annotated by the players themselves and their peers, and subjected to recent computer analysis. It is illustrated with around 250 photos and cartoons from the period, the main sources being Russian chess magazines and tournament bulletins. Volume I of Masterpieces and Dramas of the Soviet Championships was named the English Chess Federation’s Book of the Year 2021. The jury stated: “The book reads like a novel... A most remarkable, absorbing and entertaining chess history which fully lives up to its title, Masterpieces and Dramas, on and off the board. A worthy winner of Book of the Year 2021 over strong competition.”

Most opening books assume you want to become an expert. Openings for Amateurs starts somewhere else: with the mistakes that players under 1600 actually make, over and over, in the first fifteen moves of a game.

The book is in two parts. Part One — "The Primer" — is structured around 24 common opening errors, each given its own chapter. The titles are deliberately stated as mistakes: "Allowing the king to give up castling without a good reason", "Don't make unnecessary pawn moves if you have not completed your development", "Don't develop the queen too early", "Solid, passive defenses are the waiting rooms for defeat." Each chapter explains not just what the mistake is but why it keeps happening and how to avoid it. Author Pete Tamburro, a longtime chess teacher and columnist, pays particular attention to the situations players find most confusing: what to do against gambits like the Blackmar-Diemer or the Belgrade; how to handle "system" openings like the Colle and the Barry Attack; whether to chase an active bishop; how to use (and when to distrust) opening manuals.

Part Two puts principles into practice. Tamburro presents a selection of playable, learnable openings — chosen for their compatibility with the ideas in Part One rather than their theoretical complexity — and illustrates each with annotated games. The 53 games are chosen to show the opening's strategic logic, not to demonstrate the latest theory.

360 pages. Aimed at club-level and scholastic players looking for a practical foundation rather than memorised lines.

Any good chess coach will tell you to study the endgame. Improving your knowledge of the ‘third phase’ in a chess game will bring you many extra half or even full points.

After the success of his award-winning classics, Chess Strategy for Club Players and Attacking Chess for Club Players Herman Grooten has now written an equally instructive endgame manual. He teaches you how to understand the themes of an endgame, and find the right moves based on your understanding.

International Master Herman Grooten learned about endgames the hard way, as many good players have. Early in his career, he realized there was a lot to be gained in this undervalued part of the game. Building on his experience as a player and coach, Grooten takes an original approach to convey his message: the endgames are divided according to theme, not chess material. This is a novel, but very effective way to learn the ins and outs, since many themes can occur with different material balances.

The material is richly illustrated with many examples from practical play, as well as endgame studies, which present the motifs in their purest and most attractive form. The result is a lively and highly instructive guide to the endgame.

This book is a logical follow up of Semkov’s previous work on the Nimzo-Indian Defence. It covers the Exchange Variation 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.cxd5 exd5 5.Bg5 against the Queen’s Gambit Declined. Practical results of 63% in White’s favour and the endorcement of Carlsen, Gukes, Caruana, Aronian, Sarana and many others of the elite confirm the prominent status of this system.Lately second players tend to deviate from the traditional main lines and resort to 3...a6, 3...h6, 3...Be7, 5...Bb4 and other exotic set-ups, so the author analyses them in separate chapters.

There was a golden era when The King’s Gambit was the favourite opening of every attacking player. In the glory days of Paul Morphy it was considered almost cowardly to play anything else. Legends such as Spassky and Bronstein kept the flame burning in the 20th century, but its popularity faded as players became distrustful of White’s ultra-aggressive approach. Nevertheless there are honourable exceptions whose games prove that this ancient weapon can still draw blood – Short, Nakamura and Zvjaginsev are world-class players who have used the King’s Gambit successfully. In this groundbreaking work, GM John Shaw shows that the ultimate Romantic chess opening remains relevant and dangerous even in the computer era.

The best place to start your tactics training is in the endgame! Chess is 99% tactics – and if you want to win more games, nothing works better than training tactics. Win a piece or find a mate. That will get you results.

Since most of the pieces have left the board, endgame tactics have the clarity that enables you to grasp all basics concepts quickly and comprehensively. In the endgame, you can focus on what is important without any distractions by a couple of random pawns and pieces.

In 1001 Chess Endgame Exercises for Beginners, IM Thomas Willemze does two things at once. He explains all the basic concepts, and provides you with a huge amount of exercises for each theme and each chess piece. Willemze uses all his experience as a coach, and his familiarity with the famous Step Method, to carefully build up your chess knowledge step-by-step. He shows you the strength of all pieces, from the lonely pawn to the almighty queen. And he guides you from the basics to more complex tactics in a highly instructive puzzle rush.

Art of Sacrifice in Chess

Rudolf Spielmann’s The Art of Sacrifice in Chess, first published in the mid-1930s, was instantly recognised as a classic — the book that first tried to classify, systematically, the nature of the chess sacrifice. This is its 21st-century edition, with Spielmann’s original work preserved in full and brought to a modern audience.

Spielmann’s great idea was to distinguish the "real" sacrifice (where you give up material for an unclear, long-term return) from the "sham" sacrifice (where the material comes straight back). Around that he organises a whole taxonomy — sacrifices for development, line-clearance, deflection, king-hunts, the king’s field, the exchange and queen sacrifices — that still shapes how we understand the subject.

For this edition, German grandmaster Karsten Müller has done far more than modernise the notation: he has roughly doubled the book, adding chapters on the Greek Gift and the classic weak points (g7, f7, e6, f6), on the sacrificial magic of Tal and Shirov, on the fine art of defending against sacrifices, and a wealth of exercises to test what you’ve learned.

A timeless subject in an enriched modern package — instructive and hugely enjoyable for any club player who wants to attack with imagination and judgement.