The French Defence hits the sweet spot between soundness and practicality, and remains one of Black’s most popular defences at all levels. Win with the French! offers a complete, robust repertoire for Black after 1.e4 e6.
Elite theoretician and author Vassilios Kotronias presents a two-pronged approach in the most critical main lines, with a theoretically bulletproof, professional-grade option accompanied by a sound yet combative choice to generate winning chances with less memorization. This versatile approach, combined with thoughtful advice about typical themes and pawn structures, makes Win with the French! the ideal modern guide to this classic chess opening.
Grandmaster Vassilios Kotronias is a ten-time Greek Champion with a peak ranking of 44th in the world, as well as a renowned theoretician and 1.e4 player. After spending many decades trying unsuccessfully to break the French Defence, he is ready to share his extensive insights on why it’s a great opening to play with Black.
What is the best way to improve your opening knowledge? Memorizing variations? Not really. In the first volume of the two-volume set, Dariusz helps you to understand the instructive patterns that arise from the immensely popular Nimzo-Indian Defense. Packed with plenty new ideas, his methods consider the different ways White has at his disposal. His unique approach shows Black has nothing to fear, on the contrary! Thinkers is convinced you will enjoy the read!
The Pirc Defence and the Modern Defence are two naturally entwined chess openings that are both flexible and rich in strategic and tactical ideas. They feature in the repertoire of great players like Grischuk, Ivanchuk, Nakamura and Carlsen.
In The Perfect Pirc-Modern, Viktor Moskalenko, a renowned propagator of dynamic chess who has championed the Pirc-Modern for many years, explains:
- the ideas and plans that matter
- the various pawn structures and how to handle them
- tricky transpositions: opportunities and risks
- a wealth of new resources for both Black and White.
In this updated version of Moskalenko’s 2013 book of the same name, 33 of the 42 games are new, the structure has been updated in places, and there are fresh ideas on every page.
Moskalenko expertly guides you through this ground-breaking opening book with the enthusiasm, ease and humour that characterize his style.
Viktor Moskalenko (1960) is an International Grandmaster and a well-known chess coach. The former Ukraine champion has won many tournaments in Spain, his current home country. For New In Chess, he wrote, among others, The Fabulous Budapest Gambit (2007), Revolutionize Your Chess (2009), The Diamond Dutch (2014), Training with Moska (2017), The Fully-Fledged French (2021) and Trompowsky Attack & London System (2022).
Chess players can look ahead, formulate a clear plan, and act accordingly. That's why chess is the perfect learning environment for becoming a strategic expert. But how do you train this? It starts with playing many games and analysing them carefully afterwards.
At the same time, you should learn from the best by studying the games of the world's strongest players and gradually build their techniques into your play. This book offers you 100 strategic exercises from the games of the best of the best, the World Champions from Bobby Fischer to Ding Liren.
You will learn foundational techniques such as: how to improve your worst-placed piece; how to exploit a lead in development; or make the right piece trade; and how to create a strong square; plus numerous others.
Solving these exercises will help every ambitious club player better understand how to make and execute plans.
Thomas Willemze is an International Master from the Netherlands. He is an experienced trainer of amateur players of all levels and has been the National Youth Coach of the Dutch Chess Federation. New In Chess has published his books The Chess Toolbox and The Scandinavian for Club Players and 1001 Chess Endgame Exercises for Beginners - all well-liked by reviewers and customers alike.
I have always been interested by less theoretical Sicilians. I have been playing the Classical Sicilian for a long time and right before the covid period, I decided to find a new one. The Sicilian Kan came to me as a very serious option, and I decided to work on it. In the meantime, my friend and editor Daniël Vanheirzeele offered me the chance to author a book about it. This came to me as a complete surprise, as I had no experience with it. In comparison with my work on the Reti and the Dutch (my two previous books), I am a newbie on the subject. But I decided to accept the challenge. I found it extremely interesting, as this gave me a fresh look at the positions. I think I managed to ask myself the questions everyone would have asked. I also work as a second for others and am accustomed to working on openings I do not necessarily play as well as finding the key ideas very quickly. So, after a deep initial work to understand the variations, I was ready to start writing!
This book presents a full repertoire based on the Gligoric System against the King’s Indian Defence – 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 0-0 6.Be2 e5 7.Be3. The key point of this set-up is that White does not commit his king to any flank, at least for a while. That makes Black’s thematic attack with ...f5-f4, ...g4 pointless and allows White to play chess without having to memorise tons of variations. The authors focus on typical positions and methods of handling them, which is essential for the Gligoric System.
The Accelerated Dragon (1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 g6) has attracted the attention of many creative players. In the past these included Tigran Petrosian and Bent Larsen while modern aficionados include the dominant player of the era, Magnus Carlsen, as well as Viswanathan Anand, Veselin Topalov, Vassily Ivanchuk, Jan-Krzysztof Duda and many others.
The opening is characterised by the swift fianchetto of the dark-squared bishop on g7. It is a close relative of the "normal" Dragon (1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 d6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nc3 g6) but with one crucial difference - Black delays committing the d-pawn to d6, a decision which complicates the play. If White does not respond accurately, Black will often gain the opportunity to play ...d7-d5 in one go. This can mimic the effect of a bomb going off as the white position is laid to waste.
The traditional reason why the accelerated version of the Dragon is viewed with a little suspicion is that with 5 c4 White can set up the Maroczy Bind - a potentially powerful clamp on Black's game. However, there are good ways to fight against this plan and they are examined in detail.
– A strong aggressive line where "natural" moves can be disastrous for White.
– A complete repertoire for Black against 1 e4.
– The question and answer method continually tests the reader's understanding.
Nigel Davies is an International Grandmaster and FIDE Senior Trainer. He is the author of numerous books and DVDs on the game and is known for the clarity of his explanations. Davies was part of the victorious England over-50 side at the recent European Senior Team Chess Championships, winning team gold, as well as an individual silver medal for his performance on board four.
How I Beat Fischer's Record
In 1991 Judit Polgar became a grandmaster at fifteen — breaking the age record Bobby Fischer had set decades earlier — on her way to becoming the strongest female player in history and a genuine threat to the world’s very best. This book is the first volume of her trilogy, and it is both a teaching manual and the story of how that prodigy was made.
Polgar builds the instruction around her own early games, organised by theme rather than by opening. The chapters work through the attacking and tactical tools that defined her play — tricks and traps, the mating net, trapping the queen, the zwischenzug, piece domination, exploiting a lead in development, and attacking the uncastled king — before moving into the art of simplifying and basic endgame technique.
Because the examples come from her own path to the top, the lessons carry the weight of real, high-stakes games, including victories over elite opponents such as Anand and Polugaevsky and a vivid tournament diary. You learn the ideas and meet the player at the same time.
A rich, motivating book for club players and improving juniors who want to absorb aggressive, concrete chess from one of its greatest exponents — equal parts instruction and inspiration.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Polgar Bundle
This book presents the Triangle set-up, which arises after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3/Nf3 c6. This move order avoids many unpleasant systems for White, notably the Catalan, the Exchange Slav and the Botvinnik Variation. It leads to sharp strategically unbalanced play and brings Black excellent practical results. Semko Semkov is a chess journalist and theoretician. He has co-authored the famous books The Modern English, The Most Flexible Sicilian, Attacking the English/Reti, Attacking the Flexible Sicilian and Understanding the Queen’s Gambit Accepted.
Why can a grandmaster glance at a position and know within seconds what is going on? Ivan Sokolov’s answer is: pawn structure. This acclaimed book — carrying a foreword by Michael Adams — sets out to teach that same instant understanding by examining the handful of structures that shape the vast majority of middlegames.
Sokolov works through them one family at a time: doubled pawns, isolated pawns, hanging pawns, and central pawn majorities, each broken down into its essential recurring forms. For every structure he explains the plans available to both sides — where the pieces belong, which breaks to aim for, and which endgames to steer toward or avoid.
The teaching is done through deeply analysed top-level games rather than fragments, so you see the structure’s logic play out from middlegame to result. Sokolov’s annotations are demanding but accessible, and he takes nothing for granted — the explanations carry, in one reviewer’s words, “a large amount of genuine Grandmasterly wisdom.”
Studying it pays off in three ways: sharper middlegame play, a better sense of which positions suit your style, and — because structures arise from openings — a deeper practical grasp of your own repertoire. This revised edition refreshes a modern classic — runner-up for the ECF Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Guardian award — with more than half of the illustrative games replaced by newer examples. Aimed at club players and above.
International Master Tibor Karolyi and FIDE Master Tigran Gyozalyan have written a comprehensive two-volume treatise on the life and games of Tigran Petrosian, who was world champion from 1963-1969. The present Volume I takes the reader on a journey from Tigran’s childhood, through the war years, successes in Georgian and Armenian national championships, his emergence as an elite player winning the Soviet championship and Olympic gold, and victory at the famous 1962 Candidates Tournament in Curacao. Karolyi and Gyozalyan provide deep modern analysis of 148 full games and fragments, and summarise almost all known games played by Petrosian in the period. They also provide considerable background colour on each game, with round-by-round analysis of tournaments and matches in which they were played. Very few of these games have previously been analysed in detail in modern books, and those that were have nevertheless been subjected to considerably improved analysis. Petrosian’s opponents in Volume I include world champions and challengers Fischer, Tal, Spassky, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Euwe, Korchnoi, and Bronstein, as well as leading players such as Keres, Geller, Benko, Polugaevsky, Reshevsky, Taimanov, Kotov, Gligoric, and many others. There is a special focus on his coaches Ebralidze, Lilienthal and Boleslavsky. An added bonus is the inclusion of rare photos taken from private collections in Georgia and Armenia, many of which have never before been published in the West. With a foreword by the greatest Armenian chess player of modern times Levon Aronian.
The diverse set of tactical ideas involving a bishop and knight in the finale will enable them to gain a deeper understanding of how the bishop and knight pair combine.
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