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Grandmaster Repertoire 14 – The French Defence 1 introduces the Winawer Variation after the opening moves 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Bb4, and provides expert recommendations against all of White’s major possibilities, with the exception of the most critical 7.Qg4 line which receives special coverage in Volume Two of the series. Volume Three will deal with the Tarrasch, Advance and all of White’s other options.

The possession of the bishop pair (vs. bishop & knight, or knight pair) is an important strategic element that may guarantee superiority and even determine the outcome of the game. In modern chess, the bishop pair has been established as a positional advantage in the majority of cases, and it’s very common nowadays to hear teachers tell their students ‘keep your bishops’ or ‘capture that bishop’.

In today’s chess, the importance given to this element has increased to the point that in some of the most popular opening variations, the main goal has become to gain the bishop pair. That is because the bishop pair can be a powerful advantage in any phase of the game. For example, it’s a lethal weapon in an attack against the king. It can also be very efficient in attacking weaknesses: one bishop can put pressure on the target, while the other attacks the defending piece. However, it is the endgame where it is particularly strong.

The follow up of the successfull tactics books of Csaba Balogh. The book consists 551 practical puzzles from the January of 2013 to the July of 2015.

This is the second volume of the series The Life & Games of Vasily Smyslov. It covers the period from spring 1948, after The Hague-Moscow world championship match-tournament, to the end of 1953, when he won the Candidates’ tournament in Zürich to become the official challenger for the world championship.

FIDE master Andrey Terekhov continues the narrative as we follow Smyslov's intense struggle with Boleslavsky, Bronstein, Keres and Reshevsky for the right to play a world championship match with Mikhail Botvinnik. 

With access to rare Soviet-era archival material and invaluable family archives, the author complements his account of Smyslov’s emergence as an elite player and title challenger with dozens of fascinating photographs, many never seen before, as well as 28 deeply annotated games.

The first volume won critical accolades, including 2020 Book of the Year from both FIDE and the Chess Journalists of America.

The 2020-2021 FIDE Candidates Tournament held in Ekaterinburg, starring super-grandmasters Ian Nepomniachtchi, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Anish Giri, Fabiano Caruana, Ding Liren, Alexander Grischuk, Kirill Alekseenko and Wang Hao, delivered an awesome display of fighting chess. Grandmaster and FIDE Senior Trainer Dorian Rogozenco, coach of the German national team from 2014-2020, provides a comprehensive move by move analysis of all 56 games together with an assembled Dream Team of 13 super-class GM guest commentators including Garry Kasparov and Boris Gelfand. The commentary covers opening strategy and novelties, middlegame battles and instructive endgames, psychology and practical observations, together comprising a swathe of learning material valuable to players from club level to titled masters. The book is illustrated with a selection of official FIDE photographer Lennart Ootes’s best shots from both halves of the event.

Endgame mastery separates great players from the good. First-rate endgame play requires a mix of calculation, pattern recognition, abstract themes, theoretical knowledge and resilience few have mastered. In this rich collection of seventy mini-lessons, written over six years, acclaimed author GM Daniel Naroditsky guides you to every corner of the endgame world in the engaging, humorous, and always instructive style that made him famous.

The articles in this book were originally published in Chess Life Magazine and on chess.com. They have been checked carefully and updated where necessary. Mastering Practical Endgames is a resource for chess improvement of the highest order.

Daniel Naroditsky (1995-2025) became the World U12 Champion in 2007 and a Grandmaster at just 17 in 2013. He competed in the US Championship in 2021, defeating World No. 2 Fabiano Caruana. At his death in 2025, Naroditsky ranked 23rd in the world in blitz. Online, he was a respected and much-loved chess educator. 

Szymon Winawer was a world top-10 player in the 1870s and 1880s, dueling with such titans as Steinitz, Lasker, Anderssen, Marshall, Chigorin, Zukertort, Louis Paulsen, Janowski, Maroczy, Tarrasch and others, and defeating most of the leading players of his time. He won or took prizes in major international tournaments, including Paris 1867 (second, behind Kolisch and above Steinitz), Leipzig 1877 (fourth, behind Paulsen, Anderssen and Zukertort), Paris 1878 (first equal with Zukertort, though he lost the play-off), Berlin 1881 (third equal with Chigorin, behind Blackburne and Zukertort), Vienna 1882 (first equal with Steinitz), and Nuremberg 1883 (first, ahead of Blackburne).

Winawer was a proponent of fighting chess, regularly deploying the King’s Gambit and Ruy Lopez as white, demonstrating winning combinations as well as positional sacrifices and endgame precision. He attacked the castled king with his h-pawn 150 years before Alpha-Zero. He displayed technique using Horowitz bishops and opening the g-file. At the same time, we see in the book that he also played solid positional chess. Moreover, several opening ideas are named after him, including the popular Winawer Variation of the French Defense.

The Warsaw-born player was not a chess professional and never published any annotated games of his own, but some of his concepts, both in the opening and in the middlegame, are still valid in the 21st century. Indeed, many strategic ideas (blockade, exploiting doubled pawns, maneuvering) described in the works of Nimzowitsch and other hypermodernists can be found, in embryonic form, in the games of Winawer played half a century earlier.

In the first half of this biographical work, Warsaw-based chess historian Tomasz Lissowski, who has co-written books on Kieseritzky and Zukertort among others, portrays Winawer’s life and his sporting achievements in the context of the epoch. This book delivers not only a description of the evolution of chess in Poland in the nineteenth century, but a sense through the prism of chess of the political and social history of Poland and the Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian empires in a period of war and upheaval. It is illustrated by many historical photos from the period.

In the second half of this book, International Master Grigory Bogdanovich paints Winawer’s creative portrait, as well as examining the legacy that this ingenious improviser left to chess culture. The book contains in total 132 annotated instructive games and fragments of Winawer and his contemporaries.

Beauty in chess manifests itself in different ways!

For chess players who are not sophisticated enough, one of the leading aesthetic criteria is probably the value of the offered piece. An experienced player will primarily value the originality and purity of the idea. It happens that a key to a position is a seemingly discreet move. Situations like these have always impressed me the most.

Firstly, by their mystery: why does one of several apparently equivalent moves turn out to be much stronger than the others? Secondly, a modest move can radically change a well-established position assessment and even change the outcome of the game straight away. Where did the idea for this kind of work come from? 

There are two reasons. 

Firstly, while browsing chess literature, I have not found a publication focusing on quiet moves, as most often, only three to eight examples are given. Secondly, we have always felt sorry for a person who cannot see beauty, for example of mountains (as these are just rocks) or architecture (as the Eiffel Tower is just iron), etc. The same applies to a large group of chess players, who value only the size of the piece they offered or the victory. However, one can lose a game and feel satisfaction because, for example, they found a stunning quiet move in their game.

This is a theoretical book about a chess variation that (it could not be otherwise) I will call the Del Rio Variation. It is one of the most fascinating openings that can be played today, leading almost immediately to highly dynamic and complex positions. Additionally, it can be set up quite easily. For example, after 1.d4 Nf6 (1...d5 is another possible move order to reach the same position) 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 d5 4.Nc3 (from 1.d4 all of White’s moves are the most popular). Then 4...dxc4, establishing the Vienna Variation. Here, White can only fight for an advantage with 5.e4. 

Until a few years ago, the main lines continued with 5...Bb4 6.Bg5 c5, or the dangerous gambit 6.Bc4!? Nxe4 7.0-0. All of these led to a well-researched ocean of variations where Black had to struggle to maintain equality and generally had few practical chances to win the game. The scenario changes dramatically with 5...b5!? as Black now sets up a complicated, unbalanced game that is also less studied than the other continuations. This partly explains the excellent results that Black has been achieving in practice. It is no surprise that this move has attracted the interest of today's top players, some of whom have adopted it frequently.

This book is especially focused on Black's perspective and aims to provide you with all the necessary material to successfully employ this variation. You will find theory, exemplary games, deep analyses, conceptual explanations, and many novel ideas that have yet to see the light of day in practice.

The Tarrasch Defence is one of the most ambitious ways to play against 1.d4. Black immediately fights for the centre, gets a lot of space and develops his pieces without many problems. Former Russian Champion Alexey Bezgodov has more than 30 years of experience with the Tarrasch and is one of the world’s greatest experts. The Art of the Tarrasch Defence is a deeply researched journey into the positional structures, the key moments in the fight for the initiative, the players and the variations.

Every chessplayer, from beginner to world champion, loves to win a game with a brilliant attacking display. However many, if not most, attacks that end in victory do so due to inaccurate defence. This may be due to simple tactical miscalculation or perhaps a more fundamental misunderstanding of the important principles of defence. Furthermore, many attacks that are launched are simply unsound but succeed because many players feel uncomfortable when forced to defend, get flustered and make mistakes. In this book, highly experienced chess author and coach, Neil McDonald addresses these issues.

Defensive skill is crucial in chess. Good, accurate defence can win a game just as well as a fine attacking display can, so expertise in this department is essential for any player wishing to improve their game. With thorough explanations, questions, and exercises, this book provides fascinating material to enable you to hone your defensive skill and not feel intimidated when your opponent hurls pieces at your king.