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Mark Dvoretsky (1947–2016) is widely regarded as the greatest chess trainer of the modern era, and this is one of the manuscripts he completed shortly before his death — a distilled course of training material, framed by a foreword from his long-time collaborator Artur Yusupov.
True to its title, the book is built for active work rather than passive reading. It is organised by the core skills a serious player must drill: training combinational vision, generating and choosing between candidate moves, calculating variations accurately (including attention to the opponent’s resources and the role of intermediate moves), attack and defence, positional play and prophylactic thinking, the technique of realising an advantage, and a substantial set of endgame tests.
Each section presents carefully chosen positions to solve, with the deep, honest solutions Dvoretsky was famous for — laying bare the logic of how a strong player reaches the right decision at the board. This is the same material he used with the elite students who passed through his school.
Demanding and high-quality, it is best suited to strong club players, experts, and aspiring masters who want to train rigorously. A fitting part of the legacy of a master teacher.
If you want to improve, you have to understand pawn structures — they dictate where the pieces belong, which plans make sense, and how a position should be judged. The Power of Pawns is a focused training manual aimed squarely at the post-beginner who knows the rules but has never been taught these essentials systematically.
Experienced trainer and grandmaster Jörg Hickl builds the book in two halves. The first looks at how the individual pieces — bishop, knight, and rook — relate to pawn structure and which squares suit them. The second works through the fundamental formations every player meets: hanging pawns, isolated pawns, backward pawns, passed pawns, doubled pawns, weak squares, and pawn chains.
Hickl’s method is common-sense and practical. For each structure he explains the typical characteristics, how to develop your pieces around it, how to improve your position, and how to form a concrete plan. Worked examples illustrate the ideas, and exercises let you apply them immediately.
The tone is that of a good coach rather than a reference work — clear, encouraging, and to the point. Best suited to improving players who want a dependable foundation in structure before tackling more advanced strategy.
Theoretical Rook Endgames
Rook endgames are the single most important endgame to study, for one blunt reason: they are the kind you will face most often over the board. As the saying goes, working on them gives the biggest bang for your buck — and this book, by world-class grandmaster Sam Shankland, sets out to be the clearest, best-organised guide to them ever written.
Shankland’s method has two layers. First, the vital "set positions" you simply must know by heart — the Lucena, the Vancura, the key drawing and winning formations. Then, more valuably, a framework of rules and guidelines that lets you assess a theoretical rook endgame you have not memorised and still find the right path. The goal is understanding, not rote: you finish knowing both which positions to commit to memory and how to reason about the rest.
The coverage is systematic and complete, marching from single-pawn endings through the great practical battlegrounds — rook in front of, beside, and behind the passed pawn — to multi-pawn structures and pawnless endings, with a foreword by endgame authority Karsten Müller.
Demanding but exceptionally clear, this is essential study for any ambitious club player or tournament competitor who wants to stop throwing away half-points in the most common endgame of all.
Goethe once wrote, “Everything is both simpler than we can imagine, and more complicated than we can conceive.” He could well have had chess endgames in mind. Endgames have fewer pieces on the board than middlegames but this does not necessarily make them “easier” to play or understand.
Tactical expertise is, understandably, generally associated with middlegame (and sometimes opening) positions. However, tactics are also crucial in endgames – a point that is sometimes overlooked. Even some quite simple looking pawn endgames can feature complex tactical ideas. Tactics in endgames also tend to be very different to middlegame tactics. As well as the familiar themes of pins, skewers and forks, endgames also feature unique concepts that rarely occur in middlegames such as pawn breakthroughs, manoeuvring for zugzwang and active use of the king as an aggressive unit.
In this book the highly experienced chess author and coach Cyrus Lakdawala guides the reader through the complexities of endgame tactical play. Lakdawala assembles positions that are most effective to improve tactical ability. Work your way through this book and you will undoubtedly see the results in your own games.
100 Years Later, Nimzovich Is Still Good for Your Chess!
Almost a century ago, a chess book about positional play and strategic concepts appeared on the chess scene. Written by a Latvian grandmaster residing in Denmark, it quickly took its place as one of the classics of chess literature. Since then, Aron Nimzovich’s magnum opus My System has been embraced by every generation of chessplayers.
However, there were some inherent flaws. For starters, it was quite “dense.” The reader had to plow through many subjective digressions and other literary detours before getting to the core concepts. Now American Grandmaster Alex Fishbein has adapted this classic for the modern chessplayer.
While remaining true to the original text – and with the same goals as his outstanding work with the FastTrack Edition of Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual – Fishbein has produced an eminently readable, modernized version of My System. The result is a book that not only retains the unique imagery of the original text, but a book that is also easy to understand by both club players and masters.
As the author stated in his preface: Nimzovich’s ideas have stood the test of time and, if anything, are more relevant today. In his famous foreword to the 1974 Russian edition, Mikhail Tal wrote: “This old book, sustaining many editions in different forms and different languages, is imbued with an elixir of eternal chess youth.” My aim was to retain that elixir in this new translation.
Alex brings you the best of Nimzovich’s My System, erasing all misconceptions. As a newcomer to the game, you will feel blessed to learn pure, unmistakable strategies, while if you are an old chap like me, you will appreciate the fresh clarity, helping you re-evaluate your personal chess philosophy… Nimzovich is good for your chess, and a more coherent Nimzovich even better. – From the Foreword by GM Vassilios Kotronias
Most tactics books train you to attack: your opponent’s position is loose, so find the win. This one flips the question. Award-winning instructor Dan Heisman argues that practical success starts with a humbler habit — asking, before every move, “is the move I’m considering actually safe?”
It sounds simple, but answering it reliably is not, and that gap is where countless games are lost. Heisman has assembled more than 150 carefully chosen positions — from openings, middlegames, and endgames — that show how a move can look safe and not be, or look risky yet be the soundest choice on the board. The format is multiple-choice, and the positions range from fairly easy to genuinely difficult.
The orientation is defensive in the best sense: instead of finding your own tactic, you are training to make sure your opponent won’t have one. Many of the answers are far from clear-cut and are analysed in depth, so the book doubles as serious calculation practice rather than a quick quiz.
For anyone who keeps throwing away good positions with one careless move, this is a direct, practical remedy. Suitable for a wide span of players, from lower intermediate up to strong club and master level.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Dan Heisman's Books
After the immense success of his award-winning classic Chess Strategy for Club Players Herman Grooten has now written an equally accessible primer on attacking chess. He teaches how to spot opportunities, exploit weaknesses, bring your forces to the front line and strike at the right moment.
It is well established that nothing improves a developing player faster than studying basic tactics — and that is exactly what this book sets out to teach, comprehensively and from the ground up. Award-winning instructor Dan Heisman covers the full vocabulary of tactical ideas with around 500 examples and problems, ranging from very easy to genuinely difficult.
The organisation is methodical. After an opening look at safety and counting — the bedrock skill of making sure a capture actually wins material — Heisman works through the complete catalogue of motifs: trapped pieces, pins, skewers, double threats and double attacks, knight and pawn forks, removal of the guard, discovered attacks and checks, promotion, and more. Further chapters cover checkmating patterns, tactics in the opening, and the often-overlooked area of defensive tactics.
Two ideas give the book its identity: “the seeds of tactical destruction,” Heisman’s framework for recognising when a position is ripe for a combination, and a closing scheme of five levels of tactical ability that lets you gauge where you stand.
Clear, encouraging, and genuinely thorough, this is a foundational tactics course for beginners and improving players — and a reminder that tactics are also simply the most fun part of the game.
The London System in 12 Practical Lessons
After the success of The Agile London System, Óscar de Prado returns to the opening he is most associated with — but with a deliberately more practical aim. Instead of long, forcing variations, this book teaches the London through plans, schemes, and the standard manoeuvres that recur in almost every game.
The structure is its strength: twelve self-contained lessons, each on a concrete practical theme. You learn the core move-orders and ideas, then the typical attacking plans — the assault on b2, the early h4 thrust, the f2-f4 schemes, queenside play — followed by the recurring middlegame motifs (good knight versus bad bishop, the key queen manoeuvres) and, importantly, the typical London endgames so often reached.
A lesson on the latest theoretical developments keeps the repertoire current, and a closing chapter of tactical, strategic, and theoretical exercises lets you test what you’ve absorbed. A preface by grandmaster Pepe Cuenca sets the tone.
Best suited to club players who want a sound, low-maintenance 1.d4 system they can play on autopilot — understanding the plans rather than memorising lines.
The Sicilian Najdorf is one of Black’s best and most combative responses to 1.e4. The Najdorf was championed by Fischer and Kasparov during their respective periods of dominance over the world chess scene, and has been used extensively by many other World Champions and elite GMs, including Anand, Gelfand, Topalov and Vachier-Lagrave to name but a few. Despite the Najdorf’s obvious pedigree, many players are intimidated by the highly tactical and theoretical nature of some of its main lines. In Playing the Najdorf, IM David Vigorito shows that this need not be a problem, as he offers a complete repertoire for Black based on positional principles, offering sound recommendations which lead to a fighting game without turning the battle into a memory contest.
Bestselling author Viktor Moskalenko presents an extremely powerful set of lines for White. The guiding principle of his 1.d4 repertoire is: be bold and put pressure on your opponent as early as possible. Moskalenko does not shower you with long computer-generated variations, but has a keen eye for the essence of positions. His talent to find new resources in well-known lines results in a host of novelties, daring recommendations and cunning tricks. When you play his lines and follow his recommendations you will frequently surprise your opponent and build up positions full of swing. This is a typical Moskalenko book: practical, accessible, original and inspiring.
Pawn play is a fundamental aspect of chess strategy, yet often neglected in chess literature. In this, his second book on pawn play, Super-GM Sam Shankland sheds light on the vital topic of Passed Pawns.
Passed pawns – whether connected, lone or protected – are common occurrences in middlegames and endgames, and your effectiveness in playing with or against them will make the difference between victory and defeat. Just like in his previous book, Shankland breaks down each topic into a series of crystal-clear guidelines to aid the reader.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Pawn Play Bundle
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