General Strategy Books

Understanding Before Moving: Part 1

What actually matters in the opening? Which plans are available, and what hidden ideas are concealed in the position you reach just as the opening ends? Those questions — far more useful to an improving player than another twenty moves of memorised theory — are the subject of Herman Grooten’s series, and Part 1 applies them to the Ruy Lopez and Italian structures.

Grooten’s premise is that you should understand before you move: grasp the typical pawn structures and the plans they dictate, and the individual moves start to make sense on their own. The book opens with chapters on how to study openings and what really goes on "behind the scenes," then builds a clear overview of the structures arising from the Ruy Lopez and the Italian Game.

The ideas are then cemented through carefully chosen model games — where you see the plans played out in full — and a set of exercises to test your understanding.

A genuinely instructive bridge between raw opening theory and practical middlegame play, ideal for club players who keep reaching the middlegame with no idea what to do. Part of an ongoing series covering the major structures.

The story of AlphaZero has a wider impact. Game Changer offers intriguing insights into the opportunities and horizons of Artificial Intelligence. Not just in solving games, but in providing solutions for a wide variety of challenges in society. Game Changer also presents a collection of lucidly explained chess games of astonishing quality. Both professionals and club players will improve their game by studying AlphaZero’s stunning discoveries in every field that matters: opening preparation, piece mobility, initiative, attacking techniques, long-term sacrifices and much more.

I assume that most of you have read (and enjoyed!) the first volume of this series, but for those who haven’t: don’t worry. The level of the content of the two books is identical and you can work through the second volume without having studied the first one. However, it’s still not too late to get a copy of the first volume! In the first six chapters I will mainly look at positions with limited material left on the board. Endgames, yes, but also positions where the initiative plays an important role. My aim is to illustrate the specific features of all the pieces and this can best be done without too many other pieces on the board.

Chess Pattern Recognition for Beginners

Pattern recognition is the engine of chess improvement: the more standard images you carry in your head, the faster you grasp a position and find the right plan. Arthur van de Oudeweetering’s earlier books on the subject became instant favourites — but they assumed you already knew the fundamentals. This book supplies those fundamentals, written for the ambitious beginner and post-beginner.

It teaches the essential patterns a developing player actually needs: how to develop and coordinate the pieces, how to manoeuvre pawns into strong formations, how to put pressure on the opponent and attack the enemy king, and how to execute the standard sacrifices that seize the initiative. The chapters are built around memorable, named images — the rook on the seventh, the bad bishop, the isolated pawn, the classic h7 bishop sacrifice — so the ideas stick.

Each part ends with exercises, and a foreword by grandmaster Vladimir Chuchelov frames the method. The whole approach is designed so that recognising a familiar pattern does the heavy lifting that calculation alone never could.

Study it and your results should climb noticeably. Ideal for improving beginners — and the perfect on-ramp to the author’s more advanced pattern-recognition books later.

Better Thinking, Better Chess

Finding strong moves is not simply a matter of how much you know — often, more knowledge makes the choice harder by multiplying the directions your mind can wander. What really matters, argues grandmaster Joel Benjamin, is how you think. This book is his attempt to fix the thought process itself.

Years of coaching taught Benjamin that pointing out the move a student missed was only half the job; the real task was explaining why they failed to find it. A chess engine won’t do that — it shows the best move but not the flawed reasoning that led you astray. So Benjamin works on the reasoning directly, across every phase of the game.

The chapters span openings, endgames, tactics, grandmaster calculation and analysis, the handling of material versus initiative, the surprisingly difficult skill of winning a won game, and the dark art of swindling a lost one — closing with a chapter of practical "words of wisdom" for clearer thinking and a set of challenges.

A practical, experience-driven improvement book for club and tournament players who keep making the same kinds of mistakes and want to understand the habits of mind behind better moves.

International Master and experienced chess trainer Thomas Willemze is the handyman you are looking for. He tells you which are the most urgent problems that need fixing. In his no-nonsense guide, Willemze presents essential techniques on how to mobilize your pieces in order to gain the upper hand.

After reading this book the reader will increase his or her knowledge of the typical and not-so-typical methods of play in the middlegame, become familiar with ideas of non-standard solutions to practical problems arising during the game and be able to apply this knowledge in his or her own games.

With twenty-five years’ experience getting underprivileged kids to achieve beyond all expectations, Cripe now takes his holistic instructional methods to the chess arena. Designed for both chess novices and their coaches, The Learning Spiral sets out the theory, explains how it works, and then applies it with more than 400 positions for the student to solve.

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

Christian tackles one of the most important issues in chess: how to select candidate moves. He illustrates and discusses many different themes such as: > entering relatively uncharted territory > replying on your acquired knowledge > using intuition > play prophylactically

Strategic Chess Exercises

Almost every chess puzzle book trains tactics — find the forced win. But in most of the positions you actually face in a game, there is no combination to find. What you are really doing, move after move, is trying to improve your position or worsen your opponent’s by applying strategic judgement. This book trains that neglected skill directly.

Experienced trainer Emmanuel Bricard has assembled a manual of carefully selected and tested positions where the task is not to calculate a tactic but to find the right plan: which piece to improve, which structure to aim for, where to create a weakness, when to exchange. Each exercise asks you to think the way you must in a real game when no forcing solution exists.

The positions are split into middlegame and endgame exercises and indexed by strategic theme, with detailed solutions that explain the reasoning rather than just giving the move. The benefits are practical: better strategic understanding, the ability to apply principles in concrete positions, and even time saved on the clock when you know what you are trying to do.

A rare and valuable training resource for club players and above who want to sharpen the part of their game that decides most non-tactical positions.