Great Moves: Learning Chess Through History
blends the intricacies of chess play with the game’s compelling and colorful history, putting real people at the 64 squares. Much more than a primer for beginning chess players and their teachers,
Great Moves
shines a light on the lives of famous players of bygone eras, helping experienced players to fill in the gaps in their chess culture
The Complete Manual of Positional Chess, volume 2
This is the second half of the training course Konstantin Sakaev and Konstantin Landa built for the DYSS, Russia’s elite sports school for young chess talents. Where Volume 1 laid the foundations, Volume 2 goes wide and deep — a genuinely comprehensive reference covering the two engines of practical play: pawns and dynamics.
The first part takes Nimzowitsch’s dictum that "pawns are the soul of chess" literally, working through every important structure in turn: passed and protected passed pawns, blockades, pawn chains and how to break them, backward, doubled, isolated, connected and hanging pawns, the minority attack, pawn breaks, and the destruction of the enemy centre.
The second part turns to dynamics and tactics — open and discovered attacks, the standard combinational motifs (pin, fork, double attack, deflection, overload, interference), the classic sacrifices on h7 and f7, attacks on the castled and uncastled king, opposite-side castling races, and the art of eliminating defenders and bringing every piece into the attack.
Each topic is explained as a transferable tool rather than a list of examples, in the structured DYSS style. This is an advanced reference for players aiming at master strength who want one coherent treatment of the whole middlegame. Best used alongside Volume 1.
FIDE Master and coach Tigran Gyozalyan fills a gap in the chess literature with the first systematic exploration of the king’s role and capabilities in the opening and the middlegame
How do we make better decisions on the chessboard? GM Jacob Aagaard, the author of Grandmaster Preparation: Thinking Inside the Box, will teach you just that.
The focus of this book is to break down the most important topics relating to chess improvement, many of which deal with the psychological aspects of the game, and to illustrate how to overcome critical thinking barriers that hinder progress.
The topics include the psychology of chess improvement, four types of decisions made during a game, calculation techniques, abstract thinking, strategic concepts, and more.
Thinking Inside the Box is the final volume of the award-winning Grandmaster Preparation series which consists of 5 exercise books: Calculation, Positional Play, Strategic Play, Attack & Defence, and Endgame Play. Each book focuses on specific ways of looking at various types of positions and includes exercises to enhance understanding and application of key concepts.
A thought-provoking read, this final book is meant to be a conversational piece, unifying concepts written in the previous five books. It is the ultimate self-improvement guide, catering to amateurs and world-class players alike aiming to overcome their plateau and achieve better results.
In the words of Aagard himself, “Improvement in chess is hard; knowing how it can be done should be easy.”
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Grandmaster Preparation
Calculation is the engine of practical chess, and this is the first volume of a dedicated training series built to sharpen it. The focus here is the middlegame: the moments where seeing one move further, or spotting the move you would never normally consider, decides the game.
The book is organised as a graded course of themed exercises rather than a prose treatise. After a warm-up, the chapters each train a distinct skill — punishing poor piece coordination, finding the unexpected blow, holding up under pressure, landing a devastating attacking move, uncovering the quiet but killer positional move, and spotting the resource you missed. Later chapters push into evaluation and decision-making, where you must judge whether an opportunity is real and then choose correctly between competing candidates.
Working through the positions without moving the pieces — visualising to the end before committing — is the intended method, and the difficulty rises as you progress. A special closing section adds tougher, mixed material for players who want to be stretched.
This is a workout, not light reading. It rewards players who are willing to sit with a position and calculate hard, and is best suited to committed club players and above. Two further volumes extend the same training to endgames and beyond.
TACTICS TRAINER AVAILABLE!
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Chess Calculation Training
The study of well-annotated master games is the best way to improve. Acclaimed chess author Steve Giddins has assembled the most didactic examples from New In Chess. There are masterclasses by dozens of chess legends and no fewer than eight World Champions. Together they provide the high standard of instructional material that today’s club player needs.
The new series of middlegame books by Adrian Mikhalchishin and Georg Mohr starts with a volume about the center.
After his 2008 book ‘Winning Chess Middlegames’, Grandmaster Ivan Sokolov takes us a step further into his dungeon of middlegame skills. In his well known style, Sokolov focuses on the different aspects of the complex middlegame.
Kalinin helps players seeking the master title by showing how concrete knowledge leads to improved decisions at the board. He stresses the essence of the classics and the importance of human interaction in reaching analytical mastery.
Attack & Defense - GM Preparation
Part of Jacob Aagaard’s award-winning Grandmaster Preparation series, this volume tackles the dynamic heart of the game: the twin skills of attacking and defending. These are the moments when a game is won or lost outright, and they are notoriously hard to teach as a system rather than a set of disconnected examples.
Aagaard’s solution is to carve dynamic play into separate, trainable abilities — seizing and using the initiative, attacking the king, defending under pressure, and finding counterplay — and to set out the main principles governing each. By breaking the subject into clear components, he gives the reader a structured way to expand a part of chess that most players approach by instinct alone.
As throughout the series, the method is active rather than passive: the principles are introduced and then drilled through a large body of demanding exercises drawn from real play, so you build the skill by solving rather than just reading. The detailed solutions show how a strong player reasons through the chaos of a sharp position.
This is genuinely difficult, high-level material, best suited to strong club players, experts, and aspiring masters who want to sharpen the attacking and defensive sides of their game. A rigorous workout, and a natural companion to the other volumes in the series.
In Calculation thinking methods such as Candidates, Combinations, Prophylaxis, Comparison, Elimination, Intermediate Moves, Imagination and Traps are explained to the reader, and ownership of them is offered through a carefully selected series of exercises.
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