All chess players know that they need to study tactics, calculation, endgames, and openings, but when it comes to defense, far too many wait until they're under pressure. The truth is that more games are lost because of defensive mistakes than strategic ones.
By improving your defense, you could do more for your win rate than perhaps any other area of chess study. Mastering Chess Defence by GM Johan Hellsten is the training program you need to be prepared and defend against attacks, both in the short and long term.
Inside are 31 chapters that form a compendium of all the defensive skills you need to learn.
Specifically, you'll learn to
– Deflect successfully with material
– Create counterthreats - the best defense is a good offense
– Exploit the back rank as a defensive measure
– Learn the risks of materialism - to grab material or not to grab?
– Find safety on flight squares
– Find "lifelines" that allow you to escape from the seemingly inescapable
This is the most comprehensive modern book on defensive techniques, with hundreds of instructive examples and dozens of exercises. Strategic mastermind Johan Hellsten teaches you to defend at a master level.
Johan Hellsten is a Grandmaster, a former Swedish Champion and a European Team Championship individual gold medalist. He's a renowned chess teacher and award-winning author with his trilogy: Mastering Chess Strategy, Mastering Opening Strategy and Mastering Endgame Strategy.
How to lose small and win big in Chess
A pawn is the smallest unit of material in chess, but a well-executed pawn sacrifice can yield huge rewards. Still, many players shy away from such possibilities when they are uncertain of the consequences.
Powerhouse Pawn Sacrifices contains everything you need to master this crucial area of chess. In addition to covering dynamic and long-term sacrifices, Grandmaster Ivan Cheparinov also discusses pawn sacrifices arising in specific opening variations, connecting the different phases of the game, while sharing valuable insights that will be transferable to other scenarios.
Winning a pawn is a common occurrence in chess, but many players have no idea what to do with an extra pawn, aside from the vague notion of “exchange pieces and win the endgame”. Grandmaster Sam Shankland knows better – and after reading this book, you will too.
In this groundbreaking work, Shankland shares his three-step process for handling positions with an extra pawn, providing exercises to train the reader’s ability, along with carefully annotated examples to illustrate the key themes. Converting an Extra Pawn in Chess contains everything you need to master the skill of winning with the most common type of material advantage in chess.
Grandmaster Sergei Tiviakov once remained unbeaten in a streak of 110 consecutive professional chess games. Who could be a better guide to help you find the right move in any chess position than Tiviakov? His style was polished in the famous Russian chess school and hardened by his vast experience in hundreds of strong tournaments.
The first volume of this highly acclaimed series on chess strategy dealt with pawn structures. In the second volume, Sergei discussed various types of piece play, relating it to specific situations on the chessboard. In this third volume, he focusses on the basis: the individual move in a game.
Choosing a move is an eternal dilemma for a chess player. How can we recognize the right solution in any position? How can we gain confidence in our decisions? Where do we direct our pieces and pawns?
In ten chapters, Tiviakov explains in his own clear and unique way how a single move can strengthen your position, weaken your opponent’s position, or simply avoid trouble. Chapters are also devoted to finding the right move by intuition or by weighing up candidate moves, and to more practical advice such as how much time you should spend on one move.
Classic games, as well as many samples from Tiviakov’s own rich practice, are used to illustrate the arguments made. Instructive exercises have been added to help the reader test his newly acquired knowledge. Like the other volumes of Rock Solid Chess, this book will teach you much more than traditional chess manuals do and will help you to greatly improve your decision-making in chess.
Grandmaster Sergei Tiviakov is an Olympic gold medallist, a three-time Dutch Champion and a former European Champion. In 2024, at 51, he still became vice-champion of the Netherlands.
Yulia Gökbulut is a Women’s FIDE Master, chess author and sports writer from Turkey.
This new book by Mikhail Shereshevsky, one of the most respected chess trainers in the world, is about a very important but little-explored topic: associative thinking. How can a modern chess student avoid drowning in the flood of information? The answer is to stop mechanically memorizing moves and turn on your curiosity. Try to create a vivid image of the technique you are studying and remember it as an association!
During a game of chess, we have associations all the time. We are not talking about specific pawn structures, but about more abstract things. What is the best interaction between knight and pawn? Where should the rook be placed – behind the passed pawn or to the side? On which squares should you place your pawns when you have a bishop against a knight? Generations of chess players before us have answered these and similar questions.
Shereshevsky clearly shows that studying the games of great chess players will help you to improve your associative thinking, especially when the comments come from the players themselves. The author pays special attention to such outstanding grandmasters as Ulf Andersson, Anatoly Karpov, Vladimir Kramnik, and Magnus Carlsen.
As with all of Shereshevsky’s books, this manual offers supreme examples of chess training excellence. Studying this book will improve your understanding of chess enormously and help you on your way to chess mastery.
Mikhail Shereshevsky (1950) is one of the most respected chess trainers and writers in the world. In 2018, he published the best-selling The Shereshevsky Method to Improve in Chess. His magnum opus, Endgame Strategy, is a must-read for ambitious players. It’s been hailed by superstars like Vladimir Kramnik and Magnus Carlsen as their formative guide to handling the endgame.
Material imbalances are a fundamental part of almost every chess game, yet have not received much attention in chess literature. In this illuminating book, GM Mauricio Flores Rios breaks down this universal topic into categories such as bishop vs knight, opposite-coloured bishops, possessing and playing against the bishop pair, and various scenarios with a queen or rook being traded for a number of pieces.
With meticulously chosen examples, insightful commentary and exercises to test your newfound understanding of all types of material imbalance, Chess Imbalances is an essential tool for chess improvement.
Este libro sigue los pasos del manual de iniciación Escuela de ajedrez, del mismo autor, y está destinado a los jugadores que conocen los fundamentos del juego y quieren progresar, es decir, a jugadores en formación y de nivel medio que participan en torneos y desean mejorar su técnica de juego.
¿Cuál es el secreto del ajedrez?
¿Cuál es la clave que permite llevar la pieza justa a la casilla precisa y en el momento oportuno?
El arte de interpretar y dictaminar las posiciones de forma exacta es el que permite realizar esa jugada.
Este arte de análisis y evaluación se puede aprender. Para ello se requieren los conocimientos técnicos que permitan juzgar la posición que tiene ante el tablero. No basta con interpretarla o leerla correctamente, sino que hace falta saber cómo explotar, por ejemplo, un complejo de peones doblados, cómo tratar una posición del medio juego o cómo determinar el mejor procedimiento de ataque al enroque.
Esta maestría se adquiere con el estudio de los elementos y temas que integran el juego. El propósito de este libro es brindarle, precisamente, esa caja de herramientas para interpretar posiciones y aplicarles el tratamiento adecuado, clave para ganar y tener éxito en el juego.
Antonio Gude es un experto investigador y divulgador de ajedrez. Ha dirigido varias publicaciones técnicas, traducido obras capitales de la literatura ajedrecística y es autor de los libros de ajedrez en español más vendidos.
Few books have dealt with the topic of exchanges in chess, leaving this important part of chess strategy a mystery to most. In Mastering Chess Exchanges, grandmasters Jacob Aagaard and Renier Castellanos break down the topic into crystal-clear themes, including piece preferences, tension, weaknesses, colour complexes, king safety and endgames, illustrating the concepts with illuminating examples.
Then the reader is given a chance to turn understanding into skill, with 365 instructive exercises, featuring a novel, multiple-choice format designed to focus the reader’s attention on possible exchanges.
The book about defense is created as an endeavor to help players who struggle with issues that are rarely written about. Namely:
– How to organize a proper defense?
– How to perry opponent’s threats and thwart his plans?
– How to create a strong counter-attack?
After a careful study of interesting and instructive examples we decided to divide the material into several logical chapters:
1. Good Defense. Learn and draw conclusions about how the best players think when solving the problems of defense in practical play.
2. Poor Defense. Examples of incorrect defense can be found at practically all levels. We believe these examples show exactly how demanding defense is.
3. The King. Modern ways of king evacuation, or keeping the king in the center. Also, we explain how the king "thinks" and takes care of himself in dangerous situations.
4. Critical moments in the game. Games and game fragments that tackle with the moments when the fate of the game is decided and how the best players react in those situations.
5. Defense in inferior endgames. Defense is not only about the king that is threatened in a game, and it is not just about thinking of the king’s safety. It is highly instructive and practical to apply defensive principles in endgames as well.
6. Openings. Presentation of modern openings and typical defensive reactions in the Italian, the Ruy Lopez and the Grunfeld Defense.
Finally, the book ends with 50 demanding exercises that should reenforce the knowledge you have gathered after a careful study of all examples.
We hope you will enjoy studying the presented material and successfully pro gress in this extremely demanding area of chess.
SERIES INTRODUCTION
There are many various concepts and approaches to creating chess books. Chess strategy books have, more or less, well-known structure and contents. Writers work on “elements, principles, concepts... The chapter titles are more or less known in advance. I suggest an alternative concept. I will try to explain how to use your pieces and how to handle situations with the same pieces in your opponent’s camp!
Not once I heard statements like: “He doesn’t know how to play with minor pieces, or “He always stays with a bad bishop”, or “He is bad in rook endgames” etc. That conclusion motivated me to focus on such peculiar problems and to explain everything related to a concrete chess piece.
EVERYTHING ABOUT THE KING
The first volume is dedicated to the most important piece – the king. Some principles are well known: in the opening we should castle as soon as possible to secure the king and give freedom to other pieces. In the middlegame we should attack the opponent’s king if he is not safe to mate and win, in the endgame we are well-advised to activate our own king in order to have one more piece in action... There are many exceptions or modifications of these principles and there are many other less common principles.
I am sure that you will learn a lot while reading this book that and you will enjoy some interesting games. The material is divided in six chapters. In the first chapter our story will be about the importance of having an active king in the endgame. The next three chapters are about launching and organizing attacks on our opponent’s unsafe king (king in the center, attacks with castling on the same side and on the opposite sides). The fifth chapter is about king evacuation, a concept of great value both in defense and attack! The final chapter focuses on art and beauty in chess and you will see brave kings in action and some risky walks performed across the whole board!
I have no doubt that the mix of well known, unknown and fresh examples will be interesting to you, dear reader.
A dramatic sacrifice might seem like the best way to achieve a dazzling, come-from-behind victory, however, the outcome of most chess matches, depends on the participants' positional skills. The first player to establish a positional advantage gains the best chance of a successful direct attack.
This complete guide, written by an Israeli grandmaster, offers valuable insights in developing a more powerful strategic game. It spans a century and a half of international chess, from the era of the legendary Paul Morphy in the 1850s to that of the modern powerhouse Gary Kasparov. The author focuses on common situations arising from practical over-the-board play. Examples — on such themes as key squares, bad bishops, and pawn structures — appear in ascending difficulty, with ample cross-reference.
Derived from the author's own coaching manuals, these instructive examples successfully assisted in training Israel's top juniors and the champions of the Israeli women's national team. Chess players at every level will benefit from this opportunity to develop an intuitive grasp of each concept and strengthen their positional play.
Every chess player hopes to set off brilliant combinations and win games in a blaze of glory. Such combinations do not come into being by themselves, however; they appear only as the result of proper chess strategy. It is therefore surprising that so few books deal with this highly important subject, and understandable that Pachman's modern classic has been so enthusiastically received by chessplayers at all levels.
Ludĕk Pachman, a Czech grandmaster, has long had an international reputation as a chess theorist, but until now his work has not been available in English. This present volume, which condenses his great Modern Schachstrategie, presents his ideas and theories in a form that the English-speaking world can assimilate easily. Beginning with basic concepts and the rules of the minor and major pieces, it covers the use of the Queen, the active King, exchanges, various kinds of Pawns, the center and its use, superiority on the wings, minority attack, strategical points and weak squares, methods of attack and defense, and similar topics. Pachman elaborates the various kinds of strategy that can be employed, and shows how each leads to tactical opportunities. It has been said that his section on the Rook alone make his book indispensable to the serious chess player, since the Rook is so important in both middle and endgames.
Pachman presents his method in the form of a thorough, systematic, analytical text, which draws upon scores of great games for exemplification. Both classical and very recent masters are included, although stress is on the moderns: Capablanca, Alekhine, Dr. Lasker, Rubinstein, Nimzovich, Botvinnik, Reshevsky, Bronstein, Smyslov, and Spasski.
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