Combines all 7 books by Victor Charushin: Alekhine’s Block, Combination Cross, Lasker’s Combination, Mitrofanov’s Deflection, The Steeplechase, Domination, and Less Common Combinations.
Maneuvering: The Art of Piece Play
Some of the hardest moments in chess come when there is no forcing line and no obvious plan — when the position simply asks you to improve your pieces. This book is the legendary trainer Mark Dvoretsky’s study of exactly that skill: manoeuvring, and the art of finding the best squares for your pieces.
Piece play is one of the subtlest aspects of positional mastery, and Dvoretsky approaches it the way he approached everything — through carefully chosen, demanding examples and a great deal of active solving rather than passive reading. The material ranges across every phase, from opening manoeuvres through richly complex middlegames to queenless positions and endgames, showing how the same principles of piece improvement run throughout the game.
As always with Dvoretsky, the solutions are detailed and honest: he lays out the reasoning, the candidate moves, and the way a strong player actually arrives at the right regrouping, rather than simply presenting the answer.
This is advanced training material, best suited to strong club players, experts, and above who want to deepen one of the defining skills of high-level chess. Demanding, but among the most rewarding work a serious improver can do.
The idea of the Miniatures series is to present a mix of interesting miniatures, combinations, instructive mistakes along with some accompanying opening theory putting everything into context This volume is dedicated to Sicilian Najdorf.
Opening Originals focuses on both sound and dangerous opening ideas that have escaped wide notice.
“Know thy enemy.” The skill this book trains is the one most players neglect: thinking not only for yourself but for your opponent. As Viktor Korchnoi observed, a player who does not check what the other side is doing ends up blaming bad luck after every game. Renowned trainer Mark Dvoretsky built this collection to fix precisely that blind spot.
It is a training manual, not a textbook. Each of the four chapters opens with a short theoretical discussion and then hands you dozens of exercises, graded from elementary to genuinely hard. The themes build deliberately: paying attention to the opponent’s resources, then the process of elimination, then traps, and finally prophylactic thinking — anticipating and preventing the other side’s ideas before they arrive.
With close to 500 positions drawn from every phase — opening, middlegame, and endgame — the book doubles as all-round calculation and decision-making practice. The solutions are detailed by design: Dvoretsky lays out the logic of the search, showing how a player can actually reach the right conclusion at the board rather than simply presenting the answer.
Among the last works from one of history’s greatest trainers, and close to unique in its subject. Demanding, and best suited to dedicated players from strong club level upward.
Art of Sacrifice in Chess
Rudolf Spielmann’s The Art of Sacrifice in Chess, first published in the mid-1930s, was instantly recognised as a classic — the book that first tried to classify, systematically, the nature of the chess sacrifice. This is its 21st-century edition, with Spielmann’s original work preserved in full and brought to a modern audience.
Spielmann’s great idea was to distinguish the "real" sacrifice (where you give up material for an unclear, long-term return) from the "sham" sacrifice (where the material comes straight back). Around that he organises a whole taxonomy — sacrifices for development, line-clearance, deflection, king-hunts, the king’s field, the exchange and queen sacrifices — that still shapes how we understand the subject.
For this edition, German grandmaster Karsten Müller has done far more than modernise the notation: he has roughly doubled the book, adding chapters on the Greek Gift and the classic weak points (g7, f7, e6, f6), on the sacrificial magic of Tal and Shirov, on the fine art of defending against sacrifices, and a wealth of exercises to test what you’ve learned.
A timeless subject in an enriched modern package — instructive and hugely enjoyable for any club player who wants to attack with imagination and judgement.
Rubinstein French
The Rubinstein Variation — reached after 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 and an early ...dxe4 — is the French Defence at its most solid. Black gives up the centre but gets a rock-hard, low-risk structure with no weaknesses for White to target, which is exactly what makes it such a dependable answer to 1.e4. This book builds a complete Black repertoire around it, with a foreword by French authority John Watson.
The treatment is thorough and reassuring. Hannes Langrock covers every way White can try to punish the Rubinstein — the natural main lines, Kasparov’s 7.c3, the various ways of handling or relinquishing the pin on f6, Khalifman’s 6.Bd3 set-up, and the plans with queenside castling — and then deals with everything Black must know besides: the Advance, the Exchange, the King’s Indian Attack, and the sidelines.
The recommendation suits a particular kind of player perfectly: someone who wants a sound, durable defence that doesn’t require constant theoretical maintenance and steers the game toward clear, understandable middlegames and endgames.
Ideal for club players who want a "set it and forget it" French repertoire — solid, respectable, and hard to break down.
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.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Dan Heisman's Books
Looking for Trouble
Almost every tactics book trains the same thing: here is a position, find the win. But half of practical chess is the opposite skill — spotting what your opponent is threatening before it lands. This book, now in a revised and enlarged third edition, is built around that neglected half.
Award-winning instructor Dan Heisman presents more than 300 problems in which your task is not to attack but to identify and meet a threat — in the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame. Recognising the danger is the first and most commonly skipped step, and training it directly does more to stop you losing than any number of "white to play and win" puzzles.
The problems are organised by phase and graded for difficulty, with Heisman’s trademark clear, patient explanations that suit players of a wide range of strengths. A bonus section on famous threats from master play adds some enjoyment to the workout.
For the many players who keep getting hit by things they "didn’t see coming," this is a direct and unusually practical remedy — a defensive-awareness course rather than another tactics anthology.
It is very important for the practical player to train his or her ability, understand when to rely on intuition, rules of thumb and more general positional considerations, when to try to solve problems by calculating variations to the end and how to manage time to avoid time pressure.
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