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.
Swedish chess legend Ulf Andersson was a positional genius with a crystal-clear style. In his prime, in the 1970s and 80s, he rose to the number 4 spot of the FIDE world rankings because he almost never lost a game and kept scoring wins from quiet positions.
But every now and then, he found himself in a position on the board that demanded an attack. And then he would strike! He was fierce and decisive, showcasing his phenomenal talent and his incredible ability to sense any imbalance on the board.
Ulf - The Attacker is an amazing collection of thrilling games! Ulf is widely regarded as one of the most likable figures in the chess world. He is consistently humble, generous with his time, and known for his exceptional sportsmanship. But at the board, he was merciless in his games against Anatoly Karpov, Viktor Korchnoi, Bent Larsen, and Lajos Portisch, to name a few of the chess stars that got crushed in an attack.
This book is both entertaining and instructive. Ulf Andersson's fluid attacking game will undoubtedly influence your own thinking about chess.
Thomas Engqvist is an International Master from Sweden. He has over forty years’ experience as a chess coach, teacher and writer. This is his eleventh chess book, and the first one published by New In Chess.
Mikhail Botvinnik is widely regarded as one of the greatest chess players of all time, in the same league as Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer, and Garry Kasparov. Botvinnik was born in 1911 and died in 1995. He is known as The Patriarch, or the father of the Soviet School of Chess. He was World Chess Champion from 1948 until 1963, with two short interruptions, and later mentored other world champions Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik.
For this modern biography, the Russian grandmaster Alexander Khalifman has selected and annotated more than fifty of Botvinnik’s best games. Khalifman is an excellent guide with a deep understanding of chess and a talent for explaining games in a clear and accessible manner.
Botvinnik’s Best Games is part of a series by New In Chess that celebrates the greatest chess players of all time. Previous titles in the series include collections of games by Paul Morphy, Max Euwe, Boris Spassky, and Ding Liren.
Alexander Khalifman (1966) is a Russian grandmaster who has won numerous tournaments, including the Russian Championship and the New York Open. He was FIDE World Champion in 1999-2000 and has written more than a dozen widely acclaimed chess books.
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.
Dana Mackenzie celebrates the joy of chess - the ordinary, everyday chess we amateurs play. For this book, he has selected forty of his favorite posts from his award-winning chess blog, including a diverse mix of stories, philosophical musings, chess improvement tips, and game analysis.
In each story, the fun leaps off the page. We attend club nights, team tournaments, and state championships. We are on the road and at the board. We enjoy the company of famous and not-so-famous chess personalities. You will read about the Hook and Ladder Trick and Dana’s personal favorite opening, the Bryntse Gambit, presented here with analysis found nowhere else.
A special chapter is devoted to Mike Splane’s invitation-only chess parties, a monthly ‘meeting of the minds’ for masters and aspiring masters in the San Francisco Bay Area. There was no resting on one’s laurels in this crowd. No matter how well you thought you played, you could expect some tough questions and spirited disagreements.The book continues in the spirit of the blog, preserving a dialogue between author and reader that is rarely found in other chess books, or any books for that matter.
Dana Mackenzie is a Ph.D. mathematician who went rogue and became a full-time freelance writer, specializing in popular science and mathematics. As a chess player, he was North Carolina State Champion in 1985 and 1987, is a USCF National Master and Life Master, and for several years was a popular lecturer on a chess instruction website, chesslecture.com. As a professional science writer, he wrote The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be and co-authored The Book of Why, which was named one of the top science books of 2018 by National Public Radio’s Science Friday program.
This book presents forty selected posts (many newly edited and revised) from his blog, which was named ‘Best Chess Blog of 2021’ by the Chess Journalists of America.
We all love the dynamics of chess. Spectacular sacrifices, combinations and attacks on the king never fail to enchant us. But how do we improve our understanding of dynamics? How can we recognize the ‘dynamic energy’ in a position? When can we turn 2+2 into 5, as the legendary tactician Mikhail Tal could? The answers can be found in the Hidden Laws of Chess.
In the first volume of this series, International Master Nick Maatman explored the deeper patterns behind pawn structures. In this second volume, he explains the dynamics of chess by discussing themes such as material imbalance, calculation, and quality versus quantity. He also introduces concepts such as field of vision, the impact of error and the price of a move. These original and well-thought-out ideas are illustrated by a wealth of games from top players past and present, as well as from Maatman's own experience.
Maatman is an experienced chess coach and a graduate in business and philosophy. His books are a rich blend of science, philosophy and practicality. The Hidden Laws of Chess Volume 2: Mastering Dynamics contains plenty of useful advice, instructive chess and carefully selected exercises.
Nick Maatman (1995) is an International Master, an experienced chess coach, and a training partner of former Tata Steel winner GM Jorden van Foreest. Maatman became Dutch U20 champion in 2013 and is very active in tournaments, where he has beaten many grandmasters. He is also an acclaimed chess commentator and columnist.
Siegbert Tarrasch and Aron Nimzowitsch could be called the two vainest chess players in history. This book tells the fascinating story of their lifelong rivalry. They clashed as personalities, as players and as chess writers, both searching for the truth in chess, but with very different perspectives.
Tarrasch is seen as the dogmatic theorist and, according to Nimzowitsch, didn't offer much more than the well-meaning advice of a housewife. Nimzowitsch is the philosopher, the designer of a complete ‘system’ that explains everything there is to know about chess to future generations of students.
Does chess history treat these giants fairly or are they mere caricatures? And what was the role of the third protagonist in this debate, Semyon Alapin, whom Nimzowitsch condescendingly called ‘an artist of variations’? These questions, and these different viewpoints, are at the heart of this in-depth investigation.
Hendriks offers a wonderful and often highly entertaining look at this great controversy. The many chess fragments nicely illustrate how our expertise has evolved in this turbulent period of chess history.
Willy Hendriks.(1966) is an International Master who has been working as a chess trainer for over thirty years. His bestselling book Move First, Think Later won the English Chess Federation Book of the Year Award in 2012. Hendriks has published two other widely acclaimed chess books, On the Origin of Good Moves (2020) and The Ink War (2022).
The astounding success of How To Study Chess on Your Own made clear that thousands of chess players want to improve their game — and like to work on their training at least partially by themselves.
The bestselling book by GM Kuljasevic offered a structured approach and training plans. Due to popular demand, Kuljasevic has created a series of accompanying Workbooks with exercises and tools a chess student can use to start his training immediately.
Most workbooks offer puzzles and puzzles only. But Kuljasevic has used his coaching experience to create a broader and more exciting training schedule. Tasks like these will challenge you:
– Solve deep visualization puzzles
– Find a ‘hidden tactic’ – and a mini-plan
– Playing a sharp tactical position – against a friend or an engine, carefully set an appropriate level
– Simulation – study and replay a strategic model game
– Analyze – try to understand a thematic endgame position
Volume 2 is optimized for chess players with an Elo rating between 1500 and 1800 but is helpful for anyone between 1200 and 2000. Volume 1 is for 1800-2100 Elo, and Volume 3 will serve the needs of more advanced club players.
Davorin Kuljasevic is an International Grandmaster born in Croatia. He graduated from Texas Tech University and is an experienced coach. His bestselling book Beyond Material: Ignore the Face Value of Your Pieces was a finalist for the Boleslavsky-Averbakh Award, the best book prize of FIDE, the International Chess Federation.
The Center Game is a wonderful opening for club players. White starts with a center push, develops quickly, looks for opposite castling, and launches an attack. The setup will feel very familiar to you in no time. And the chess engines show that this opening is both sound and correct, and at least as good as the over-analyzed Ruy Lopez and Italian Opening.
With this opening, you'll get a middlegame position that you know very well, but quite often will be new to Black. This will probably guarantee you an advantage on the clock, which will further increase your winning chances.
The author, Arne Moll, is an experienced club player, chess writer and chess book reviewer, so he knows exactly what the reader needs: the historical context, the basic strategic ideas of each line, the tactical patterns that will emerge, and some inspiring model games by great players such as Ian Nepomniatchi and Arjun Erigaisi —who uses the Center Game as a surprise weapon
Arne Moll is an experienced club and tournament player with a peak rating well above 2200. He was a chess writer for the legendary blog Chess Vibes and Chess.com and has reviewed dozens of chess books. He lives in Amsterdam and works as an IT and Data specialist in the Finance industry.
Perhaps the greatest beauty in chess can be found in endgame studies. Delightful twists and turns on the board are combined into true works of art. In studies, chess is distilled into its purest form, with all pieces making only the most essential moves. Endgame studies are also useful exercises for practical chess players, as they show patterns, improve calculation, and inspire out-of-the-box thinking.
Grandmaster Jan Timman has been fascinated by endgame studies since his youth. The artistry and perfection have always appealed to him. In recent years his focus has shifted from practical chess to composing endgame studies, and many of his compositions have won awards. Timman wrote about composing in The Art of the Endgame (New In Chess, Revised Edition 2023).
In this new book Timman presents the one hundred greatest endgame studies. In five chapters he guides you through masterpieces of increasing difficulty, beginning with elementary endings such as the Réti and Lasker manoeuvres. The studies include themes such as minor) promotion, Zugzwang and domination, all beautifully illustrated and clearly explained. By the time you reach the final chapter with the most complicated examples, you will be amazed at the myriad possibilities of chess and inspired to add more finesse to your own endgame play.
Jan Timman, World Chess Champion finalist, is the author of many bestselling chess books. Timman's Titans won the 2017 ECF Book of the Year Award, and his recent books, The Longest Game, The Unstoppable American, Timman's Triumphs and Max Euwe's Best Games have all met with wide acclaim. He was awarded the title of FIDE Master of Chess Composition in 2022.
Think Like Ivanchuk is a celebration of a true chess genius. This book is a collection of Vasyl Ivanchuk's best games, a chess biography and a highly entertaining training manual all in one.
Vasyl Ivanchuk, a super-grandmaster from Ukraine, was born in 1969 and was the best player in the world in the 1990s behind World Champion Garry Kasparov. He has won the Olympiad, the super-tournaments in Linares and Wijk aan Zee, and many, many other events. He is an incredibly versatile player and has employed almost every possible opening variation known to chess.
Grandmaster Viktor Moskalenko has known his compatriot since childhood, has been his second and sparring partner, and understands his style like no other. Moskalenko has selected Ivanchuk's most fascinating games against world champions and top grandmasters and has derived more than 500 training positions from them. The exercises are fun, engaging, and presented in a way that any chess player can understand.
This collection of Ivanchuk's best artistic ideas will make you think like Ivanchuk and reach new heights in chess. Welcome to Planet Ivanchuk!
Viktor Moskalenko (1960) is one of the leading chess instructors of our time. The Ukrainian Grandmaster has authored numerous inspiring opening manuals such as Trompowsky Attack & London System, An Attacking Repertoire for White with 1.d4, The Fully-Fledged French, The Wonderful Winawer, and The Fabulous Budapest Gambit.
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