A Guide to Chess Improvement features the very best of Dan Heisman's multi-award winning chess column Novice Nook, which ran for over ten years at the popular website ChessCafe.com. This book is full of valuable instruction, insight and practical advice on a wide range of key subjects: general improvement, thought processes, planning and strategy, tactics, endgame play, technique, time management and much more besides.
Heisman has thoroughly revised, expanded and updated his work to produce an easy-to-navigate guide. He has also included brand new and exclusive columns. Any player from beginner to expert who is serious about improving their chess should read this book!
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Dan Heisman's Books
Jacob Aagaard shares his simple three-step tool of positional analysis that he has used with club players and famous grandmasters to improve their positional decision-making. Working from the starting point that all players who aspire to play at international level have a certain amount of positional understanding, Aagaard lays out an easy-to-follow training plan that will improve everyone’s intuition and positional decision-making.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Grandmaster Preparation
Lars Schandorff opens his preface with a quote from the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit: "The Caro-Kann Defence. Genuine bummer. What is wrong with the Caro-Kann? It is all pawns and no hope!" — attributed to the fictional grandmaster Benny Watts. He lets it sit for a paragraph, then dismantles it. The Caro-Kann, he argues, has changed: it is no longer a defence played for solid equality, but a weapon that the world's best players — including Carlsen and Caruana — have been using as a genuine winning try with Black.
This book is Schandorff's second on the Caro-Kann, but not an update of his earlier Grandmaster Repertoire 7. It is a completely new book built around a different main recommendation. In GMR 7, Schandorff advocated the classic 4...Bf5 in the Classical Variation — the move the Caro-Kann was essentially designed to play. Here he switches to 4...Nf6 5.Nxf6† exf6, a more combative line in which Black voluntarily accepts doubled pawns in exchange for piece activity and kingside pressure. Nothing is wrong with the old recommendation, he notes — Black has met every challenge of the past decade. But the new system creates more strategically demanding play and, in Schandorff's judgment, gives Black better winning chances.
In the Advance Variation's Short System, Schandorff retains his earlier recommendation of the immediate counterattack 5...c5. In the critical main line after 6.Be3, he now offers two options rather than one: the solid 6...cxd4 (his previous recommendation, which eventually equalises) and a new addition, 6...Qb6!?, which is equally sound but tests White's knowledge more and offers Black more winning chances. This pattern of expanded choice appears throughout the book wherever Schandorff felt it was appropriate.
344 pages. Suitable for intermediate to advanced players. Part of the Quality Chess Playing... series.
50 Mistakes You Should Know
It is not the quality of your best moves that wins games — it is the quality of your worst ones. That is the premise of this book, and the fastest route to improvement it proposes is simple: learn to recognise, and stop making, the mistakes that quietly cost you points.
Spanish grandmaster and coach Jesús de la Villa — author of the bestselling 100 Endgames You Must Know — has the rare gift of knowing exactly what a developing player needs. Drawing on more than a decade of coaching juniors, he has distilled the fifty errors that recur most often, so that once you have seen each one clearly you can avoid it in your own games.
The mistakes are grouped by theme across the whole game: exchanging pieces, calculation, defence, attacking the king, strategy, positional sacrifices, the endgame and rook endings in particular, the opening, basic tactics, prophylactic thinking, and paying attention to what your opponent is doing. Each is illustrated memorably, in de la Villa’s clear, encouraging style.
He likes Eleanor Roosevelt’s line: "Learn from the errors of others — you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself." A genuinely practical improvement book for club players of every stripe.
Jesus de la Villa (1958) is an International Grandmaster born in Spain. He is a successful author and a well-known chess trainer. He has twice won the Spanish Championship. His book 100 Endgames You Must Know is an international bestseller.
Imagine you are a club player who has been given the opportunity to talk at length with a famous grandmaster. How would you make the most of this opportunity? Club players are unaware of the subtleties in Grandmaster chess. Great players can analyze chess at a depth that is unfathomable to amateurs. However, having reached such a high level can make it difficult to understand what is lacking in the mind of the amateur. Lessons with a Grandmaster bridges this gap between grandmaster and amateur through a series of conversations between teacher, the renowned Grandmaster Boris Gulko, and student Dr. Joel R. Sneed, a professor of psychology and amateur chess player. The lessons are based on Gulko's own battles against fellow grandmasters, and there is particular focus on strategy, tactics and the role of psychology in chess competition.
While good opening preparation is important, it is often the proper middle and endgame execution that dictates the game outcome. In Techniques of Positional Play, authors Valeri Bronznik and Anatoli Terekhin focus on 45 key practical methods that every aspiring player must know. From concepts like restricting enemy pieces, creating space, navigating pawn structures, leveraging rook pawns, seizing open files, and more, these skills, while often intuitively understood, can be honed through deliberate study to enhance strategic vision.
Most of these techniques are easy to understand and memorize. Bronznik and Terekhin do not burden the reader with deep analysis and only present those variations that are necessary to get the point. Additionally, the book includes a special training section where the players can test and reinforce their skills and positional understanding.
This magnificent compilation of chess form the basis of the first part of Garry Kasparov's definitive history of the World Chess Championship. Garry Kasparov, who is universally acclaimed as the greatest chessplayer ever, subjects the play of his predecessors to a rigorous analysis.
Part one features the play of champions Wilhelm Steinitz (1886-1894), Emanuel Lasker (1894-1921), Jose Capablanca (1921-1927) and Alexander Alekhine (1927-1935 and 1937-1946).
This ebook is a part of Bundle: My Great Predecessors
A century ago Emanuel Lasker argued that improving amateurs should spend roughly 5% of their study time on openings. Today’s club players are closer to 80% — often memorising the very lines top grandmasters need only because they must extract every last drop from the opening. This book argues that for everyone else, that effort is largely wasted.
Gerard Welling and Steve Giddins offer an alternative: a single, low-maintenance system you can play with both colours. Built around the Old Indian and Hanham Philidor set-ups, the repertoire uses similar plans and structures whether you are White or Black, so the amount you must learn — and keep updating — shrinks dramatically.
The book is organised around understanding rather than memorisation. Each chapter leads with the strategy and typical ideas — the central breaks, the standard manoeuvres, the recurring endgames — before reaching the move orders and illustrative games, and a closing set of summary tables makes the whole repertoire easy to revise.
The promise is practical: rock-solid positions you genuinely know how to handle, and far more time freed up for what actually decides amateur games — tactics, positional judgement, and endgame technique. Ideal for busy club players who would rather improve than memorise.
One of the finest chess books ever written, now in the revised algebraic edition. The author expounds both the basic principles and the most complex forms of attack on the king. A study of this masterpiece will add power and brilliance to any chess enthusiast's play.
Technical Decision Making in Chess
Most players find the same moments slipping away: the endgames and the positions where one side holds a structural or material edge but the win (or the save) refuses to come. In this book — part of his acclaimed Decision Making series — former World Championship Challenger Boris Gelfand opens up his own thinking in exactly these technical situations.
This is not a manual of memorised positions but a window into how an elite grandmaster actually decides. Gelfand explores the recurring questions of technique: when to defend passively and when actively, why a bad plan beats no plan, when it is right to "run" with the king, and how to choose the correct transformation of one advantage into another. His concept of the "Zone of one mistake" — the danger zone where a single slip squanders everything — is likely to be a revelation.
The examples range from Rubinstein’s classics to his own battles with players like Karjakin, and include fascinating chapters on stalemate, geometry, opposite-coloured-bishop endings, and the practical value of studying endgame compositions.
Demanding and deep, it is best suited to strong club players and above who want to understand technical chess from the inside. A serious book that repays serious study.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Gelfand Decision Making
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.
Matthew Sadler presents a unique set of methods to work out using an engine. Preparing openings and training early middlegame play, the conversion of advantages, positional play,and defense. And of course: how to analyze one’s own games. These generic training methods Sadler supplements with concrete middlegame and opening tools (techniques, ideas) developed by various top engines. Sadler illustrates his lessons with a collection of fantastic games, explained with his trademark enthusiasm. For the first time the superhuman powers of the chess engine have been decoded to the benefit of all players, in a rich and highly instructive book. Ten thousands of players own a chess engine, but they mostly just use it to check and calculate variations. Matthew Sadler presents unique methods to work out with a chess engine and shows specific middlegame tools and opening strategies developed by engines. For the first time, the superhuman powers of the chess engine have been decoded to the benefit of all chess players.
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