A mastery of tactics is essential to a competitive chess player, and the original Advanced Chess Tactics became an instant classic in this field. “This book is absolutely superb. For serious players... this volume will provide a wonderful breadth of study material and act as a workbook to advance your skills and understanding of this important topic...” was Carsten Hansen’s comment when awarding the book 6/6 stars. This new edition benefits from various analytical tweaks, plus an entirely new chapter dedicated to attacking in the French Defence, an opening which the author knows better than almost anyone, having played it for most of his career. Readers are sure to find this an invaluable addition to the original chapters, which remain usefully categorized by opening or common pawn structure.
TACTICS TRAINER AVAILABLE!
Simply solving a large number of random tactical problems is not as effective as solving structured tactical puzzles and learning to recognize their patterns. This is why, in his Chess Tactics from Scratch, the author Martin Weteschnik, breaks down tactics into basic structured elements, such as the pin, or the double attack, and provides their systematic analysis. Once the players understand tactical structures, they will improve their tactical vision and intuition.
This expanded and improved second edition offers more puzzles to test the tactical chess skill that Weteschnik helps the reader develop.
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.
Positional Decision Making in Chess offers a rare look into the mind of a top grandmaster. In his efforts to explain his way of thinking, GM Boris Gelfand, a winner of all the major awards for chess writing, focuses on such topics as the squeeze, space advantage, the transformation of pawn structures, and the transformation of advantages.
Based on examples from his own games and those of his hero, Akiba Rubinstein, Gelfand explains how he thinks during the game, providing invaluable insights into a grandmaster’s thought process for advanced players.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Gelfand Decision Making
Chess is 99% tactics. A tactical pattern is all about immediate threats that produce immediate results. Learning the 100 Tactical Patterns You Must Know will dramatically improve your performance.
This book is the long-awaited middlegame companion to 100 Endgames You Must Know, the all-time bestseller of all chess books published by New In Chess. In three hundred pages, experienced chess trainer Frank Erwich teaches you all the tactical patterns that
– occur most frequently
– are easy to learn
– Explain ideas that are useful in practical games
You will get a huge amount of clear, concise and easy-to-follow chess tactics instruction, ideal for every post-beginner, club player and candidate master who wants to win more games.
Frank Erwich is a FIDE Master and an experienced chess trainer from the Netherlands. He holds a Master’s degree in Psychology. Frank is a book editor for New In Chess and has published the best-sellers: 1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players and 1001 Chess Exercises for Advanced Club Players.
Volume 2B completes the series by providing cutting-edge antidotes to tricky defences such as the Dutch, various Benoni set-ups, Benko and Budapest Gambits, and anything else not covered in volumes 1A, 1B & 2A. With innumerable updates and improvements to the author’s previous work, this book is essential reading for any ambitious 1.d4 player.
The Sicilian Taimanov arises after the opening moves 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nc6, and is an ideal weapon for Black in the modern era. It is theoretically sound, and strikes a perfect balance between solidity and dynamic counterattacking potential, which makes it a popular choice among club players and top grandmasters alike. GM Antonios Pavlidis is the ideal guide to this opening. A keen theoretician, he has been using the Taimanov as the backbone of his repertoire for many years. As a lifelong 1.e4 player, he is also adept at seeing the position from White’s perspective, making his insight all the more valuable to the reader. In this book, Pavlidis shares top-class analysis as well as the expert knowledge he has gained from his many years of experience with the Taimanov.
Strategic Play - GM Preparation
Part of Jacob Aagaard’s award-winning Grandmaster Preparation series, this volume tackles what he considers the hardest area of all: strategic play, the handling of complex positions where the right path is not a matter of calculation or familiar patterns but of deep, original thinking.
This is the most demanding kind of chess training. The games and exercises here deliberately go beyond the skills drilled elsewhere in the series — beyond pattern recognition, calculation, and routine positional assessment — into positions so rich that you must genuinely think for yourself to find the way. Aagaard provides the conceptual tools and then sets you to work on tough, carefully chosen material.
As throughout the series, the emphasis is on active solving rather than passive reading: you wrestle with the positions the way a professional preparing for a tournament would, and the detailed solutions show how a strong player navigates the complexity.
Genuinely difficult, and aimed at strong, ambitious players — experts, masters, and aspiring masters — who want to develop the deepest layer of chess understanding. Not a first improvement book, but a superb one for those ready to be stretched.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Grandmaster Preparation
There are many differing opinions amongst the top players in the world of chess, but there is one thing upon which World Champions, Grandmasters and other experts all agree: the art of chess calculation is the absolute key to the success of a player. Master this discipline and you can surely expect your results to improve dramatically. And yet there have been very few serious attempts in the past by chess authors to delve into this delicate topic, perhaps not surprisingly given its complexity and difficulty. In Excelling at Chess Calculation, Jacob Aagaard tackles the subject matter head on, unravelling the many secrets behind chess calculation and arming the reader with the necessary tools to be able to calculate effectively at the chessboard. Aagaard pays particular attention to the searching practical questions like "when should you calculate?", "how can you discover candidate moves?" and "how long should you spend on critical moves?" A thorough study of this book will enable you to calculate with confidence in future games.
The correct handling of pawns is one of the hardest things to teach in chess, because the guidelines are rarely spelled out. In this book, American grandmaster and former US Champion Sam Shankland sets out to do exactly that — reduce pawn play to a set of clear, memorable principles any player can actually apply.
The structure follows the simple truths that make pawns unique. The four parts are built around the facts that pawns cannot move backwards, can be compelled forwards, seldom move sideways, and can be forced to do so — and each principle is developed through themed chapters with names like “Protecting Your Children,” “Driving on Open Roads,” and “Keeping Your Door Locked.”
Shankland begins with strikingly simple positions and then raises the level steadily, repeatedly showing how even grandmasters could have made better decisions had they applied the book’s guidelines. Each chapter ends with exercises so you can test the idea before moving on.
The approach is practical rather than encyclopaedic: instead of cataloguing every structure, Shankland teaches a way of thinking about pawns that transfers to your own games. Suitable for club players and above who want their positional understanding to rest on principles they can state out loud.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Pawn Play Bundle
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.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Chess Calculation Training
The second volume of the book follows the unique concept of the first one. The reader needs to solve practical exercises throughout the entire book in various important middlegame strategical topics in a testing format. According to the collected points after the solutions, he will also be able evaluate his current knowledge.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Monster Your Planning
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