This book is definitely not a book full of theoretical lines. Of course, I will give some advice if possible and necessary. But the main purpose is to explain the structures that can result from double fianchettoed positions. The reader will find five chapters with structures from the white side and six chapters with structures from the black side. The last chapter is a mixed one, with games from both sides. The main — and longest — part will be the first chapter, with games and analyses of my own main weapon starting with Nf3, g3 and b3 against the King’s Indian and Grünfeld. I will show the reader a few games of my own and also games from Kramnik and Andersson, two of my favourite players. I have learned a lot from their games myself. I have played those structures for nearly 25 years and one of my sons also now starts with 1.Nf3. During my years of playing chess I tried many possible openings with White and Black, but I was only successful with fianchettoing one, or even better both, bishops. Maybe this was a sign and those structures are really a lifestyle for me? I hope you will enjoy reading this book and maybe these structures will also become part of your lifestyle. ~ Daniel Hausrath

The author presents a full opening repertory for the club player, which is analysed in six volumes. In the books you will find many novelties for both sides, with a full move-to-move presentation. Furthermore, the reader will get access to middlegame strategies, endgame techniques and common tactical motifs, which are patterning the proposed variations. In the first volume the openings of the Slav Defence, the Gruenfeld Defence and the Blumenfeld Gambit are presented.

One of the most challenging tasks in a chess game is to find the correct strategy. It is far easy to attack too randomly, to miss a vital opportunity, or even choose the wrong plan altogether. These are all mistakes frequently seen by even quite strong players. Your Chess Battle Plan focuses on how Magnus Carlsen and other great masters decide on the best strategy in a position and then find the right ways to implement it. Clear advice shows you how to hone in on the most relevant features of a position in order to decide what your general plan needs to be. Factors that are addressed include when to exchange pieces, when to make long-range manoeuvres, when to offer sacrifices and how to identify and focus on key squares. Your Chess Battle Plan will get you thinking along the right strategic lines and using your pieces and pawns in a much more efficient and skilful manner.

404 Puzzles for those who are serious about improving their chess Tactical puzzle books all seem sort of the same, positions where you are being told what the demand is and you then have to figure it out. Typically having to sacrifice or exploit a tactical feature, the answers can typically be worked out sooner or later. The puzzles in this book are different. For starters, the puzzles are recent, from the latter half of 2018 and they are played by players rated at least 2300. Additionally, the solutions are not always a quick tactical solution, and the first move is typically not enough for a complete answer, instead a series of precise moves is required and not always is it a winning continuation but one leading to an advantage, often a large one, but occasionally a clear or even a small advantage is all you can hope for. The key is, the solver doesn't know just as in game situations. Should the puzzles prove too difficult, then there are hints for the solution, although the hints can be rather cryptic as well.

Sie spielen schon lange und leidenschaftlich gern Schach? Oder Sie wagen die ersten Schritte auf dem Schachbrett? Dann studieren Sie dieses Buch gründlich. Als Anfänger erspart es Ihnen unnötige Umwege zum richtigen Schachverständnis! Als erfahrener Amateur wird sich Ihr Blick auf die 64 Felder womöglich fundamental verändern! Denn viele Amateure verfangen sich leider schon frühzeitig in falschen Denkmustern, welche sie dann oft ein ganzes Schachleben lang begleiten. Wer aus dieser Sackgasse nicht hinausfindet, erleidet stets nur herbe Niederlagen und schmerzhafte Rückschläge. Dann hilft es auch wenig, wahllos Bücher zu studieren oder Unterricht zu nehmen. Vielmehr müssen die Weichen des strategischen Denkens neu gestellt werden. Auf den richtigen Weg führt Sie der Autor mit seiner Theorie von den „Störungen des Gleichgewichts“, die zwar gering an Zahl, jedoch überraschend allgegenwärtig sind. Geleitet von dieser Theorie erlernen Sie, wie man im Mittelspiel einen plausiblen Plan entwickelt und konsequent verfolgt. Währenddessen bleibt Silman stets ein strenger Lehrmeister, der sich gelegentlich selbst mit harscher Kritik nicht zurückhält, der jedoch auch nie müde wird zu rekapitulieren, was seinen Schülern nicht auf Anhieb gelingen mag. Immer wieder üben Sie das Erkennen vorhandener Störungen, der wichtigsten Grundlage des konzeptionellen Schachspielens, bis Sie allmählich von einem gewöhnlichen Amateur oder Klubspieler zu einem starken Turnierspieler reifen. Der Internationale Meister Jeremy Silman ist ein Schachlehrer von Weltklasse und zugleich Autor und erfolgreicher Spieler. Er gewann das American Open, das National Open und das U.S. Open. Die englischsprachige Originalausgabe von Schach, aber richtig! (The Amateur’s Mind) ist eines der meistgekauften Schachbücher der Gegenwart.

Hein Donner (1927-1988) was a Dutch Grandmaster and one the greatest writers on chess of all time. He was born into a prominent Calvinistic family of lawyers in The Hague. His father, who had been the Minister of Justice and later became President of the Dutch Supreme Court, detected a keen legal talent in his son. But Hein opted for a bohemian lifestyle as a chess professional and journalist. He scored several excellent tournament victories but never quite fulfilled the promise of his chess talent. Hein Donner developed from a chess player-writer into a writer-chess player. His provocative writings and his colourful persona made him a national celebrity during the roaring sixties. His book ‘The King’, a fascinating and often hilarious anthology spanning 30 years of chess writing, is a world-wide bestseller and features on many people’s list of favourite chess books. The author Harry Mulisch, his best friend, immortalized Hein Donner in his magnum opus The Discovery of Heaven. In 2001 the book was adapted for film, with Stephen Fry playing the part that was based on Donner. Included in Hein Donner is the interview in which Harry Mulisch tells about his friendship with Donner. After suffering a stroke at the age of 56, Donner lived his final years in a nursing home. He continued writing however, typing with one finger, and won one of the Netherlands’ most prestigious literary awards. Alexander Münninghoff has written a captivating biography of a controversial man and the turbulent time and age he lived in.

Building on the tremendous success of Openings for Amateurs in 2014, Pete Tamburro offers a new collection of practical tips to help club-level and young chessplayers to play the opening on their own terms. Centering the discussion around 67 selected model games, Openings for Amateurs – Next Steps covers troublesome variations commonly seen in amateur play, such as the Smith-Morra Gambit, Grand Prix Attack, Schliemann Defense, Anti-Grünfeld, Two Knights, London System, Stonewall Attack, and the Benko Gambit, among others. As befits an experienced chess teacher, the author gives special attention to promoting positional understanding of the Open Games, isolated queen’s pawn strategies, and plans revolving around the queenside pawn majority. In combination with the original volume, you will enjoy over 600 pages of common-sense explanations for average players and 122 model games, enabling you to cope with your booked-up opponents because you understand what the positions are about once you get out of the opening.

The Dutch Defense is an old opening. A seriously old opening. So old, in fact, that in large part it currently has the reputation of not really causing a well-prepared White player to fear losing. That is especially the case with the variant of it I am analysing in this book: the Stonewall (in which Black continues with ...e6 and ...d5). I intend to show that that impression is mistaken. First things first: it’s a very positional opening. In contrast to the King’s Indian (which shares the feature of having few early piece or pawn exchanges) play moves slowly and despite there obviously being some sharp lines, the absolute prerequisite for playing the Stonewall Dutch is that you understand positional chess. The first person to really understand the strategic themes at play here, and develop decent plans for Black was sixth world champion, Mikhail Botvinnik. From which it should be clear that positional doesn’t necessarily mean easy. There have been many revolutions in how chess players view tactical play or opening strategy. However, for me it is fitting that the resurgence of the Stonewall is coming at the exact time that strategic chess is being redefined by Carlsen. It is an echo of when the opening was first introduced: Botvinnik, the ‘Patriarch’ of the Soviet chess school, with its discipline and its principles, produced a similarly seismic shift in how people viewed positional play at the time. The positional themes in this opening are incredibly complex. We’ll get into it more later but let me just explain some of the confounding factors. From Black’s perspective, playing with a hole on e5 is very much an ‘acquired taste’, in spite of the ideas that have already been found to counterbalance it, such as a queen (or bishop) transfer to h5, or launching the f-pawn against the enemy king.

The Grünfeld Defence is well known to be one of Black’s best and most challenging responses to 1.d4, and has long been a favourite choice of elite players including Kasparov, Svidler, Caruana, Vachier-Lagrave and many more. As with many openings, however, it can be difficult to navigate the ever-expanding jungle of games and theory. Playing the Grünfeld offers an ideal solution for practical players. Alexey Kovalchuk is a young Russian talent with expert knowledge of the Grünfeld, and in this book he shares his best ideas to form a complete, coherent and combative repertoire for Black. In addition to theoretical soundness, efforts have been made to avoid variations leading to early forced draws, as well as those in which Black allows his king to be attacked at an early stage.

The history of sport has seen many great gladiatorial clashes: Ali v Frazier in boxing, McEnroe v Borg in tennis, Prost v Senna in motor racing. None however can quite compare to the intensity of the rivalry between those two great world chess champions: Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. Between 1984 and 1990 they contested an astonishing five World Championship matches consisting of 144 individual encounters. This volume concentrates on the first two of those matches. – The epic 1984/85 contest which was lasted six months before being controversially halted "without result" by the then President of FIDE Florencio Campomanes. – The 1985 match when Kasparov brilliantly won the final game to take the title and become - at the age of 22 - the youngest ever world champion. Great chess contests have often had resonances extending beyond the 64 squares. The Fischer v Spassky match was played during the Cold War with both champions being perceived as the finest products of their respective ideologies. The Karpov v Korchnoi battles (three matches between 1974 and 1981) were lent an edge with Karpov being a Russian hero of the pre-Glasnost era whilst Korchnoi was the disaffected dissident. The Kasparov v Karpov encounters mirrored a battle between the new Russia and old Russia with Kasparov seen as a symbol of the new ideology emerging under Gorbachev whereas Karpov was seen to represent the old regime of die-hard Communists such as Brezhnev. In this volume Garry Kasparov (world champion between 1985 and 2000 and generally regarded as the greatest player ever) analyses in depth the clashes from 1984 and 1985, giving his opinions both on the political machinations surrounding the matches as well as the games themselves.

The Ruy Lopez is perhaps the most classical of all chess openings. It dates back to the 16th century and has featured in the opening repertoire of every modern world champion. It is a highly flexible variation: Bobby Fischer used it to create numerous powerful strategic masterpieces. In the hands of Anatoly Karpov it led to many of his trademark positional squeezes, whereas Garry Kasparov often used it as a springboard for his typically powerful attacks. Opening Repertoire: The Ruy Lopez is a modern examination of this perennial favourite. Joshua Doknjas has put together a repertoire for White based firmly around contemporary trends in the Lopez. He examines all aspects of this highly complex opening and provides the reader with well-researched, fresh, and innovative analysis. Each annotated game has valuable lessons on how to play the opening and contains instructive commentary on typical middlegame plans.

This book presents the Triangle set-up, which arises after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3/Nf3 c6. This move order avoids many unpleasant systems for White, notably the Catalan, the Exchange Slav and the Botvinnik Variation. It leads to sharp strategically unbalanced play and brings Black excellent practical results. Semko Semkov is a chess journalist and theoretician. He has co-authored the famous books The Modern English, The Most Flexible Sicilian, Attacking the English/Reti, Attacking the Flexible Sicilian and Understanding the Queen’s Gambit Accepted.