Boris Zlotnik is an extraordinary trainer and coach. He was the director of a legendary chess school in Moscow before he emigrated to Spain in 1993. Ten years later, the super talent Fabiano Caruana moved to Madrid with his entire family to live near his trainer Zlotnik.
As a former coach of U.S. Champion Caruana, Zlotnik knows how top players work on their chess improvement. And his experience with club players allows him to translate that understanding into practical lessons for amateurs about highly original subjects like creativity or 'putting up resistance' - topics seldom touched on in other chess manuals.
Zlotnik covers a wide variety of topics and uses a wealth of material. Readers will love this new book, as they did his first book, Zlotnik's Middlegame Manual. 'A brilliant, important and extraordinarily instructive book', said Florian Jacobs, the book reviewer for the Max Euwe Center in Amsterdam. 'This is how probing, rich and motivating studying chess can be.'
Any good chess coach will tell you to study the endgame. Improving your knowledge of the ‘third phase’ in a chess game will bring you many extra half or even full points.
After the success of his award-winning classics, Chess Strategy for Club Players and Attacking Chess for Club Players Herman Grooten has now written an equally instructive endgame manual. He teaches you how to understand the themes of an endgame, and find the right moves based on your understanding.
International Master Herman Grooten learned about endgames the hard way, as many good players have. Early in his career, he realized there was a lot to be gained in this undervalued part of the game. Building on his experience as a player and coach, Grooten takes an original approach to convey his message: the endgames are divided according to theme, not chess material. This is a novel, but very effective way to learn the ins and outs, since many themes can occur with different material balances.
The material is richly illustrated with many examples from practical play, as well as endgame studies, which present the motifs in their purest and most attractive form. The result is a lively and highly instructive guide to the endgame.
(WEBSTORE SPECIAL - You can purchase the book on our webstore and access it from all your Forward Chess apps. Pull down to refresh the "Books" tab in your mobile apps).
The most hated cliché in chess is: And the rest is a matter of technique. In A Matter of Endgame Technique Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard deals with one of the few things chessplayers hate even more – losing a winning position. No serious chessplayer is new to the misery of spoiling hours of hard work in a few minutes...
A Matter of Endgame Technique offers the second-best happiness – the misfortune of others – as well as deep explanation of the underlying patterns of how and why we misplay winning endgames. At just under 900 pages, this book is actually six books in one, explaining the technical and practical areas of chess endgames plainly, simply and deeply. Endgame theory is well covered elsewhere; this book is all about technique and devoid of material to memorise.
Grandmaster Jacob Aagaard won the British Championship at his first and only attempt. Aagaard has won more awards than any other chess author, and is co-founder of Quality Chess and the online academy killerchesstraining.com.
Aagaard’s students have won school tournaments, national titles, FM, IM and GM titles, international opens, the US Championship, the World Cup, the Candidates Tournament and Olympiad medals of all denominations.
Who would be silly enough to resign a tournament game they were not losing? As Oops! I Resigned Again! shows, almost anyone – including some of the world’s best players!
Learn the stories behind the most embarrassing moment any chessplayer can suffer, while trying to outmatch the poor, unfortunate player who resigned. Indeed, this is the only chess puzzle book where you cannot do worse than the player in the game! Pit your wits against legends such as Kramnik, Nunn, Tarrasch and Timman, knowing that they failed the test and that you can, perhaps, do better.
Australian Grandmaster Ian Rogers has assembled 100 extraordinary positions in themed sets of 5 puzzles designed to both baffle and delight the solver, in a format which makes it easy to sneak a look at the answer!
With a foreword written by US Olympian Sam Shankland – baring his soul about his own silly resignation at a top level tournament – Oops! I Resigned Again! is a rare treat for chessplayers of all strengths, who after finishing the book will fervently hope never to have to say... Oops!
Attacking your opponent’s king is not just a shortcut to victory, it’s also one of the most enjoyable and gratifying experiences in chess. If you want to win more games you should become a better attacker. Studying typical attacking motifs and ideas easily brings dividends while you are having a good time. Michael Prusikin presents the prerequisites and the rules for a King attack in a lucid and attractive manner. In 15 thematic chapters he teaches you how to assess the nature of the position, identify the appropriate offensive patterns, find the preliminary moves and conduct your attack in a clear and effective way. Battering rams, obstructive sacrifices, pawn storms, striking at the castled position, sacrificing a knight on f5, Prusikin demonstrates the most important patterns of attack with lots of clear and well chosen examples. Next, Prusikin tests your newly acquired insights and your attacking intuition with exercises covering all the themes and motifs. You will find that studying Attacking Strategies for Club Players is both entertaining and rewarding.
“To be passive... is fatal to the beginner or medium player – such players must be aggressive. He must attack, because only in that way can he develop his imagination, which is a very important thing.” This quote comes, perhaps surprisingly, from José Capablanca, a world champion far better known for his brilliant strategic and positional play than his attacking prowess. This emphasizes the fundamental importance of having a clear understanding of how to build up and execute an attack. Every chess player loves to attack. Directing one’s forces towards the enemy king, probing to create weaknesses and ultimately crashing through with a brilliant sacrifice is always a thrilling experience. However, attacking play must always be based on sound principles and carried out in a forceful and logical manner. This is not always a straightforward task. In this book, the highly experienced author and grandmaster Neil McDonald guides the reader through all the complexities of attacking play. Topics include: – Attacking a king trapped in the centre; – Exploiting weaknesses to develop an attack; – Preventing reinforcements from rescuing the king.
The seconds tick down relentlessly toward zero just as your game approaches the critical stage. Your higher-rated opponent is putting your game under severe pressure, so extreme accuracy is needed to hang tough and avoid falling into a losing position. What do you do now – should you exchange pieces to relieve the pressure, lash out with a sacrifice, probe for weaknesses in the opponent's camp, or maybe just give up and get a lesson on how to bring the point home? The answer is... none of these! At such do-or-die moments, says Steve Hrop, the first thing to do is to sit on your hands and take a few deep breaths. In Defending Under Pressure: Managing Your Emotions at the Chessboard, the author uses critical moments from his own tournament games (most of them against players rated above 2200) to describe the difficulties of thinking straight when the enemy is at the gates, and then outlines methods and techniques to clear your head, evaluate the position, and find your way to the best move. Techniques include how to avoid redundant pieces that critically limit your mobility; when visualization is more important than calculation; and “freeze-framing” positions to eliminate blunders. Save the draw – or turn a looming defeat into an astonishing victory – with the tips in this practical training manual!
The FastTrack to Endgame Expertise! Since it first appeared in 2003, Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual has been acclaimed as the best single volume ever written on the endgame. With staggering depth and accuracy, it clearly reveals the secrets of this most important stage of the game. One of the unique characteristics of the Endgame Manual has been the highlighting of text considered to be essential to the understanding of endgame theory. The late, great trainer Mark Dvoretsky carefully selected the text to be highlighted so that players at all levels could benefit from this monumental work. Now in its fifth edition, the 440-page manual may seem somewhat intimidating to some readers. With that in mind, German grandmaster Karsten Müller and American grandmaster Alex Fishbein – both recognized endgame experts in their own right – have collected the highlighted text from the fifth edition and presented it so that the core concepts might be more readily available. The result is Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual: FastTrack Edition. As noted by Australian grandmaster Ian Rogers in his foreword: “I am very pleased that Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual: FastTrack Edition has come along. It is eminently suitable to sit in an amateur player’s library as their only endgame book, and equally good at preparing a serious student for many other fine endgame books – not forgetting of course the storied father of this volume, Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual." If you are serious about studying endgames, have a limited amount of time, or are simply looking for a convenient way to improve your play in endgames, the FastTrack Edition may just be the book you have been looking for.
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.