TACTICS TRAINER AVAILABLE!
Improving chess tactics is crucial for many reasons including calculation skills, pattern recognition, decision-making speed, broader board vision and awareness, and confidence. The Woodpecker Method, authored by GM Axel Smith and GM Hans Tikkanen, is an innovative tactics training approach that focuses on developing these skills through repetitive and structured practice.
The book is organized around solving over 1,100 tactical puzzles, advancing from beginner to intermediate and advanced levels. This systematic approach ensures that players can progressively build and reinforce their tactical knowledge and “re-program” their unconscious mind. They will notice a significant improvement in their games as a result.
In Calculation thinking methods such as Candidates, Combinations, Prophylaxis, Comparison, Elimination, Intermediate Moves, Imagination and Traps are explained to the reader, and ownership of them is offered through a carefully selected series of exercises.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Grandmaster Preparation
How do we make better decisions on the chessboard? GM Jacob Aagaard, the author of Grandmaster Preparation: Thinking Inside the Box, will teach you just that.
The focus of this book is to break down the most important topics relating to chess improvement, many of which deal with the psychological aspects of the game, and to illustrate how to overcome critical thinking barriers that hinder progress.
The topics include the psychology of chess improvement, four types of decisions made during a game, calculation techniques, abstract thinking, strategic concepts, and more.
Thinking Inside the Box is the final volume of the award-winning Grandmaster Preparation series which consists of 5 exercise books: Calculation, Positional Play, Strategic Play, Attack & Defence, and Endgame Play. Each book focuses on specific ways of looking at various types of positions and includes exercises to enhance understanding and application of key concepts.
A thought-provoking read, this final book is meant to be a conversational piece, unifying concepts written in the previous five books. It is the ultimate self-improvement guide, catering to amateurs and world-class players alike aiming to overcome their plateau and achieve better results.
In the words of Aagard himself, “Improvement in chess is hard; knowing how it can be done should be easy.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players
"Chess is 99% tactics" — the old saying holds not just for beginners but right through club level, where most games are still decided by who spots the combination. This book is built to sharpen exactly that, for players roughly in the 1500–2000 range.
FIDE Master Frank Erwich does something most tactics books don’t: he combines teaching with drilling. Rather than only explaining ideas or only piling up puzzles, he introduces each key tactical theme and then backs it with a large bank of exercises on that specific motif — so you learn the pattern and then groove it.
The 1001 positions are organised by mechanism: elimination of the defence, the double attack, discovered attacks, skewers and pins, trapping pieces, promotion, saving draws, mating attacks, and — unusually and valuably — a chapter on defensive tactics, where you must find the resource that saves you. A large mixed section at the end tests whether you can recognise the right motif without being told which it is.
A complete, well-structured tactics workout. Ideal for the ambitious club and tournament player who wants a single book that both teaches the themes and provides enough volume to make them automatic.
Chess Tests
Mark Dvoretsky (1947–2016) is widely regarded as the greatest chess trainer of the modern era, and this is one of the manuscripts he completed shortly before his death — a distilled course of training material, framed by a foreword from his long-time collaborator Artur Yusupov.
True to its title, the book is built for active work rather than passive reading. It is organised by the core skills a serious player must drill: training combinational vision, generating and choosing between candidate moves, calculating variations accurately (including attention to the opponent’s resources and the role of intermediate moves), attack and defence, positional play and prophylactic thinking, the technique of realising an advantage, and a substantial set of endgame tests.
Each section presents carefully chosen positions to solve, with the deep, honest solutions Dvoretsky was famous for — laying bare the logic of how a strong player reaches the right decision at the board. This is the same material he used with the elite students who passed through his school.
Demanding and high-quality, it is best suited to strong club players, experts, and aspiring masters who want to train rigorously. A fitting part of the legacy of a master teacher.
If you want to improve, you have to understand pawn structures — they dictate where the pieces belong, which plans make sense, and how a position should be judged. The Power of Pawns is a focused training manual aimed squarely at the post-beginner who knows the rules but has never been taught these essentials systematically.
Experienced trainer and grandmaster Jörg Hickl builds the book in two halves. The first looks at how the individual pieces — bishop, knight, and rook — relate to pawn structure and which squares suit them. The second works through the fundamental formations every player meets: hanging pawns, isolated pawns, backward pawns, passed pawns, doubled pawns, weak squares, and pawn chains.
Hickl’s method is common-sense and practical. For each structure he explains the typical characteristics, how to develop your pieces around it, how to improve your position, and how to form a concrete plan. Worked examples illustrate the ideas, and exercises let you apply them immediately.
The tone is that of a good coach rather than a reference work — clear, encouraging, and to the point. Best suited to improving players who want a dependable foundation in structure before tackling more advanced strategy.
After the immense success of his award-winning classic Chess Strategy for Club Players Herman Grooten has now written an equally accessible primer on attacking chess. He teaches how to spot opportunities, exploit weaknesses, bring your forces to the front line and strike at the right moment.
It is well established that nothing improves a developing player faster than studying basic tactics — and that is exactly what this book sets out to teach, comprehensively and from the ground up. Award-winning instructor Dan Heisman covers the full vocabulary of tactical ideas with around 500 examples and problems, ranging from very easy to genuinely difficult.
The organisation is methodical. After an opening look at safety and counting — the bedrock skill of making sure a capture actually wins material — Heisman works through the complete catalogue of motifs: trapped pieces, pins, skewers, double threats and double attacks, knight and pawn forks, removal of the guard, discovered attacks and checks, promotion, and more. Further chapters cover checkmating patterns, tactics in the opening, and the often-overlooked area of defensive tactics.
Two ideas give the book its identity: “the seeds of tactical destruction,” Heisman’s framework for recognising when a position is ripe for a combination, and a closing scheme of five levels of tactical ability that lets you gauge where you stand.
Clear, encouraging, and genuinely thorough, this is a foundational tactics course for beginners and improving players — and a reminder that tactics are also simply the most fun part of the game.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Dan Heisman's Books
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