“Know thy enemy.” The skill this book trains is the one most players neglect: thinking not only for yourself but for your opponent. As Viktor Korchnoi observed, a player who does not check what the other side is doing ends up blaming bad luck after every game. Renowned trainer Mark Dvoretsky built this collection to fix precisely that blind spot.
It is a training manual, not a textbook. Each of the four chapters opens with a short theoretical discussion and then hands you dozens of exercises, graded from elementary to genuinely hard. The themes build deliberately: paying attention to the opponent’s resources, then the process of elimination, then traps, and finally prophylactic thinking — anticipating and preventing the other side’s ideas before they arrive.
With close to 500 positions drawn from every phase — opening, middlegame, and endgame — the book doubles as all-round calculation and decision-making practice. The solutions are detailed by design: Dvoretsky lays out the logic of the search, showing how a player can actually reach the right conclusion at the board rather than simply presenting the answer.
Among the last works from one of history’s greatest trainers, and close to unique in its subject. Demanding, and best suited to dedicated players from strong club level upward.
Art of Sacrifice in Chess
Rudolf Spielmann’s The Art of Sacrifice in Chess, first published in the mid-1930s, was instantly recognised as a classic — the book that first tried to classify, systematically, the nature of the chess sacrifice. This is its 21st-century edition, with Spielmann’s original work preserved in full and brought to a modern audience.
Spielmann’s great idea was to distinguish the "real" sacrifice (where you give up material for an unclear, long-term return) from the "sham" sacrifice (where the material comes straight back). Around that he organises a whole taxonomy — sacrifices for development, line-clearance, deflection, king-hunts, the king’s field, the exchange and queen sacrifices — that still shapes how we understand the subject.
For this edition, German grandmaster Karsten Müller has done far more than modernise the notation: he has roughly doubled the book, adding chapters on the Greek Gift and the classic weak points (g7, f7, e6, f6), on the sacrificial magic of Tal and Shirov, on the fine art of defending against sacrifices, and a wealth of exercises to test what you’ve learned.
A timeless subject in an enriched modern package — instructive and hugely enjoyable for any club player who wants to attack with imagination and judgement.
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.
Move First, Think Later
Most improvement books preach the same method: study the position’s features, form a plan, then choose a move. International Master Willy Hendriks thinks that is largely a comforting myth — and this provocative, much-discussed book sets out to prove it.
Drawing on his experience as a trainer and on research into how players actually think, Hendriks argues that move selection is not the tidy output of a rational checklist; judging, planning, and calculating all happen together, messily and at once, in weak and strong players alike. The dogma that "good moves follow automatically once you assess the characteristics" simply doesn’t match what happens at the board.
In place of method-worship he offers something more honest and more useful: a healthy scepticism toward chess instruction, and a large amount of no-nonsense training material — exercises and discussion designed to build the pattern knowledge that really drives improvement. The tone is sharp, funny, and refreshingly willing to puncture sacred cows.
Best suited to club and online players who suspect the standard advice hasn’t been working — and to any thoughtful improver who enjoys having their assumptions challenged.
In this groundbreaking work, award-winning chess coach and author Frisco Del Rosario shines a long-overdue light on this neglected aspect of Capablanca’s record. He illustrates how the Cuban genius used positional concepts to build up irresistible king hunts, embodying the principles of good play advocated by the unequaled teacher, C.J.S. Purdy. The author also identifies an overlooked checkmate pattern – Capablanca’s Mate – that aspiring attackers can add to the standard catalogue in Renaud and Kahn’s The Art of the Checkmate. As Del Rosario shows, Capablanca has inspired not only generations of players, but also many of the classics of chess literature.
Do masters methodically cut their way through the branches of a tree of analysis? Is it true that attacking players calculate a dozen moves ahead, while positional specialists rely on abstract principles? What exactly does it mean to “calculate,” anyway?
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
Mating the Castled King
Almost every game these days features a castled king, which means almost every attack is an attack on a castled king. This book is a systematic course in exactly that skill — turning a promising position into a forced mate, the moment that most often slips through club players’ fingers.
Its engine is pattern recognition. The heart of the book is a collection of 160 mating finishes, organised by the mechanism behind them: the Greek Gift bishop sacrifice, breakthroughs on the g-, h- and b-files, dragging the king into the open, smothered mates, back-rank themes, and the classic queen-and-bishop or rook-and-knight mating pairs. Seeing the patterns again and again trains your eye to spot them instantly in your own games.
From there it builds toward whole-attack thinking: breakthroughs with pieces and with pawns, typical pawn-storm sacrifices, and finally a set of exercises to test everything. The author draws on twenty years of training experience to present the material in digestible, memorable units.
A practical attacking manual for improving players who keep reaching good positions but missing the knockout. Work through the patterns and the mate-in-fours stop getting away.
Looking for Trouble
Almost every tactics book trains the same thing: here is a position, find the win. But half of practical chess is the opposite skill — spotting what your opponent is threatening before it lands. This book, now in a revised and enlarged third edition, is built around that neglected half.
Award-winning instructor Dan Heisman presents more than 300 problems in which your task is not to attack but to identify and meet a threat — in the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame. Recognising the danger is the first and most commonly skipped step, and training it directly does more to stop you losing than any number of "white to play and win" puzzles.
The problems are organised by phase and graded for difficulty, with Heisman’s trademark clear, patient explanations that suit players of a wide range of strengths. A bonus section on famous threats from master play adds some enjoyment to the workout.
For the many players who keep getting hit by things they "didn’t see coming," this is a direct and unusually practical remedy — a defensive-awareness course rather than another tactics anthology.
The ability to determine when conditions are suitable for attacking the opposing king is critical to successful chess play. Readers will hone this skill while learning valuable techniques to force the enemy monarch out of his fortress.
It is very important for the practical player to train his or her ability, understand when to rely on intuition, rules of thumb and more general positional considerations, when to try to solve problems by calculating variations to the end and how to manage time to avoid time pressure.
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