Tactics Books

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Build up your Chess with Artur Yusupov is for chess players who want to build their skills on solid foundations. Yusupov guides the reader towards a higher level of understanding using carefully selected positions and advice. This new understanding is then tested by a series of puzzles.

Artur Yusupov was ranked No. 3 in the world from 1986 to 1992, just behind the legendary World Champions Karpov and Kasparov. He has won everything there is to win in chess except for the World Championship. In recent years he has mainly worked as a chess trainer with players ranging from World Champion Anand to local amateurs in Germany, where he resides.

In this book, aimed at strong tournament players (1900-2300 Elo or fast improving juniors) the author introduces a wider approach to developing endgame tactics skills that a formidable chess player needs. Specifically, he presents 101 positions from games of grandmasters played in 2019, including super-GMs such as Magnus Carlsen, Ding Liren, Alireza Firouzja, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Alexander Grischuk, Wang Hao, Alexei Shirov, Samuel Shankland, Kirill Alekseenko, and Levon Aronian, in which he first explains the mistake made by one of the players in underestimating their opponent’s counterplay, then he analyzes how the game progressed where punishment for the mistake is meted out. After that, he returns to the starting position to demonstrate the correct or a more promising continuation. Therefore, the text is structured so that each challenge contains the starting diagram twice – before the moves in the actual game, and then, on the page overleaf, before the solution. Studying these key fragments from grandmaster games will help a player to develop their endgame approach. Firstly, the student analyzes why a move or series of moves by one of the players was erroneous. What counterplay by the opponent did the player making the mistake underestimate? Secondly, armed with this answer, the student can review the position to try and figure out the better move. If the student is working with a coach, then the coach should first set up the position on the board, demonstrate the erroneous move played, and ask the student to find the refutation to that bad move. After the refutation is found by the student, the coach should once again set up the critical position and ask the student to find the strongest continuation for the initial player. This may be one or more moves, depending on the position. Naturally, in the case of self-study the student can change their approach, either trying to figure out the refutation to the error by covering up the subsequent text, or simply studying the moves in the game before trying to find the better continuation, which is detailed overleaf together with the starting diagram.

Turbo-Charge Your Tactics 1 is essentially a chess puzzle book, but not a typical one. It’s a multi-year effort by GM Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko and his world-renowned trainer IM Vladimir Grabinsky to introduce you to the world of “unnatural” tactical moves.

Presenting examples of extreme beauty, no matter where they come from – be it online bullet or world-class grandmaster praxis – this book will cure your “selective blindness” by destroying the false notion of chess principles being a set of rules, instead of helpful guidelines. Most chess games are decided by tactics, so solving tactical puzzles is the most effective path to improvement.

Jakov's new book focuses on a key element of tactics: forced mate. It contains 1500 positions rife with tactical resources; 1380 of them are presented as puzzles. The book is divided into 31 chapters, most of which are dedicated to a single tactical method, which is described in detail. This fundamental work systematizes the methods for delivering forced mate, which include sacrifices, pawn promotion, vacation, attraction, elimination, deflection, blocking, seizing the square, x-rays, pins, discovered checks, double checks, windmill and interference. The rest of the chapters are titled Combinations; they are used to consolidate the provided knowledge and test the acquired skills. They contain the theoretical basics of the combinations and cases studied, but to solve these puzzles the reader will also need to use techniques they studied in previous parts of the book, rather than in only the current chapter. Therefore, each new tactical method studied gradually increases the diversity of combinations used in the subsequent chapters. The puzzles in every chapter also gradually increase in difficulty. The last chapter makes the book useful even for top-level players, because it consists solely of difficult puzzles and can be used as a universal test to check forced mating skills. The greatest value of this book is in the learning system that can be used as a foundation for young chess players to study tactics. The author has used this system countless times when working with his pupils and it has proved to be highly successful. Together with the carefully crafted examples it turns this work into a universal textbook that can be used by both students and coaches. This book is accessible to beginners once they have learned to mate in one, and contains puzzles with mostly 2-move to 6-move solutions. Puzzles in the final chapter will challenge even grandmasters, with solutions often requiring 9-11 moves.

The book contains 500 of the most instructive examples from the games played during 2023 in tournaments around the world. The positions are selected owing to their practical value, importance and inherent aesthetics, and are divided into 4 levels of difficulty to make your training and browsing through the material smooth. Exercises are not organized in sections according to tactical motifs they are based on, because my intention was to present examples which are resembling real game situations.

“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.

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.

This ebook is a part of Bundle: Dan Heisman's Books

Chess is 99% tactics. If this celebrated observation is true for the master, how much more so for beginners and casual players! If you want to win more games, nothing works better than training combinations.

There are two types of books on tactics, those that introduce the concepts followed by some examples, and workbooks that contain numerous exercises.

Chess masters and trainers Franco Masetti and Roberto Messa have done both: they explain the basic tactical ideas AND provide an enormous amount of exercises for each different theme. Masetti and Messa have created a great first tactics book. It teaches you how to:

• identify weak spots in the position of your opponent

• recognize patterns of combinations

• visualize tricks.

1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners can also be used as a course text book, because only the most didactically productive exercises have been used.

This workbook offers over five hundred carefully selected exercises to accompany the book 100 Tactical Patterns You Must Know.

Experienced chess trainer Frank Erwich has not only identified the 100 most important tactical patterns, he has also collected hundreds of exercises for you to train these patterns. Solving these puzzles will drive home the key ideas, refresh your knowledge and improve your technique.

It is probably best to study the manual and workbook together, but you can also use the workbook as a stand-alone training tool as each pattern is summarised.

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.

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.

Themes: Annihilation of Defence, Blockade, Clearance, Deflection, Discovered Attack, Pinning, Demolition of Pawn structure, Decoy, Interference, Double Attack

Levels: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced

Finally, a word of advice!

Beginners and relatively inexperienced players should study and play through all the examples on a chessboard. Also, it is advisable to write down the solutions with all the variations you calculated, and only after the training session to compare those with the Solutions given in the Encyclopaedia. Keep your notes in a notebook especially dedicated for that purpose, so you could monitor and assess your own progress. As you progress you will be able to solve many of the basic and intermediate examples without a chessboard, but still writing down the solutions and variations is of extreme importance. Of course, when you successfully reach higher echelons of chess mastery you will be able to solve large portions of the examples without a chess board, only by looking at the diagrams.

The Encyclopaedia of Chess Combinations is a benchmark work on the art of chess tactics and combinations. It is designed to offer the infinite pleasure for chess enthusiasts, everlasting source of training for most diligent students, and would-be-grandmasters.

“I had a fantastic position, but I couldn’t figure out what to do next!” If that sounds familiar, this book is written for you. Fred Wilson’s aim is to take the apparent mystery out of attacking the enemy king and reduce it to a handful of recurring principles that underlie most successful attacks.

The teaching is done through a curated collection of complete games rather than disembodied positions, so you see each idea arise, get prepared, and get executed in a real game. Wilson groups them to highlight specific attacking methods — the classic Greek Gift bishop sacrifice on h7, attacks against a fianchettoed king, and the deflection and removal-of-the-guard motifs that so often deliver the final blow.

The range of games is part of the charm: alongside masterpieces by Rossolimo, Larsen, and Maróczy sit instructive club and scholastic games — including some never previously published — chosen because they show the ideas cleanly. The style is conversational and welcoming throughout.

Novices and intermediate players will benefit most from the explanations and practical tips, while stronger players can simply enjoy it as a collection of enterprising attacking chess. A short, encouraging book about turning a promising position into a win.