Tactics Books

Combines all 7 books by Victor Charushin: Alekhine’s Block, Combination Cross, Lasker’s Combination, Mitrofanov’s Deflection, The Steeplechase, Domination, and Less Common Combinations.

IM Bonin offers the answers to practical questions that every chessplayer faces as the clock is ticking.

The follow up of the successfull tactics books of Csaba Balogh. The book consists 551 practical puzzles from the January of 2013 to the July of 2015.

Maneuvering: The Art of Piece Play

Some of the hardest moments in chess come when there is no forcing line and no obvious plan — when the position simply asks you to improve your pieces. This book is the legendary trainer Mark Dvoretsky’s study of exactly that skill: manoeuvring, and the art of finding the best squares for your pieces.

Piece play is one of the subtlest aspects of positional mastery, and Dvoretsky approaches it the way he approached everything — through carefully chosen, demanding examples and a great deal of active solving rather than passive reading. The material ranges across every phase, from opening manoeuvres through richly complex middlegames to queenless positions and endgames, showing how the same principles of piece improvement run throughout the game.

As always with Dvoretsky, the solutions are detailed and honest: he lays out the reasoning, the candidate moves, and the way a strong player actually arrives at the right regrouping, rather than simply presenting the answer.

This is advanced training material, best suited to strong club players, experts, and above who want to deepen one of the defining skills of high-level chess. Demanding, but among the most rewarding work a serious improver can do.

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.

Grandmasters Arkadij Naiditsch and Csaba Balogh analyze the 50 best attacking games from 2012-2015. The readers will see not only the brilliant sacrifices and mating combination at the end of the games, but also how it was all built up from the beginning.

TACTICS TRAINER AVAILABLE!

The upgraded 2024 edition of a modern classic

The best advice for chess players who want to improve quickly is: get better at tactics! Because the vast majority of amateur games is decided through tactics you will immediately start beating moreopponents when you improve your tactical skills.

Improve Your Chess Tactics presents more than 700 decisive combinations from tournament practice and is a self-tutor and a sparring-partner in one. Experienced Russian chess master Yakov Neishtadt has selected those examples that have the biggest instructional value for club players.

In the first part of the book Neishtadt teaches a systematic course on the most important tactical themes. The second part consists of an exam with hundreds of tests from real-life chess, in random order so as not to give unwelcome hints on how to solve them. The solutions are not just lists of moves, but include clear,witty and instructive prose.

Yakov Neishtadt (1923-2023) was a famous chess writed and historian. He published dozens of books, in his native Russia and abroad, and was editor-in-chief of the acclaimed Soviet chess magazine 64.

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.