The Royal Chess Couple is a combined attempt to introduce the various traits of the most significant piece with the most powerful piece on the chessboard. Following a short historic review of the development and metamorphoses of each piece over time, the reader is offered 240 positions (480 in total) from tournament practice as well as from the magic world of chess composition. In each position a royal piece plays either a crucial offensive or defensive role. These positions are subdivided into 60 themes, four positions per theme, arranged by their increasing difficulty. The reader may use the positions as training challenges to improve his understanding and playing skills or just to enjoy playing through them. In either case he will learn to appreciate the characteristic qualities of each piece alone and in collaboration with other pieces.
I am not seeking glory with this book, but I certainly had to have a book in tactics! That’s the main idea of the book; to be a companion for trainers and players who seek improvement — simple but effective! The names of the mates are not important. What’s crucial is understanding and subconsciously memorising these patterns in order to recognise when they’re about to occur in a player’s own games. These mating patterns are not confined to chess problems and puzzles. As will be shown, they occur in the games of Grandmasters and even World Champions, past and present! They belong to everybody’s games, even beginners’! Each mate’s theoretical pattern is presented as a diagram, with constructed examples and actual games. It is suggested that students set-up and play through these mates from the losers’ viewpoint as well. Most difficult of all is recognising patterns when they occur horizontally (i.e., rotated 90 degrees) from the normal orientation. The key to each pattern is the status of the squares surrounding the king: which ones are obstructed, which are potential flight squares that can be controlled with the available pieces. Players are advised to know these patterns forwards, backwards and upside down!
This book invites the reader to enter the wonderful elite chess world with one of the most creative GM’s of all time. It tells about his approach to the core of fighting, about his strongest points but also about his weaknesses. It presents real masterpieces and hurtful losses.
The book Together with the Candidates that you are holding is firstly a book of tests with their solutions, given in the format of game fragments with detailed comments. All the tasks in this book have been taken from games of the Candidates competitions. They differ very much in their degree of complexity. I hope this will allow a wide circle of readers to find the tests corresponding to their own chess level here.
Given the changes in the chess world over the last few years I feel that we badly need an update of how to prepare and out-prepare your opponent during a chess tournament.
The pandemic giving rise to vastly underrated junior and amateur players. Online chess taking a much more prominent role. Accusations of cheating making the headlines. Social media being used as a tool to educate the chess masses. All these have lead to a different landscape, but some things stay the same. The player who is willing to analyse and work on chess harder than the rest will still separate his or herself from their peers. In my view, at least 90 percent of success in tournament play will come down to how good your calculation and analysis is. Because that is the bread and butter of tournament play. This is what I will try to get across in this book, that a chess player will often stand or fall on the quality of analysis and I will discuss the positive and negative role that working with computers has on a players overall strength. I will also try to explain why my chess fell into a torpor because of an over reliance on computers and how I have recently come to realize that technical deficiencies have often held me back from reaching the higher echelons of the game. And in doing so, and looking at the chess world and trying to explain it from my point of view while following my own progress and that of others I will try to put together a tournament battle plan.
A new collection of puzzles carefully selected by two experienced trainers.
I realize that this book will not cover all open wounds, nevertheless my aim to write a manual about defense which can help us defenders enduring the hardest difficulties in practice, seems to be achieved. Personally speaking this book helped me as a defender to approach a worse position in a much more objective way, optimally use all of my defensive resources available, both psychologically and technically, to set – even under the most dire circumstances – pitfalls, while keeping my nerves under control.