🏆 Winner of CJA's 'Best Instructional Book of the Year 2025'!
The final volume in Pete Tamburro’s trilogy is finally here! Chock-full of practical advice aimed at the average-to-advancing club player, Openings for Amateurs – Theory vs Practice rounds off this acclaimed series with discussions of sharp and sneaky openings you will often face in tournaments and cautionary tales of the opening traps that people still fall into. And since you’ve advanced this far, there are 38 carefully annotated games on key themes in positional chess, including a close look at isolated queen pawn openings; what to know about the Minority Attack; learning why “equal” doesn’t always mean “drawn”; and a deeper dive into the Ruy López, where you will learn some grand strategies – one of them going back all the way to Alexander the Great.
The final section is a special feature, rarely seen in the chess literature: a collection of nearly two dozen games from the biggest amateur team tournament in the world, where Pete illustrates what he’s been talking about in all three volumes. It’s a chess feast of 85 games explained to amateurs the way they should be!
Award-winning chess writer Pete Tamburro has been a regular columnist for American Chess Magazine, Chess Life, Chess Life for Kids, The Atlantic Chess News, and British Chess Magazine. The author of Learn Chess from the Greats and of the first two volumes in the Openings for Amateurs series, he is also a highly successful chess teacher.
Every chess player faces an opening dilemma: big main lines are complicated and time-consuming to learn, while easy-to-learn sidelines usually suffer from other defects. Finding the best of both worlds has been an impossible dream – until now!
Reimagining 1.e4 offers the Holy Grail of a simple, easy-to-learn White repertoire, which packs a punch against all of Black’s main defences. In some lines, White unleashes a surprise as early as move 3. In others, White follows the known paths for a little longer, but only when there are big rewards to justify a modest effort.
This book presents 100 of best and most beautiful chess problems composed by Rev. A. Cyrill Pearson - a leading English chess problem composer in the middle of the 19th century.
In this new edition, FIDE Master Carsten Hansen thoroughly reanalyzed all of the compositions and analyses and made the material accessible to modern readers and fans of chess problems.
This book presents 174 of best and most beautiful chess problems composed by John Brown or as he referred to himeself "J.B. of Bridport" - a leading English chess problem composer in the middle of the 19th century.
Available via subscription
British Chess Magazine (December 2024)
Hikaru is a five-time US chess champion, ranked as high as second in the world with a stratospheric peak rating of 2816, the 10th highest of all time. He is also a top chess streamer with over a million followers across social media, consistently on the list of the five wealthiest gamers in the world. Nakamura has represented the US in 5 Olympiads, earning a team Gold and two Bronze medals.
“Naka’s” chess style is confrontational. He thrives on aggression, confrontation and complications, making him one of the most entertaining players in the world. In 72 fully annotated games, this book covers Hikaru’s most exciting and instructive battles against many of the world's top players. Opponents include world champions Carlsen, Kramnik, Anand, and Ding Liren, leading US rivals Caruana, So and Shankland, as well as other world-class players such as Short, Nepo, Gelfand, Karjakin, Topalov, and Kamsky.
2000 studies, themes, definitions and explanations
Solving endgame studies has become a major working tool in modern chess training combining the instructive with the enjoyable. Studies are highly recommended for refining calculating and tactical skills, deepening endgame understanding, as well as improving creativity and out of the box thinking.
The Anthology of Miniature Endgame Studies is the biggest selection of composed endings with up to seven pieces on the board, created by the world’s best composers throughout the past 150 years. The carefully selected studies are categorized into thematic chapters. The game-like positions highlight the power and typical qualities of each piece alone and in collaboration with other pieces.
From the foreword by GM Jan Timman: “Endgame studies are in fact an important factor in becoming a strong player. It is significant that both Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen have a keen interest in endgame studies. It is praiseworthy that Chess Informant was ready to publish this important work. Afek is arguably the most qualified person to write it.”
Chess endings have an immediacy lacking in chess endgame or chess problems: endings are not theoretical or composed, but actual board positions, the point in every game when the superfluous falls away, leaving only the essential. José Raúl Capablanca (1888–1942) had no need for isolated artistic theory or compositions — he composed and created chess art as he played. All of his genius — intuitive, tactical, strategic, logical — all of his art shines clearest in his endings, as he himself was proud to declare, advising others to study them carefully. "In order to improve your game," he said, "you must study the endgame before anything else; for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame."
The best way to follow Capablanca's advice is through this — the only book devoted to his great endings, 60 complete games emphasizing the grand finale but annotated throughout.
Irving Chernev communicates in his notes the mystery and wonder as well as the delight in discovering again and again the original, fertile mind of chess's greatest born player. "Virtuoso," "exquisite," "profound," "inspired," "elegant," and "fiendish ingenuity" describe match and tournament games and endings against Alekhine, Steiner, Marshall, Nimzowitsch, Lasker, Réti, and others, the best in the contemporary chess world. Capablanca's eleventh game in the 1901 Cuban championship (which he won, aged 12) "surpasses any accomplishment by such other prodigies as Morphy, Reshevsky, and Fischer." From age 12 through the last game in the book (nearly four decades later against Reshevsky at Nottingham, 1936), Capablanca fashions endgames in tense tournament atmosphere that seem like delicate, precise instruments dreamt at leisure.
Here then is the essence of Capablanca, analyzed for the instruction of players and the pleasure of chess connoisseurs. Included are indexes of openings, themes in the endings, and opponents, as well as a bibliography and record of tournament and match play. Capablanca: for players, the epitome of the endgame; for readers, a classic chess study.
Este libro de Zenón Franco sobre las partidas de Robert James Fischer, con el sistema “Jugada a jugada”, es ideal tanto para aprender como para enseñar.
Contiene 60 partidas comentadas más 10 extractos de partida; como es habitual, se plantean ejercicios y también preguntas tomando el lugar del lector.
Franco trata siempre de incluir el punto de vista práctico, ya que no jugamos contra computadoras, sino contra seres humanos que, como nosotros, cometen fallos, se cansan, etc.
Esta obra no es una biografía, pero se incluyen algunas anécdotas no muy conocidas de sus torneos en Argentina
The Center Game is a wonderful opening for club players. White starts with a center push, develops quickly, looks for opposite castling, and launches an attack. The setup will feel very familiar to you in no time. And the chess engines show that this opening is both sound and correct, and at least as good as the over-analyzed Ruy Lopez and Italian Opening.
With this opening, you'll get a middlegame position that you know very well, but quite often will be new to Black. This will probably guarantee you an advantage on the clock, which will further increase your winning chances.
The author, Arne Moll, is an experienced club player, chess writer and chess book reviewer, so he knows exactly what the reader needs: the historical context, the basic strategic ideas of each line, the tactical patterns that will emerge, and some inspiring model games by great players such as Ian Nepomniatchi and Arjun Erigaisi —who uses the Center Game as a surprise weapon
Arne Moll is an experienced club and tournament player with a peak rating well above 2200. He was a chess writer for the legendary blog Chess Vibes and Chess.com and has reviewed dozens of chess books. He lives in Amsterdam and works as an IT and Data specialist in the Finance industry.
British Chess Magazine (November 2024)
Isaak Lipnitsky (1923–1959) was a leading Ukrainian chess player of the early 1950s as well as a celebrated chess theoretician and journalist, whose textbook Questions of Modern Chess Theory became an internationally recognized classic. Born in Kiev shortly after the establishment of Soviet control over Ukraine, he achieved a career-best result of second equal in the 1950 Soviet Championship, half a point behind the winner Paul Keres, during which he defeated Petrosian, Smyslov, and Geller. He also played in the finals of the 1951 and 1952 Soviet Championships, as well as winning the Ukrainian Championship in 1949 and 1956, and the Kiev Championship in 1956. According to the Chessmetrics website Lipnitsky was ranked no. 12 in the world between September and December 1950 with a peak rating of 2700 and a best TPR of 2729 recorded in the 1950 Soviet Championship.
In the words of Grandmaster Kevin Spraggett: “As a player Lipnitsky was well trained in strategy and tactics, capable of playing all types of positions equally well. However, what he really liked doing was playing complicated positions, a trait that many of the finest Ukraine masters seemed to have inherited.”
Lipnitsky’s fascinating biography with original research by the authors takes us from his childhood in a poor Jewish family, through to his membership of the Kiev children’s chess club at the Pioneer Palace under the tutelage of the great coach Alexander Konstantinopolsky, who nurtured David Bronstein’s talent at the same time. It introduces the reader to the origins of the Soviet Chess School in Kiev, which was one of the USSR’s greatest talent mills. Lipnitsky’s World War Two service as an intelligence officer is discussed, as is what is known of his wife and daughter and his eventual full-time chess career.
Lipnitsky died at the tragically young age of 35 from a terminal disease that curtailed his tournament performances in his final years. His tragedy was not confined to that, however. His paternal grandparents and aunts were murdered by the Nazi occupiers during the War, and his daughter later died in a psychiatric hospital.
Kyiv-based Candidate Masters and chess historians Mykola Fuzik (born in 1957) and Alexei Radchenko (1947-2013) spent several years researching Isaak Lipnitsky’s biography, which was first published in Ukraine in 2018. This book provides instructional analysis of 63 of his best games, mostly annotated by Lipnitsky and his contemporaries, supported by computer corrections. Opponents include Tal, Petrosian, Smyslov, Botvinnik, Bronstein, Keres, Geller, Averbakh and Taimanov among other names. It also contains a highly original article he wrote on attack along the a1-h8 diagonal, as well as a number of interesting photographs of the protagonist and his family.
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