Why not just to have a simple puzzle book where you are supposed to find best move in each position? Every single position is picked carefully and this method will help you develop different strategic concepts and patterns. There are no chapters or indicative names or comments to help you find solution more easily. Just positions. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” - Leonardo da Vinci.
All these positions are new! What does that mean? We didn’t recycle old, fa mous games that everyone knows. We didn’t use material and positions from other books and courses. All positions are unique. Also, the 99% of the positions are from modern games played in the last couple of years. This book will teach you how to be flexible and practical chess player. No matter what type of position or pawn structure you have on the board, you must be able to find the best move and the best plan. The more concepts and patterns you know, the stronger player you become.
How to study this book? You should simply try to solve puzzles one by one. That’s all. After you find the move and decide what would you do in a certain position, you should go to the back pages and compare your solution with the solution in the book. We made sure that the solutions and the moves we put are precise and easy to understand. Also, we put a lot of diagrams to help you visualize better. Our personal advice is to put every position on the board and try to solve it in the old-fashioned way. But, it is totally fine to solve the positions directly from the book if you are not at home or you simply don’t have chess board with you. The way we created everything allows you to do it in the both ways. So, let’s study chess strategy in the more dynamic and fun way!
The third volume of Elk and Ruby’s treatise on Viktor Korchnoi, penned by FM Hans Renette and IM Tibor Karolyi, covers the period 1981-1991. This encompasses Korchnoi’s famous world championship match with Karpov at Merano in 1981, his candidates matches against Portisch and Kasparov in 1983, Hjartarson in 1988 and Sax and Timman in 1991, as well as the candidates tournament of 1985 at Montpellier, the GMA world cup series and major tournament performances. Much biographical colour is supplied on his life and character, with this period including his family’s arrival from the Soviet Union to the West in 1982 and its subsequent breakup. Like in volumes I and II, original material is provided from interviews with key protagonists and sources from a wide range of languages are used.
140 games and fragments are analysed in detail in this work. Other opponents include Tal, Spassky, Ivanchuk, Topalov, Gulko, Larsen, Sosonko, Seirawan, Ribli, Torre, Yusupov, Van der Wiel, Van der Sterren, Andersson, Polugaevsky, Nunn, Miles, Short, Speelman, and Beliavsky, among others.
The book is supplemented with a generous supply of photos, some taken from the Korchnoi family archive and never before published.
CHESS INFORMANT’S 160th ADVENTURE
STEP AHEAD
CONTENTS:
• PAVLOVIC – OVERVIEW OF CANDIDATES
• AFEK – AN UZBEK VICTORY IN PRAGUE
• PERUNOVIC – AUSTRIAN BUNDESLIGA 2023/24
• SPEELMAN – HAND IN SILICON HAND
• KOTRONIAS – KING'S INDIAN DEFENCE – 5.Be2 Variation
• NTIRLIS – DEEP OPENING IDEAS THAT ARE NOT JUST FOR GRANDMASTERS
• PRUSIKIN – ABOUT OUTPOSTS AND PAWN MAJORITIES
• BARAK GONEN – WORLD OF CORRESPONDENCE CHESS
• DJURASEVIC – STUDIES – PEARLS OF THE CHESS GAMES
• ROGERS – THE SEMTEX BLUES
• GRIFFIN – FROM THE CHESS INFORMANT ARCHIVES
Traditional sections: 355 games and fragments, combinations, endings, Tournament reviews, the best game and the most important theoretical novelty from the preceding volume.
The periodical that pros use with pleasure is at the same time a must have publication for all serious chess students!
El Tratado General de Ajedrez es un clásico de la enseñanza del juego ciencia. Se trata de una obra que nos permite descubrir de forma amena y sencilla la esencia del juego, desde las enseñanzas básicas hasta la estrategia superior. Está íntegramente transcrito al sistema algebraico de notación, los nombres de las aperturas y de las líneas han sido actualizados y se han solventado algunos errores tácticos detectados en la obra original con notas al pie.
TÁCTICA Y ESTRATEGIA
Esta entrega es la llave al apasionante mundo de las combinaciones. El autor, sirviéndose de magníficos ejemplos, logra transmitir las ideas esenciales de forma fácil y comprensible. Los temas subyacentes, como el balance entre material y tiempo, el sacrificio, el espacio o la iniciativa, están tratados con especial detalle.
Roberto Grau (1900-1944) fue un estudioso del ajedrez, actividad a la que consagró gran parte de su vida, como periodista, jugador y maestro. Obtuvo el título de Campeón Argentino en 6 oportunidades, y participó en 6 olimpiadas, logrando excelentes resultados. Dirigió las publicaciones Ajedrez Americano y Ajedrez Argentino. Su columna Frente al Tablero, en el periódico La Nación, cautivó a los aficionados de su época. Además de su obra cumbre, el Tratado General de Ajedrez, escribió La Historia de Ajedrez, Códigos del Ajedrez, Aperturas y Finales, Estrategias del Ajedrez y Cartilla de Ajedrez.
Available via subscription
British Chess Magazine (July 2024)
About 10 months ago, Nery approached me. We already knew each other; Nery had been my student in group online classes for about 2 years. Nery’s main goal and desire is to help chess lovers like himself. Let’s say we don’t know the theory beyond moves 8-10 and, in many cases, after 5-6 moves we find it difficult to make the right choice. We are also not interested in studying all these complex and long variations, it does not bring us pleasure, and we only want to understand the criteria that we can rely on in choosing a move or plan in opening positions that are critical for us. Nery came to this idea thanks to numerous positions from many of his games in which he found it difficult to make a quick and correct decision. The analysis of these positions after the game, and the conclusions made together with his coach or the computer, or even independently, brought invaluable experience for making further correct decisions in the opening.
Dear chess friends, he wants to share this experience with you.
I’m sure you will enjoy reading this book. Play chess and love chess!!!
Vassily Ivanchuk has been one of the World's leading chess players for over two decades. He announced his arrival as a 21-year-old when he defeated Garry Kasparov on the way to winning the Linares Super-Grandmaster event. In a distinguished career he has won countless elite tournaments and was a FIDE World Championship finalist.
Ivanchuk is considered by many contemporaries to be a chess genius, and he has acquired a huge fan base that delights in his enterprising and creative play. His original style has helped to create games full of brilliant attacking chess and masterful strategy. In this book, Junior Tay invites you to join him in a study of his favourite Ivanchuk games, and shows us how we can all improve by learning from Ivanchuk's masterpieces.
Move by Move provides an ideal platform to study chess. By continually challenging the reader to answer probing questions throughout the book, the Move by Move format greatly encourages the learning and practising of vital skills just as much as the traditional assimilation of knowledge. Carefully selected questions and answers are designed to keep you actively involved and allow you to monitor your progress as you learn. This is an excellent way to improve your chess skills and knowledge.
The book proposes a White repertoire against all variants of the Dutch in the spirit of the London System with 1.d4 f5 2.Bf4.
Georgiev also covers the tricky move orders 1.d4 e6 2.Nf3 f5 3.Bf4, 1.c4 e6 2.d4 f5 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 Be7 (4...Bb4 5.Bd2) 5.Bf4, 1.d4 d6 2.Nf3 f5 3.Bf4 to offer a complete repertoire with Bf4.
It is in no way worse than the standard fianchetto lines, and has the huge advantage of being unexplored and barely mentioned in the books on the Dutch. The f4-bishop often proves to be White's most important and active piece, especially when he carries out the thematic break c4-c5. At the same time it defends White's castling position. In contrast to the worn-out fianchetto lines, White always has clear plans in the middlegame, which range from pawn advance on the queenside against set-ups with ...Be7, to h4, Qf3 and long castling against the Leningrad. Play is intuitive, and Black cannot easily prepare at home as the engines consistently show a fair advantage for White while top GM games are scarce. If it comes to that, they are even misleading.
On the White side we can see grandmasters as Carlsen, Aronian, Topalov, Grischuk, Morozevich, Praggnanandhaa, Nihal, Najer, Grandelius and many others. The Bf4-System against the Dutch is not a tricky, one-game opening. It can stand deep analysis with the latest versions of Leela AI and Stockfish. That makes it perfect for a long-term repertoire.
Grandmaster Kiril Georgiev has been the strongest Bulgarian player for many years. He was a Junior World Champion and a bronze medalist in Europe. He has played in 15 Olympiads and also coached Bulgarian national team. His peak rating was in the world's top ten. Kiril wrote the books Fighting the London System, Attacking 1...d5, The Modern English, The Sharpest Sicilian, Squeezing the Gambits.
We all have an intuitive feeling of the stress, pressure and frustration on the path to winning a World Championship in sport, but rarely will you get as unfiltered and raw an insight into the struggle to succeed as in The Mental Game.
Aleksandra Maltsevskaya won the 2018 World Junior Championship and 2022 European Rapid Championship. This book reveals the inside story of an 18-month period in which she worked with Grandmaster Alexander Galkin. A year later, Maltsevskaya became World Junior Champion. Galkin holds nothing back in revealing the highs, lows, jubilations and frustrations that were experienced in their collaboration, all while providing expert insights that will benefit chess players and coaches alike. The book contains a wealth of bonus material, including all eleven annotated games from Maltsevskaya’s World Championship victory.
In Chess Survivor – The Last of the Greats a chess legend shares his life story and annotates his best games.
When FIDE introduced the grandmaster title in 1950, Andor Lilienthal was one of the 27 names on that original list. And when he died at age 99, he was the last survivor of that historic group. This inspired our title. Douglas Griffin translated Lilienthal’s book from Russian and added 17 games to the 60 that Lilienthal annotated.
Lilienthal met or played all the World Champions of the 20th century. In fact, that understates it – Lilienthal won a game against Lasker, whose reign began in the 19th century. And some 21st-century champions, such as Vladimir Kramnik, certainly met Lilienthal. One might say that Lilienthal was connected to three centuries of chess.
Lilienthal’s quality of play matched his longevity. Most famous is his win against Capablanca in 1935. Equally famous is the story that when Bobby Fischer saw Lilienthal in the audience during his 1992 return match against Spassky, Fischer immediately said: “Pawn e5 takes f6!” – a reference to that Capablanca game.
We live in era of computers (unfortunately!) and we are simply forced to use them often and widely. Chess is no exclusion – it is impossible even to imagine modern chess without computers, engines, databases, online platforms, etc. Modern generations have their first connection with chess through computers, not books, and that is wrong of course! Young players prefer to memorize than to understand; they follow some fashionable line even if they do not know what is going on!
That motivated me to write this book – logic must be included in the process of chess education! Moreover, logic must be the most important part of that education process. Youngsters often neglect logic and not surprisingly they get surprised when their “well-remembered” variation doesn’t work.
Experienced players often lead the game out of theory, to places where understanding will prevail over memory and energy. That is my favorite concept against youngsters –setting static situations on the board – because young players usually go for dynamics, because they are good at calculating and memorizing. Understanding and logic are everything you need with statics on the board.
You can hardly find a more unconventional idea than pushing your g-pawn 2 squares down the board.
Some may say it belongs to a backroom chess game in a café, some may say it belongs to olden times - back when the King's Gambit was the main line after 1.e4 e5. But we are seeing more and more occurrences at the top-level.
Is it a coincidence ??
It's safe to say that g2-g4 (or ...g7-g5) is one of the most weakening moves available. As a matter of fact, the objectively worst first-move happens to be 1.g4, accompanied by an evaluation of -1.30 when running Stockfish 15 on low-depth (we did not see the point on letting it run in this position, it will probably get lower, that's not good advertising).
Now, there are quite a few positions where g2-g4 (or ...g7-g5) makes more sense and brings an interesting fight. The player has to be willing to take some considerable amount of risk, and that may be too much for some of us. The resulting positions often get messy and veer very much away from traditional paths, which means the expected number of mistakes gets higher, thus decreasing the drawing percentage.
Still, it's important to remain somewhat objective and not to get too excited by the thrill of an upcoming attack. Yes, g-pawn pushes are aggressive, but can also very quickly turn out to have disastrous consequences. "I wish I could play g4-g2", is usually a sign the experiment has gone wrong. The book is aimed at covering a wide range of chess openings. We decided to showcase the different categories of g4 (...g5) one may meet in the early stage of the opening, no matter if the idea is strong, interesting or quite unadvisable (bad, you may also say).
Most of the time, g4 (...g5) won't be the best move, but we will try to show that the value of surprise and the tendency of players to react solidly to aggression can matter as well. Also, we have decided not to include any Sicilians, as the g2-g4 push has become so frequent there, and in many variations deeply analyzed already.
Over the 50 games that we picked, the 3 main reasons why the g-pawn is being launched are: 1) Attacking a short-castled king with a hook created by h2-h3 (or ...h7-h6) 2) Challenging the stable position of a Nf3 (or ...Nf6). It becomes stronger when the knight doesn't have a good square to hop to. 3) Seizing space on the kingside.
The more you dive into the examples, the more you'll see that it's a mix of the 3, with one reason prevailing. We wish you happy reading and hope that you'll implement some of these lines into your play!