TACTICS TRAINER AVAILABLE!
The Woodpecker Method 2: Positional Play
Unlock Your Chess Potential with the Ultimate Training Regimen
From the acclaimed authors of The Woodpecker Method comes the highly anticipated sequel that promises to take your chess skills to the next level. Dive into The Woodpecker Method 2: Positional Play, a comprehensive training guide designed to transform your positional understanding and tactical prowess through rigorous and repetitive practice.
Inside This Book:
Why This Book?
Author Insight:
Building on the groundbreaking success of The Woodpecker Method, this sequel delves deeper into the world of positional chess, offering insights from the games of legendary World Champions. Through structured exercises and detailed analysis, The Woodpecker Method 2: Positional Play is your go-to resource for mastering the complexities of the game.
Take your chess training to the next level with The Woodpecker Method 2: Positional Play. Embrace the challenge, refine your skills, and become the player you've always aspired to be.
Available via subscription
British Chess Magazine (August 2024)
Gukesh Dommaraju became the challenger for the 2024 World Chess Championship when the then 17 year old won the Candidates Tournament in Toronto earlier that year, ahead of favourites including Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi. A year earlier Gukesh wasn't so well known in the West, even though the chess prodigy had been consistently breaking records:
* Gukesh was the second-youngest Grandmaster in chess history, missing being the youngest-ever by only 17 days.
* He was the fourth-youngest player to shatter the stratospheric 2700 rating barrier.
* He was the youngest-ever winner of the Candidates cycle at age 17, making him the youngest challenger in a World Chess Championship match.
Gukesh's style and strategic mastery much resemble those of the young Anatoly Karpov. He wins imperceptibly, where every 12 moves or so you notice his position improving, seemingly without having done anything! Gukesh seeks to smother his opponent's intentions in the crib, before they have a chance to grow into actual threats.
In 70 fully annotated games, this book covers Gukesh's fiercest battles against many of the world's top players. Opponents include world champions Magnus Carlsen, Ding Liren, Vishy Anand and Vladimir Kramnik, as well as other world-class players such as Caruana, Nepo, Nakamura, Giri, Firouzja, Vidit, and his long-standing rival Praggnanandhaa among others. Seven games are taken from the Toronto Candidates Tournament.
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.
Today's openings are reruns of an old sitcom that we have all seen a hundred times before, while for players in the past, life on the chess board was wild, unexplored territory. Learning the details of that gigantic entity, the Ruy Lopez (from either side), is on par with the time that hateful 7th-grade teacher made us memorize the capital cities of every country in the world--in alphabetical order!
The Origins series is an attempt at a "big picture" view that displays the interlocking parts of a much larger mechanism in time.
In this volume, the authors cover specialty lines either side deviates before heading into the Closed System Main Lines, for instance, The Exchange Variation, The Worrall Attack, The Open Ruy Lopez, The Møller, The Arkhangelsk, and many more.
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.
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.