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Chess Pattern Recognition for Beginners

Pattern recognition is the engine of chess improvement: the more standard images you carry in your head, the faster you grasp a position and find the right plan. Arthur van de Oudeweetering’s earlier books on the subject became instant favourites — but they assumed you already knew the fundamentals. This book supplies those fundamentals, written for the ambitious beginner and post-beginner.

It teaches the essential patterns a developing player actually needs: how to develop and coordinate the pieces, how to manoeuvre pawns into strong formations, how to put pressure on the opponent and attack the enemy king, and how to execute the standard sacrifices that seize the initiative. The chapters are built around memorable, named images — the rook on the seventh, the bad bishop, the isolated pawn, the classic h7 bishop sacrifice — so the ideas stick.

Each part ends with exercises, and a foreword by grandmaster Vladimir Chuchelov frames the method. The whole approach is designed so that recognising a familiar pattern does the heavy lifting that calculation alone never could.

Study it and your results should climb noticeably. Ideal for improving beginners — and the perfect on-ramp to the author’s more advanced pattern-recognition books later.

Sielecki always clearly explains the plans and counterplans and keeps you focussed on what the position requires. Ambitious players rated 1500 or higher will get great value out of studying this extremely accessible book.

The Queen's Indian Defence has the reputation of a very reliable system for Black. Although his chances of obtaining sharp double-edged positions are restricted, good knowledge of piece set-ups and different plans should offer Black chances of seizing the initiative even in calm variations. The opening monographs on the QID, as a rule, focus on the move order 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 b6. What is Black supposed to do if the opponent wishes to avoid the QID and begins the game with the moves 1.Nf3 Nf6 2.c4, or 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3?. How should Black deploy his pieces and what should he aim for in the middlegame? The book of the grandmaster from Saint Petersburg and chess-coach Evgeniy Solozhenkin answers these questions!

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.

In this companion volume to the author’s highly-regarded The Nimzo-Indian Defence, the starting point is 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6. The main focus is on 3.Nf3 b6 while Roiz also covers 3.g3 (Catalan) and miscellaneous options."

In the first book we discussed basic positions and methods for playing both simple and complicated rook endings. Now, in this book, we will discuss typical positions — which means positions that frequently appear in practical play. Knowledge of such positions and the methods of handling them is a third key element of correct play in rook endgames.

(Free re-downloadable for those who purchased the first edition!) One of the remarkable things about the Accelerated Dragon is its appeal to players with vastly different styles. In this book International Master Raja Panjwani presents a repertoire for Black demonstrating a dynamic way to fight 1.e4 from the second move.

CHESS INFORMANT’S 137th ADVENTURE

The Quest for the Golden Fleece

CONTENTS:

FORWARD, ALWAYS FORWARD GM Aleksandar Inđić

USEFUL TRICKS AND TRAPS IN FAST TIME CONTROLS GM Pentala Harikrishna

EXCHANGING QUEENS DURING A SACRIFICIAL ATTACK GM Mihail Marin

A MODERN TREATMENT OF 4.f3 NIMZO-INDIAN GM Ferenc Berkes

DOMESTICATING THE KING’S INDIAN DEFENCE! GM Markus Ragger

THE SEMI-SLAV DEFENCE – PART II GM Aleksander Delchev

THE ARMENIAN VARIATION GM Robert Markuš

THE FRENCH COMBATS GM Miloš Perunović

THE BEST OF CHESS INFORMANT – Hikaru Nakamura

Traditional sections: games, combinations, endings, correspondence chess, endgame blunders, Tournaments review, the best game from the preceding volume 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!

Better Thinking, Better Chess

Finding strong moves is not simply a matter of how much you know — often, more knowledge makes the choice harder by multiplying the directions your mind can wander. What really matters, argues grandmaster Joel Benjamin, is how you think. This book is his attempt to fix the thought process itself.

Years of coaching taught Benjamin that pointing out the move a student missed was only half the job; the real task was explaining why they failed to find it. A chess engine won’t do that — it shows the best move but not the flawed reasoning that led you astray. So Benjamin works on the reasoning directly, across every phase of the game.

The chapters span openings, endgames, tactics, grandmaster calculation and analysis, the handling of material versus initiative, the surprisingly difficult skill of winning a won game, and the dark art of swindling a lost one — closing with a chapter of practical "words of wisdom" for clearer thinking and a set of challenges.

A practical, experience-driven improvement book for club and tournament players who keep making the same kinds of mistakes and want to understand the habits of mind behind better moves.

The author has countless practical suggestions for improving your endgame play in this era of rapid-time controls so that you don’t end up “drowning” in the ocean of endgame theory. Let Mark Dvoretsky help you win more games as he examines some elementary endgame errors from master play and shows you how to avoid making the same mistakes.