Are you struggling with your chess development? While dedicating hours and hours on improving your craft, your rating simply does not want to move upwards? Spending loads of money on chess books and DVDs, but feeling no real improvement at all? No worries – the book that you are holding in your hands might represent a game changer! Years of coaching experience as well as independent research has allowed the author to identify the key skills that will enhance the progress of just about any player rated between 1600 and 2500. Becoming a strong chess thinker is namely not only reserved exclusively for elite players, but actually constitutes the cornerstone of chess training, being no less important than memorising opening theory, acquiring middlegame knowledge or practising endgames. By studying this book, you will: – learn how to universally deal with any position you might encounter in your games, even if you happen to see it for the first time in your life, – have the opportunity to solve 90 unique, hand-picked puzzles, extensively annotated and peculiarly organised for the Readers’ optimal learning effect, – gain access to more than 300 pages of original grandmaster thoughts and advice, leaving you awestruck and hungry for more afterwards!
Grandmasters Kotronias and Ivanov are renowned as leading theoreticians and chess trainers. They offer a unique and world-class repertoire based on 1.d4! They advocate an ambitious approach for White, with the aim to fight for an advantage in any position. This is their first joint effort; they tackle the ever-popular Queen’s Gambit Accepted and their sidelines in Volume 1A and 1B.
What you are holding in your hands is the natural follow up of Volume 1 where some “lesser” openings aft er 1.d4 d5 2.c4 were examined, as well as a couple of less popular variations of the Queen’s Gambit Accepted. This second Volume comprises all of the established main lines of the QGA aft er our recommended 3.e4 with the intention of giving you a full picture of this topical opening while helping you build a repertoire based on aggressive ideas. Objectively speaking, it is very hard for White to find an advantage in the event of the absolute main lines 3…Nf6 and 3…e5, but we believe we have done our duty. We scrutinized multiple interesting variations with the help of engines while applying our human understanding to select those lines that would be the most unpleasant for Black. Additionally, we tried to provide you with as many alternatives as possible so as not to become “victims” of a narrow repertoire.
I chose to write a book on advanced rook endings as I simply did not wish to write another book that would be like the many already available. I have done my best to present analysis and articles I have written over the past 10–15 years. This work has been presented in my daily coaching sessions, seminars, workshops, etc. The material has helped a lot of trainees to develop into quite strong players gaining international titles and championships. The endgame is the moment of truth. It is the phase of the game where we will try to reap the seeds of our effort regardless of whether that is the full point of victory or the half point of the draw. The significance of errors increases in the endgame as the opportunities for correcting them are few. Mark Dvoretsky makes a general quote: Rook activity is the cornerstone in the evaluation and play of rook endgames. This activity may take diverse forms: from attacking the enemy pawns, to the support of one’s own passed pawns, to the interdiction or pursuit of the enemy king. There are indeed times when the rook must remain passive and implement purely defensive functions. But even then, one must stubbornly seek out any possibility of activating the rook, not even stopping at sacrificing pawns, or making your own king’s position worse.
This book in front of you assists all players in their efforts to improve, and along their way, our young chess guns provided fresh insights how to trap and trick your opponent in the opening and early middlegame. With the many computer-assisted learning tools available, the player’s capacity to improve is limitless. This book offers the reader an insider’s candid view of how to unbalance the game in the modern age of chess.