Chess has very strict, but also fairly simple, rules: rapid development, control of the center with pawns or pieces, timely castling and defense of the king, the creation of various weaknesses in the opponent’s position, attacking those weaknesses, and control of open lines. At the same time a player shouldn’t get his queen stuck in the enemy camp, or ruin his own pawn structure. Those who know these rules will succeed. It is necessary for a chess player to know opening and endgame theory, standard combinations and motifs, as well as pawn structures and many other things. A lot of the topics listed demand a very straightforward type of thinking or approach. However it also happens that chess players often discover significant resources which formally exist outside the typical rules of chess. Those who know how to break all the rules and work around those specific guidelines reach the very top. Currently, when thousands of chess books dissect the same standard ideas in great detail, let us remember that first there were those who originally discovered them, implemented them, and made them standard, as well as those who broke the rules and created completely new ones.
In this long-awaited second Thinkers-book of International Master, Armin Juhasz, the reader is invited to take a seat in his classroom and follow his useful guidelines how to improve your practical play.
The emphasis is on general principles that readers will be able to use in their own games, and detailed analysis is always given where it is necessary. Each game and fragment contain many lessons and practical tips, guiding the reader through the most important ideas in each phase of the game. This book illustrates an increasingly prevalent and successful style of play, a method that begins by slowly accumulating small but permanent advantages. The author does a very good job of explaining the key points of the game in such a way that the reader is given a true account of what is happening and not some watered down version. Translating the muddy world of modern master chess into something that is understandable to the layman, is a skill Armin mastered.
This book contains games from every single female World Champion, as well as young up and comers, top seasoned professionals, streamers, and even a section at Beth Harmon from the recent famed Queen’s Gambit hit show.
This book is not just for girls and women, however. Any chess player can learn from these games and discover female chess history, both from the famous players in the past right up to the present day.
How have these games been selected?
It is at this point I can mention the real reason - my UK Girls chess project called ‘She Plays To Win’ (SPTW).
This group has officially been going since April 11 th 2020. I had the idea even a few years before, but I was not sure how it could be set up. The unfortunate events of worldwide lockdown provided the answer, as the switch to being online allowed me to offer zoom lessons for UK girls as well as weekly girls tournaments on the Lichess server. I do this for free and parents have never paid anything to get involved.
Each week I cover a top female player and we analyse the game. Over the past year I have built up a large collection of games and tactics, which I felt could be published. It is the most up to date collection about women’s chess covering a variety of ages and levels.
After nearly two years, I have nearly 500 girls across the UK signed up, and a further 200 girls in our new beginners programme. I hope this is just the beginning.
After all, on our official website www.sheplaystowin.co.uk the tagline reads ‘Every Girl in the UK should play and learn chess - the educational benefits are huge’.
I can announce that I personally will not take a penny from this book, as 10% of the proceeds from sales will go directly to the She Plays To Win charity in order to further the SPTW UK girls chess projects.
So not only can you benefit a lot from this book personally, your purchase will benefit UK girls chess immensely.
The book before you is a product of what happens when two chess players start a relationship (which started over six years ago) and enter a dialogue about how to get ready for the next tournament. The content of this book is a training program for players who plan to play an over-the-board tournament a few weeks from the time they start training with this book. This book, unlike other similar books in the field of improvement, does not have a central theme. In other words, we are not focused solely on openings, middlegames or endgames. Moreover, the book does not only concentrate on specific themes (calculation, positional decisions, or other strategic aspects), though many of these concepts are addressed throughout the book. Instead, this book offers a holistic view on how to approach every single position in it, regardless of the phase of the game or the nature of the position. We try to teach players how to identify types of decisions in various positions, while pointing at the trade-off between a hardcore calculation and a heuristics judgment.
The distinction between strategy and tactics is one of the first things any chess player learns about, but have you ever heard about statics and dynamics before? Did you know that nearly every critical decision you take in a game of chess is governed by the rules of the so-called static/dynamic balance? If not, for the sake of your own chess development, you might want learn more about it from this very book!
In ‘Supreme Chess Understanding: Statics & Dynamics’, GM Moranda meticulously explains rules governing the physics of the game, focusing in particular on the interplay between static and dynamic factors. In today’s dog-eat-dog chess world it is namely not enough to know the general principles, but rather to grasp when, how and why can these be bent... or even broken. Thanks to the knowledge gained by studying this work, navigating through the maze of positional transformations is going to become a piece of cake!
The 65 carefully selected exercises are going to make your chess senses tingle with learning excitement. Apart from that, you shall also benefit from the massive amount of practical advice and psychological tips provided by the author. Finally, the book’s quiz format will make the study process not only fruitful, but above all fun!
Not all chess players are ready to face a dangerous opening like the Grivas Sicilian, or any other open form of the Sicilian Defense of course, so an alternative set-up is on the quest. White has plenty of choices after 1.e4 c5; these choices sometimes are quite sound, and some others are simply crap!
Well, shorter time-controls (blitz & rapid) ‘favors’ safer, not forced and not very deep and long theoretical continuations, so White has a fair point for avoiding the open versions of the Sicilian Defense. Especially in the ‘cholera years’ as I call the 2020–2021 years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, chess players had to stay home, avoiding travelling and exercise instead via the internet form of our royal game.
This general fear demanded as ‘compensation’ a lighter approach to the game and some weird and unsound opening choices were on the daily menu. That’s fine of course, for the well-trained and ambitious chess player sitting behind the black pieces!
It is also quite true that this book is quite ‘heavy’ and contains many, many lines which are almost impossible to remember in totality. But chess is learned sub-consciously, so repeated motifs and ideas guide our choices and help us to recall important lines.
We must be trained not only in concrete opening moves, but on the middlegame, the endgame and the tactical part of the opening in question. And this is exactly what this book offers: a complete structural think-tank on the non-open form of the Sicilian Defense.
There are no good or bad openings – there are openings you understand and openings that you do not understand. And understanding comes by studying and applying the absorbed Knowledge!
In this book’s pages you will find tons of novelties not seen in practice, and in many of the lines I offer strong improvements. Many sources were reviewed, where the authors defended certain options from White’s point of view, while I defended Black’s side. In addition, this book has absorbed my attitude and approach to various positions, and I have been analyzing the Benko Gambit for more than 10 years! I wanted to approach each position from the point of view of a human, as close as possible to a practical game. In addition, even if this book becomes outdated at some point, I am sure that it will always be possible to improve the variations – but the backbone of studying this opening can be taken from this book; this is normal work on chess.
I am glad to welcome you to the second volume dedicated to the Benko Gambit. This volume examines the most basic lines. It is these lines that can be found most often at the board. We’ll take a look at the rare and tricky lines and move on to the more popular and classic lines.
In the first volume, in the Introduction, we touched on my personal attitude to this opening, which has been constantly changing over the course of the last 10 years. We touched upon the history of how the opening developed, noted who needed to play this opening and what to expect from it.
What do I want to highlight in this Introduction? This is what the reader will notice in this volume – that the lines have become more specific, sometimes requiring very accurate knowledge. The load on memory increases, but it will be rewarded a hundredfold, since the positions that arise are interesting and full of dynamic factors. In this volume, we look at positions that start after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 b5 4.cxb5 a6. We’ll start with the rarer continuations and end with the most popular and relevant ones.
The possession of the bishop pair (vs. bishop & knight, or knight pair) is an important strategic element that may guarantee superiority and even determine the outcome of the game. In modern chess, the bishop pair has been established as a positional advantage in the majority of cases, and it’s very common nowadays to hear teachers tell their students ‘keep your bishops’ or ‘capture that bishop’.
In today’s chess, the importance given to this element has increased to the point that in some of the most popular opening variations, the main goal has become to gain the bishop pair. That is because the bishop pair can be a powerful advantage in any phase of the game. For example, it’s a lethal weapon in an attack against the king. It can also be very efficient in attacking weaknesses: one bishop can put pressure on the target, while the other attacks the defending piece. However, it is the endgame where it is particularly strong.
The Caro-Kann Defense has always been one of my favorite openings to play and was the very first opening I learned when I started playing chess. Former world champion Anatoly Karpov espoused this opening throughout his career and, with his solid and positional style, inspired me to play the Caro-Kann as well. Many games have been played, and theory has evolved since the days of Karpov’s Caro-Kann. As you will see in this book, this opening offers Black many opportunities for dynamic play, despite its solid framework. My hope is that readers of all levels will find something of value to them in this book. The material contains many new ideas and the analysis often stretch quite far from the opening stages. Nevertheless, I have done my best to help the reader make sense of the complicated variations and of the positional nuances inextricably woven between them. The idea is not only to show you the moves, but also to help you develop both your understanding of the underlying plans and your familiarity with broader strategic concepts, to guide your decision-making even beyond the opening.
What’s the most effective book for your level or the most effective course to get?
As a Grandmaster and chess coach, who left his cozy life and started a company with a mission to help chess lovers to unlock their full potential, I’m very happy that in the chess world there are people like Vishnu and that you picked his book.
Vishnu isn’t an ordinary person; his methods of improvement aren’t ordinary and neither is he as a coach. When he won the Chicago Open, being the 60th out of 116 in the starting list, many people were surprised. But they wouldn’t be if they saw how smart and interesting his system of chess improvement is. Vishnu proved that his methods work and how important pattern recognition is. And exactly that’s what he teaches in this book!
When I saw the draft of it I was blown away by the hard work he had done, the quality of the research, and how carefully he was picking up the examples. I want to congratulate you on having this book in your hands. You avoided traps, you found a man who has walked the talk and has spent years learning and preparing for you a material that you can digest in a short period of time. And if your rating is somewhere between 1000-2000, this book will be one of the best books for you!
The idea behind this book is for you to ‘play’ as in a real game, and it is my job to ensure you have a pleasant time while training. I suggest you take at least an hour and a half for each game and as your coach I will indicate when to guess the moves. Sometimes there will be suggestions — including tricky ones — to measure your concentration level. Th e ideas behind the moves are always explained.
Points are awarded for the ‘right answers’ as well as for some other moves, and at the end there is a general assessment plus a review of some of the things to be learned from the game. During my coaching period I was able to witness how motivating it is for kids to receive points for the right answers, their ‘lives are at stake’ when they try to find the answers, and it is a challenge much appreciated by them. Later I also noticed a similar effect with adults although, unlike the kids, the older students try to hide it.
The final score is not that important; it is not scientifically based. But of course the more points you get the better you ‘would have played’. The effort you put into trying to find the best move every time is what matters most. I firmly believe it really helps to learn a little more about playing chess with every game.