Chess is a cruel game. We all know that feeling when your position has gone awry and everything seems hopeless. You feel like resigning. But don’t give up! This is precisely the moment to switch to swindle mode. Master the art of provoking errors and you will be able to turn the tables and escape with a draw – or sometimes even steal the full point! Swindling is a skill that can be trained. In this book, David Smerdon shows how you can use tricks from psychology to marshal hidden resources and exploit your opponent’s biases. In a lost position, your best practical chance often lies not in what the computer recommends, but in playing your opponent. With an abundance of eye-popping examples and training exercises, Smerdon identifies the four best friends of every chess swindler: your opponent’s impatience, their hubris, their fear, and their need to stay in control. You’ll also learn about such cunning swindling motifs as the Trojan Horse, the Decoy Trap, the Berserk Attack, and ‘Window-Ledging’. So, come and join the Swindlers’ Club, become a great escape artist and dramatically improve your results. In this instructive and highly entertaining guide, Smerdon shows you how.
The way a beginner develops into a strong chess player closely resembles the progress of the game of chess itself. This popular idea is the reason why many renowned chess instructors such as former World Champions Garry Kasparov and Max Euwe, emphasize the importance of studying the history of chess. Willy Hendriks agrees that there is much to be learned from the pioneers of our game. He challenges, however, the conventional view on what the stages in the advancement of chess actually have been. Among the various articles of faith that Hendriks questions is Wilhelm Steinitz's reputation as the discoverer of the laws of positional chess. In The Origin of Good Moves Hendriks undertakes a groundbreaking investigative journey into the history of chess. He explains what actually happened, creates fresh perspectives, finds new heroes, and reveals the real driving force behind improvement in chess: evolution. This thought-provoking book is full of beautiful and instructive ‘new’ material from the old days. With plenty of exercises, the reader is invited to put themselves in the shoes of the old masters. Never before has the study of the history of chess been so entertaining and rewarding.
Welcome to Volume 2 of Cheparinov's 1.d4!.
In the second part of the series, I am sharing my knowledge about the Slav Defense. I am confident that the book contains many new and interesting ideas and I have tried to provide you with the best practical options. Objectively speaking Black looks good in many lines but in practice things may look different. While I cannot promise you a big advantage in each line, I do believe you will have the best practical chances during the game.
Writing the second volume was very challenging for me. The Slav encompasses a wide but solid body of theory. Black has plenty of options and finding advantages and practical chances was not easy at all. In any case I believe that chess players from amateurs to very strong players will appreciate this book. While the Covid pandemic gave me a lot of free time to concentrate on the book, I am very happy to see that many tournaments are back. This means that my book can be useful, and you may actually be able to apply some of the ideas in your games.
The best way to use this book is to first examine the lines on an actual board and then check them with an engine. I hope this method of study increases your understanding of the positions that arise from the Slav. This book can be a very important starting point for building your 1.d4 repertoire.
The Hungarian Dragon (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be3 Nc6 7.f3 h5!?) is a creative and resourceful way of dealing with White's dangerous Yugoslav Attack to the Sicilian Dragon. With the line's endorsement by the creative Hungarian Grandmaster Richard Rapport in the World Blitz Championships 2021, the line is now receiving the scrutiny of Dragon exponents.
In this book, FIDE Candidate Master and ICCF Senior International Master Junior Tay explains this dangerous creature's concepts, tactics, strategic nuances, and theory using model examples and analytical positions.
By studying forcing sequences according to Hertan’s method you will develop analytical precision, improve your tactical vision, overcome human bias and staleness, and enjoy the calculation of difficult positions.
Chess is 99% tactics. If this celebrated observation is true for the master, how much more so for beginners and casual players! If you want to win more games, nothing works better than training combinations.
There are two types of books on tactics, those that introduce the concepts followed by some examples, and workbooks that contain numerous exercises.
Chess masters and trainers Franco Masetti and Roberto Messa have done both: they explain the basic tactical ideas AND provide an enormous amount of exercises for each different theme. Masetti and Messa have created a great first tactics book. It teaches you how to:
• identify weak spots in the position of your opponent
• recognize patterns of combinations
• visualize tricks.
1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners can also be used as a course text book, because only the most didactically productive exercises have been used.
The book presents a Black repertoire based on the Nimzo-Indian Defence.
From the "Preface": "I wrote this book for the adventurer who wants to start playing the Nimzo but is afraid of drowning in its lines. My creative task is to provide the reader with useful practical advice while sparing him unnecessary learning overhead." Igor Lysyj
Igor Lysyj is a strong grandmaster with a peak rating of 2700. He is also a FIDE Senior Trainer. Lysyj was Russian champion in 2014, European blitz champion in 2019, won the World Student’s championship in 2008 with the Russian team. Together with 43 other Russian chess players (including Chess Stars authors Khalifman, Kryakvin, Barski), Lysyj signed an open letter to Russian president Vladimir Putin, protesting against the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and expressing solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
The Hippopotamus Defence is just what a club player needs. It’s a straightforward and clear-cut chess opening that avoids the ever growing body of mainline theory. It’s universal: Black can use the Hippo against virtually all of White’s choices (1.e4, 1.d4, 1.c4, 1.f4, the Colle, London, Trompowsky, Réti and others). It’s not very well known and will surprise many opponents. On top of all that, the Hippo is seriously underestimated: with its characteristic double fianchetto it may look quiet, but inside there lurks a very dangerous animal. FIDE Master Alessio de Santis is one of the world’s greatest experts on the Hippo and has written a practical, well-structured and accessible manual.
Any good chess coach will tell you to study the endgame. Improving your knowledge of the ‘third phase’ in a chess game will bring you many extra half or even full points.
After the success of his award-winning classics, Chess Strategy for Club Players and Attacking Chess for Club Players Herman Grooten has now written an equally instructive endgame manual. He teaches you how to understand the themes of an endgame, and find the right moves based on your understanding.
International Master Herman Grooten learned about endgames the hard way, as many good players have. Early in his career, he realized there was a lot to be gained in this undervalued part of the game. Building on his experience as a player and coach, Grooten takes an original approach to convey his message: the endgames are divided according to theme, not chess material. This is a novel, but very effective way to learn the ins and outs, since many themes can occur with different material balances.
The material is richly illustrated with many examples from practical play, as well as endgame studies, which present the motifs in their purest and most attractive form. The result is a lively and highly instructive guide to the endgame.
Jakov's new book focuses on a key element of tactics: forced mate. It contains 1500 positions rife with tactical resources; 1380 of them are presented as puzzles. The book is divided into 31 chapters, most of which are dedicated to a single tactical method, which is described in detail. This fundamental work systematizes the methods for delivering forced mate, which include sacrifices, pawn promotion, vacation, attraction, elimination, deflection, blocking, seizing the square, x-rays, pins, discovered checks, double checks, windmill and interference. The rest of the chapters are titled Combinations; they are used to consolidate the provided knowledge and test the acquired skills. They contain the theoretical basics of the combinations and cases studied, but to solve these puzzles the reader will also need to use techniques they studied in previous parts of the book, rather than in only the current chapter. Therefore, each new tactical method studied gradually increases the diversity of combinations used in the subsequent chapters. The puzzles in every chapter also gradually increase in difficulty. The last chapter makes the book useful even for top-level players, because it consists solely of difficult puzzles and can be used as a universal test to check forced mating skills. The greatest value of this book is in the learning system that can be used as a foundation for young chess players to study tactics. The author has used this system countless times when working with his pupils and it has proved to be highly successful. Together with the carefully crafted examples it turns this work into a universal textbook that can be used by both students and coaches. This book is accessible to beginners once they have learned to mate in one, and contains puzzles with mostly 2-move to 6-move solutions. Puzzles in the final chapter will challenge even grandmasters, with solutions often requiring 9-11 moves.