One of the finest chess books ever written, now in the revised algebraic edition. The author expounds both the basic principles and the most complex forms of attack on the king. A study of this masterpiece will add power and brilliance to any chess enthusiast's play.
The Dutch Defence is one of Black’s most combative responses to 1.d4, and the Stonewall is the boldest version of this opening. Black immediately seizes space in the centre and clamps down on the e4-square, laying the foundations for a complicated strategic battle. Many players believe the Stonewall to be a substandard opening, naively assuming that the e5-outpost and bad light-squared bishop must give White the advantage. GM Nikola Sedlak disagrees, and in Playing the Stonewall Dutch he shares the insights that have helped him to rack up a healthy plus score from Black’s side. In addition to providing a complete repertoire in the main lines of the Stonewall, this book also offers useful guidance on dealing with Anti-Dutch variations and various move-order subtleties.
Oscar de Prado has revisted the London Chess Opening, after the enourmous success of The Agile London System, the book he co-authored in 2016. His new book has a more practical approach. De Prado avoids long and complicated variations and concentrates on explaining straightforward plans, clear-cut strategies and standard manoeuvres.
Jacob Aagaard presents the main principles of how to attack and defend in chess. By carving dynamic chess into separate areas of ability, he gives the reader a clear way to expand his understanding of this vital part of the game.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Grandmaster Preparation
TACTICS TRAINER AVAILABLE! Chess is 99% tactics. This celebrated observation is not only true for beginners, but also for club players (Elo 1500 – 2000). If you want to win more games, nothing works better than training your combination skills. There are two types of books on tactics: those that introduce the concepts followed by some examples, and workbooks that contain lots of exercises. FIDE Master Frank Erwich has done both: he explains all the key tactical ideas AND provides an enormous amount of exercises for each different theme. Erwich has created a complete tactics book for ambitious club and tournament players. He takes you to the next level of identifying weak spots in the position of your opponent, recognizing patterns of combinations, visualizing tricks and calculating effectively. Erwich has also included a new and important element: tests that will improve your defensive skills. 1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players is not a freewheeling collection of puzzles. It serves as a course text book, because only the most didactically productive exercises are featured. Every chapter starts with easy examples, but don’t worry: the level of difficulty will steadily increase.
Pawn play is a fundamental aspect of chess strategy, yet often neglected in chess literature. In this, his second book on pawn play, Super-GM Sam Shankland sheds light on the vital topic of Passed Pawns.
Passed pawns – whether connected, lone or protected – are common occurrences in middlegames and endgames, and your effectiveness in playing with or against them will make the difference between victory and defeat. Just like in his previous book, Shankland breaks down each topic into a series of crystal-clear guidelines to aid the reader.
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Pawn Play Bundle
Which side stands better? How much better? Why?
Most chess players rely on loosely knit, unstructured methods to evaluate chess pieces and positions. They learn positional principles which often lead to inaccurate evaluations and faulty decisions about how to proceed.
This ground-breaking book by best-selling chess author Dan Heisman addresses the evaluation and understanding of how static features affect the value of the pieces in a given position. Now in its fourth edition, emphasis is placed on the static evaluation of each piece’s value and its role in the overall position rather than the assessment of a specific position, but Heisman’s approach can also be applied to help evaluate entire positions by helping to answer the questions who stands better, by how much, and why?
This ebook is a part of Bundle: Dan Heisman's Books
Sielecki has created a reliable set of opening lines for chess players of almost all levels. The major objective is to dominate Black from the opening, by simple means. You don’t need to sacrifice anything or memorize long tactical lines. His main concept is for White to play 1.d4, 2.Nf3, 3.g3, 4.Bg2, 5.0-0 and in most cases 6.c4. Sielecki developed this repertoire while working with students who were looking for something that was easy to understand and easy to learn. This new 1.d4 repertoire may be even easier to master than his 1.e4 recommendations, because it is such a coherent system. 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.
Spend more study time on what’s really decisive in your games! The average chess player spends too much time on studying opening theory. In his day, World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker argued that improving amateurs should spend about 5% of their study time on openings. These days club players are probably closer to 80%, often focusing on opening lines that are popular among grandmasters. Club players shouldn’t slavishly copy the choices of grandmasters. GMs need to squeeze every drop of advantage from the opening and therefore play highly complex lines that require large amounts of memorization. The main objective for club players should be to emerge from the opening with a reasonable position, from which you can simply play chess and pit your own tactical and positional understanding against that of your opponent. Gerard Welling and Steve Giddins recommend the Old Indian-Hanham Philidor set-up as a basis for both Black and White. They provide ideas and strategies that can be learned in the shortest possible time, require the bare minimum of maintenance and updating, and lead to rock-solid positions that you will know how to handle. By adopting a similar set-up for both colours, with similar plans and techniques, you will further reduce study time. Side-stepping Mainline Theory will help you to focus on what is really decisive in the vast majority of non-grandmaster games: tactics, positional understanding and endgame technique.
The FastTrack to Endgame Expertise! Since it first appeared in 2003, Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual has been acclaimed as the best single volume ever written on the endgame. With staggering depth and accuracy, it clearly reveals the secrets of this most important stage of the game. One of the unique characteristics of the Endgame Manual has been the highlighting of text considered to be essential to the understanding of endgame theory. The late, great trainer Mark Dvoretsky carefully selected the text to be highlighted so that players at all levels could benefit from this monumental work. Now in its fifth edition, the 440-page manual may seem somewhat intimidating to some readers. With that in mind, German grandmaster Karsten Müller and American grandmaster Alex Fishbein – both recognized endgame experts in their own right – have collected the highlighted text from the fifth edition and presented it so that the core concepts might be more readily available. The result is Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual: FastTrack Edition. As noted by Australian grandmaster Ian Rogers in his foreword: “I am very pleased that Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual: FastTrack Edition has come along. It is eminently suitable to sit in an amateur player’s library as their only endgame book, and equally good at preparing a serious student for many other fine endgame books – not forgetting of course the storied father of this volume, Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual." If you are serious about studying endgames, have a limited amount of time, or are simply looking for a convenient way to improve your play in endgames, the FastTrack Edition may just be the book you have been looking for.
Throw Down the Gauntlet from the Very First Move!
The Modern Defense has been popular for decades. However, within the purview of this defense, there is a system that challenges White right from the get-go. The brainchild of Georgian grandmaster Bukhuti Gurgenidze, Black plays 1...g6 and follows with a timely ...c6 and ...d5. Occasionally classified as part of the Caro-Kann, it draws battle lines immediately.
The move 1...g6 in general is an aggressive approach, throwing down the gauntlet from the very first move. This is why in some lines, even if the reader finds that the engine assesses a position in White’s favor, one should not be put off.
This book, the first one dedicated to the Modern Gurgenidze in many years, consists of 10 theoretical Chapters and 31 sample games. Jaan carefully explains how Black’s plans may change depending on White’s move order, when exactly we should play ...c7-c6 followed by ...d7-d5 (Chapters 1-5) and when we would be better off with ...d7-d6 and ...e7-e5 (Chapters 6-10). You will be treated to Jaan’s insights on Hippo, Dutch, English, King’s Indian and even 1.b3, all through the eyes of Gurgenidze system. – Grandmaster Alex Shabalov in his Foreword.
The Modern Gurgenidze has figured prominently in Jaan Ehlvest’s repertoire as Black for many years. He now shares his expertise and experience in this provocative defense. If you want to play for a draw, this book is not for you. But if you want to play for the full point, this counterpunching defense may be just what you are looking for.
About the Author: Jaan Ehlvest is a grandmaster from Tallinn, Estonia. He won the 1980 USSR Junior Chess Championship when he was 18 and in 1983, the European Junior Championship. He was champion of Estonia in 1986 and was a member of the gold medal-winning Soviet Union team at the 28th Chess Olympiad in Thessaloniki 1988. He played for Estonia in the Chess Olympiads of 1992-2004. This is his first book for Russell Enterprises.