The Royal Chess Couple is a combined attempt to introduce the various traits of the most significant piece with the most powerful piece on the chessboard. Following a short historic review of the development and metamorphoses of each piece over time, the reader is offered 240 positions (480 in total) from tournament practice as well as from the magic world of chess composition. In each position a royal piece plays either a crucial offensive or defensive role. These positions are subdivided into 60 themes, four positions per theme, arranged by their increasing difficulty. The reader may use the positions as training challenges to improve his understanding and playing skills or just to enjoy playing through them. In either case he will learn to appreciate the characteristic qualities of each piece alone and in collaboration with other pieces.
I am not seeking glory with this book, but I certainly had to have a book in tactics! That’s the main idea of the book; to be a companion for trainers and players who seek improvement — simple but effective! The names of the mates are not important. What’s crucial is understanding and subconsciously memorising these patterns in order to recognise when they’re about to occur in a player’s own games. These mating patterns are not confined to chess problems and puzzles. As will be shown, they occur in the games of Grandmasters and even World Champions, past and present! They belong to everybody’s games, even beginners’! Each mate’s theoretical pattern is presented as a diagram, with constructed examples and actual games. It is suggested that students set-up and play through these mates from the losers’ viewpoint as well. Most difficult of all is recognising patterns when they occur horizontally (i.e., rotated 90 degrees) from the normal orientation. The key to each pattern is the status of the squares surrounding the king: which ones are obstructed, which are potential flight squares that can be controlled with the available pieces. Players are advised to know these patterns forwards, backwards and upside down!
This book invites the reader to enter the wonderful elite chess world with one of the most creative GM’s of all time. It tells about his approach to the core of fighting, about his strongest points but also about his weaknesses. It presents real masterpieces and hurtful losses.
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.
A new collection of puzzles carefully selected by two experienced trainers.
I realize that this book will not cover all open wounds, nevertheless my aim to write a manual about defense which can help us defenders enduring the hardest difficulties in practice, seems to be achieved. Personally speaking this book helped me as a defender to approach a worse position in a much more objective way, optimally use all of my defensive resources available, both psychologically and technically, to set – even under the most dire circumstances – pitfalls, while keeping my nerves under control.
This book is about the practical approach to the game of chess. It shaped me as a player and now I would like to share my philosophy with you. My objective is to combat several generally accepted misconceptions, such as a) only studying opening theory will make you a better player, b) one should always follow the first or second line shown by Komodo or Stockfish, and finally, c) that “in theory” is equivalent to “over the board”. The last fallacy is especially dangerous because it implies that players will keep on making the best moves over the board, and therefore sidelines should never be played as the opponent will always find a way to retain and convert the advantage. That is in theory. In practice, however, many players will feel like fish out of water once they end up in a position that is objectively better for them but one that they have never analyzed. Overall, based on my experience as a chess professional, I strongly believe that the above-mentioned fallacies do not hold true empirically, The book is divided into four parts. Part I covers sidelines in the mainstream openings where I take a major opening and analyze one or several sidelines. This is the most theoretical part of the book, where I share a significant amount of original thoughts and analyses that constitute my opening repertoire. Part II discusses the concept that I refer to as systems. It still involves theory, but less so in comparison to Part I. What I am trying to convey in this part is the “schematic thinking” – where you think in terms of plans and typical ideas. Part III takes one step further in abstraction – it analyzes notable modern games where one player showed ambition early on in the game and it worked out well for him. Part IV covers the so-called “early surprises” where early on in the game a player implemented a move that shocked his opponent.