Chess Review

'A terrific work that is particularly suited for those from beginner to club player' JOHN WATSON, The Week in Chess The fully revised and updated award-winning, bestselling, classic chess book by FIDE Master and chess world-record holder, Graham Burgess. Comprehensive and clear, this fully revised and updated fourth edition of Graham Burgess's bestselling chess classic is an invaluable guide to help any player progress to good club level and better. It provides a complete guide to the main chess openings along with hundreds of test positions for players at every level. This new edition includes: Expanded and updated sections on playing online chess and using computers. A complete and detailed guide to all the main chess openings. Hundreds of new training exercises for players of all standards. Courses in tactics, attacking strategy, combinations and endgames. Analysis of some of the greatest games ever played. Information and advice on club, national, and international tournaments. A comprehensive A-Z glossary of chess terminology. Practical advice and information for further study. New sections on endgame studies and problems, with all examples from 2020 or 2021.

Mastering Positional Chess is a serious, but entertaining chess instruction book. Daniel started writing it when he realized that his lack of positional understanding was causing him to lose many games.

A fresh, engaging look at how 32 carved pieces on a Chess board forever changed our understanding of war, art, science, and the human brain. Chess is the most enduring and universal game in history. Here, bestselling author David Shenk chronicles its intriguing saga, from ancient Persia to medieval Europe to the dens of Benjamin Franklin and Norman Schwarzkopf. Along the way, he examines a single legendary game that took place in London in 1851 between two masters of the time, and relays his own attempts to become as skilled as his Polish ancestor Samuel Rosenthal, a nineteenth-century champion. With its blend of cultural history and Shenk’s lively personal narrative, The Immortal Game is a compelling guide for novices and aficionados alike.

Learning how to play chess involves more than just knowing how to move the pieces. Chess 101 is a chess book for beginners that provides comprehensive chess training about everything a new player needs to know.This beginner chess book covers the following topics: Types of boards and piecesHow to set up the boardThe value of the piecesHow the pieces move, including castling and en passant How to write chess notationThe three phases of the game of chessHow to study chessWhat a chess rating is and how to get oneChess clock rulesAn overview of faster chess gamesThe mechanics of a tournamentRules and etiquetteTips to winning chess Chess 101 also contains over two dozen exhibits designed to help you learn to play chess with ease!

62 brilliant games involving the best players in the world, with notes by one of the top annotators. Igor Stohl has selected 62 outstanding games from recent years and analysed them in painstaking depth. Here he presents his findings to chess enthusiasts, who will find the games entertaining and the annotations both instructive and illuminating. Stohl is an outstanding theoretical expert, so the opening phase of each game reads like a lesson in the key strategic aspects of the opening chosen, with a critical survey of modern trends. The middlegame is dissected and the critical decisions subjected to keen scrutiny - we are invited inside Stohl's laboratory to join him in the quest for the truth. The endgame phase, if reached, is handled with similar erudition, with insights into the grandmaster's approach to questions of technique. Following each game there is a discussion of the most important lessons to be learned. The expanded and revised new edition of this award-winning work features 12 new top-level games from the period 2000-2007 annotated in great depth - about 40% new material. There are also corrections to the existing notes and a revised Introduction.

Classic introduction offers superb coverage of all aspects, especially Middle Game, combination play. Hundreds of games analyzed. Over 340 diagrams.

A surprising, charming, and ever-fascinating history of the seemingly simple game that has had a profound effect on societies the world over. Why has one game, alone among the thousands of games invented and played throughout human history, not only survived but thrived within every culture it has touched? What is it about its thirty-two figurative pieces, moving about its sixty-four black and white squares according to very simple rules, that has captivated people for nearly 1,500 years? Why has it driven some of its greatest players into paranoia and madness, and yet is hailed as a remarkably powerful intellectual tool? Nearly everyone has played chess at some point in their lives. Its rules and pieces have served as a metaphor for society, influencing military strategy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and literature and the arts. It has been condemned as the devil’s game by popes, rabbis, and imams, and lauded as a guide to proper living by other popes, rabbis, and imams. Marcel Duchamp was so absorbed in the game that he ignored his wife on their honeymoon. Caliph Muhammad al-Amin lost his throne (and his head) trying to checkmate a courtier. Ben Franklin used the game as a cover for secret diplomacy.In his wide-ranging and ever-fascinating examination of chess, David Shenk gleefully unearths the hidden history of a game that seems so simple yet contains infinity. From its invention somewhere in India around 500 A.D., to its enthusiastic adoption by the Persians and its spread by Islamic warriors, to its remarkable use as a moral guide in the Middle Ages and its political utility in the Enlightenment, to its crucial importance in the birth of cognitive science and its key role in the aesthetic of modernism in twentieth-century art, to its twenty-first-century importance in the development of artificial intelligence and use as a teaching tool in inner-city America, chess has been a remarkably omnipresent factor in the development of civilization. Indeed, as Shenk shows, some neuroscientists believe that playing chess may actually alter the structure of the brain, that it may be for individuals what it has been for civilization: a virus that makes us smarter.

'When most people learn to play chess, they usually memorise the movements of the pieces and then spend years pummelling away at each other with little rhyme and even less reason. Though I will show you how each piece leaps around, what it likes to do