It's up to you to determine how to take the King in a given number of moves. Find Pawn, Rook and Pawn, Queen, Queen and Pawn, Bishop and Pawn, and minor piece endings to help you practice for the real thing. You'll be lured into playing games that are full of challenges, and if you're stumped, the solutions appear in the back!

Checkmate! These fun-filled brain teasers will increase your skill. Each chessboard puzzle has its pieces in a specially conceived difficult arrangement. You must complete a given task in a specific number of moves: "White to play and mate in five moves", for example. Some puzzles sharpen both your defensive and offensive acumen, and many focus on your endgame-the most important phase of chess. Solutions are in the back.

Here are 200 gripping puzzles that show players a board from a chess game in progress and call upon their game skills to capture the opponent's pieces to win it in a specified number of moves.

Contains one hundred chess positions to solve, ranging from very easy to incredibly difficult. Every puzzle is preceded by an instructive example illustrating a pattern.

Swedish chess Grandmaster Axel Smith returns with a sequel to his colossal bestseller, The Woodpecker Method, which was on the tactics of the World Champions. For The Woodpecker Method 2, he has found 1002 foundational positional exercises and prepared them for 'woodpecking' - solve the puzzles repeatedly, and boost your positional intuition. The quick explanation of the Woodpecker Method is that you need to solve a large number of puzzles in a row; then solve the same puzzles again and again, only faster. It's not a lazy shortcut to success - hard work is required. But the reward can be re-programming your unconscious mind.

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.

Join Holmes and Watson as they examine interrupted games to deduce prior moves. A series of increasingly complex chess mysteries culminates in a double murder perpetrated by Professor Moriarty. The master sleuth instructs his companion (and us) in the intricacies of retrograde analysis; readers need only a knowledge of how the pieces move.