Win at chess with practical instruction from one of the world's leading teachers! With clever strategies for more than 5000 situations and clear diagrams, Chess is for the enthusiastic novice as well as the competitor taking the game to the next level. Chess takes you through more than 5,000 unique instructional situations, many taken from actual matches, including 306 problems for checkmate in one move, 3,412 mates in two moves, 744 mates in three moves, 144 simple endgames, and 128 tournament game combinations. Organized by problem type, each combination, or game is keyed to an easy-to-follow solution at the back of the book.. More than 6,000 illustrations make it easy to see the possibilities regardless of where your pieces are on the board. The book also includes the basic rules of the game and an international bibliography. Chess is the ultimate book on winning the game.

Combinations are the central element in chess; they make the game so magical and captivating. The beautiful point of sacrificing a queen, the strongest piece, in order to checkmate with a lowly pawn brings a smile of joy to all chess lovers. Virtually all chess games possess a combination, either one hidden in the shadows of analysis carefully avoided or one that provides a decisive blow. Winning Chess Combinations is a unique work that doesn't merely repeat the wonderfully rich and vast numbers of combinations, asking readers to solve a particular diagrammed position; it is a work that is far more realistic. A combination involves a sacrifice upsetting the balance of forces, but will it work or tragically boomerang? The reader is invited to solve this critical question by identifying the advantages that a specific position holds which might make the combination successful.

This book provides one thousand combinations from chess tournament play. It is not the typical book with positions and their solutions. Rather, it tests the actual players against the computer. Sometimes the computer finds the correct solution but not always. The reader needs to study the positions and determine for himself whether the move selected by the computer is correct or not. The reader is encouraged to make notes in the spaces provided in the back and then to come back over time and review his notes to see whether or not the solution he found is correct. The objective is to sharpen the player's tactical skills by solving representative combinations that appear in typical games. The complete solutions are not provided; only the first move. This is a unique book with a method not to be found in any other chess book.

Irving Chernev's outstanding chess books earn him a high rank among the world's top chess authors. In this well-annotated text, Mr. Chernev guides his readers to an understanding of the subtleties of combinative play. Step-by-step from the simplest combinations to the most complex, the book explains the intricacies of pins and counter-pins, Knight forks, smothered mates, and other elements of combination play. There is a discussion in chapter five of combinations lurking in roads not taken — alternate lines of play show up in Chernev's notes to the game, while the sixth chapter, "Convincing the Kibitzers," shows the second-guessers what would have happened had the masters done the obvious. (Some disastrous combinations show up here.) A host of boomerangs follow — cases where the player didn't look far enough ahead and his combination, instead of bringing about the opponent's ruin, paved the way to his defeat. Chapters eight through twenty one take up combinations used by such great players as Tarrasch, Botvinnik, Nimzovich, Steinitz, Rubinstein, and Pillsbury; the sacrificial combinations of Anderssen and Spielmann; the dazzling brilliancies of Morphy, Keres, and Alekhine; the deadly attacks of Marshall; the almost unfathomable ideas of Lasker; and the matchless creations of Capablanca. Mr. Chernev's thoughtful annotations unravel the secrets of each of these plans. A diagram accompanies each combination; an index, by player, leads the reader to the combination he is looking for.

This essential work provides modern explanations of principles, varieties, and techniques of combination maneuvers, plus the ideas behind them. Examples from the games of many great players provide illustrations. 200 diagrams.