Chosen as the pawn of one of the mysterious Grand Masters, young empath Violet Hunter dreams of exploring strange planets. The portal web that connects civilized planets is fraying as the portals fail one by one. A Grand Master, instead of promoting civilization, may be destroying the portals in a grab for supreme power. Violet seeks the culprits during her missions as a pawn, risking the discovery of her illegal psychic talent. Violet's Grand Master, whose avatar is a griffin, sends her on missions to exotic planets: the ice planet of Erebus, the fiery dragon world of Sythos and a terraformed planet inhabited by barbaric humans. Each mission gives her new clues about the Grand Masters. Pursued by hostile aliens on her fourth mission, she meets the Griffin and plunges into an impossible love and a world of vicious conflicts. She must learn to control her powers and recruit allies to survive.

Mauricio Flores Rios provides an in-depth study of the 28 most common structures in chess practice. In Chess Structures - A Grandmaster Guide you will find:*Carefully selected model games showing each structure's main plans and ideas*Strategic patterns to observe and typical pitfalls to avoid*50 positional exercises with detailed solutionsGM Axel Bachmann from the Foreword:"Chess Structures - A Grandmaster Guide is an excellent selection of model games. By studying the 140 games and fragments in this book, the reader will learn many of the most important plans, patterns and ideas in chess."

One young woman challenges the secret rulers of the galaxy and finds an impossible love. Violet dreams of exploring exotic planets as a Grand Master’s pawn. Life-threatening cracks appear in the teleportal web and Violet is tasked with investigating the disruption. Suspicions point to the twelve Grand Masters, and she must penetrate their curtain of secrecy to identify the culprit. Her challenges escalate when she meets the enigmatic man behind the griffin avatar. Armed with only her erratic powers and a mishmash of allies, she must challenge the most powerful beings in the galaxy.

The correct use of the pawns is one of the most difficult aspects of chess strategy, but GM Sam Shankland breaks down the principles of Pawn Play to basic, easily understandable guidelines every chess player should know. He starts with extremely simple examples, but then lifts the level, showing how grandmasters could have made better decisions by using the book's guidelines.

This is a well-established training manual which encourages the average player to understand how a grandmaster thinks, and even more important, how he works. Kotov tackles fundamental issues such as knowing how and when to analyze, the tree of analysis, a selection of candidate moves and the factors of success.

Are you bored with playing it safe in the opening? Had enough of developing your pieces sensibly, aiming to control the centre and getting your king castled? Do you yearn to tear the opposition apart in the style of the great 19th century masters? Then Grandmaster Gambits 1 e4 is the book for you! The highly successful writing duo of Richard Palliser and Simon (GingerGM) Williams have teamed up again to create a repertoire based on jettisoning a pawn (and often a whole lot more) very early on. Whatever opening your opponent favours against 1 e4, the authors have a dynamic gambiteering counter which will throw them onto their own resources. The Sicilian Defence? Attack it with the Wing Gambit. 1...e5? Tear Black apart with the Max Lange Attack. The French? Suffocate Black with the Advance Variation including Magnus Carlsen’s souped-up version of the Milner-Barry Gambit. The Caro-Kann? Play the Hillbilly Attack with 2 Bc4! Your opponent might laugh but they won’t be laughing when you crash through on f7. Forget about playing “properly” in the opening. Open 1 e4, play the Grandmaster Gambits and rip your unprepared opponents apart!

Chess owes its strategic depth to pawns, which take many roles in the chess struggle. In this text, an experienced grandmaster explores the pawn's multi-facted nature, and provides the reader with a range of pawn-play concepts.