In his prime, in the 1970-s and 80-s, legendary Swedish chess grandmaster Ulf Andersson was a Top 10 player with a distinct, immediately recognizable style. He almost never lost a game and kept scoring wins from quiet positions. Quiet positons? Acclaimed chess author Cyrus Lakdawala has played Andersson’s lines for decades and explains that those positions only LOOK quiet. Ulf Andersson, who understood the subtleties of strategic chess better than almost anyone else, always detected and exploited hidden opportunities. As Andersson’s openings tend to glide into the middlegame and often into the endgame, How Ulf Beats Black is much more than just a chess opening manual. Lakdawala’s lucid explanations offer a practical guide to positional technique that will improve your endgame skills as well. On top of that it is also a games collection of a great but often misunderstood chess player. This repertoire is not based on forcing variations but on understanding the underlying principles and techniques. As a result your opponent will not be able to surprise you because you forgot to check recent novelties. The final chapter ‘What did Ulf play?’ presents exercises to test your understanding.

What Amateurs Can Learn from Ulf Andersson's Positional Masterpieces One of the most effective ways to improve your chess is to take a world class-player as your example. By collecting his games, studying his choices and examining his style, you will understand what made him rise to the very top. This is what Guido Kern and Jurgen Kaufeld have done with Swedish chess legend Ulf Andersson, a positional genius with a crystal-clear style, who rose to the number 4 spot of the FIDE world rankings. Kaufeld and Kern have selected 80 of Andersson’s games and grouped them into 15 thematic strategy lessons, pinpointing exactly how the Swede made the difference in each case. Their instructive verbal explanations will improve your strategic skills and your positional feeling. Every chess player knows how difficult it can be to convert an advantage into a win. Positional technique is what you need and Grandmaster Chess Strategy teaches you exactly that. Throughout the book the authors have selected dozens of test positions at particularly instructive stages of the games.

When was the last time you won a perfect game? A game that wasn’t tainted by inferior moves? Every chess player knows that smooth wins are the exception, that play is often chaotic and positions are frequently irrational. The road to victory is generally full of bumps and misadventures. Welcome to the world of imperfection! Chess books usually feature superbly played games, in Winning Ugly in Chess you will see games where weird moves are being rewarded. Cyrus Lakdawala knows that playing good chess is all very well, but that beating your opponent is better. He demonstrates the fine art of winning undeserved victories by miraculously surviving chaos, vile cheapos, refusing to resign in a lost position, lucky breaks, provoking unforced errors, improbable comebacks and other ways to land on your feet after a roller-coaster ride. Lakdawala shows how you can make sure that it is your opponent, not you, who makes the last blunder. If you’d rather win a bad game than lose a good one, then this your ideal guide. The next time ‘the wrong player’ wins, you will be that player!

A winning streak in chess, says Cyrus Lakdawala, is a lot more than just the sum of its games. In this book he examines what it means when everything clicks, when champions become unstoppable and demolish opponents. What does it mean to be ‘in the zone’? What causes these sweeps, what sparks them and what keeps them going? And why did they come to an end? Lakdawala takes you on a trip through chess history looking at peak performances of some of the greatest players who ever lived: Morphy, Steinitz, Pillsbury, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Fischer, Tal, Kasparov, Karpov, Caruana and Carlsen. They all had very different playing styles, yet at a certain point in their rich careers they all entered the zone and simply wiped out the best players in the world. In the Zone explains the games of the greatest players during their greatest triumphs. As you study and enjoy these immortal performances you will improve your ability to overpower your opponents. You will understand how great moves originate and you will be inspired to become more productive and creative. In the Zone may bring you closer to that special place yourself: the zone.

Magnus Carlsen is arguably the strongest player of all time. His dominance is such that every loss comes as a shock. They remind us that even he has his weak moments. In fact, identifying the root causes of his losses holds valuable lessons for all players. Cyrus Lakdawala’s search starts with a series of Magnus wins and draws to give the reader a feel for how incredibly difficult it is to beat him. The World Champion’s arsenal is awesome: a superlative ability to concentrate and calculate, near-perfect intuition, probably the best endgame technique ever, a wide and creative opening repertoire, a willingness to unbalance the position almost anytime, and last but not least: his unparalleled will to win. How to Beat Magnus Carlsen has a thematic structure, which, together with Lakdawala’s uniquely accessible style, makes its lessons easy to digest. Sometimes even Magnus gets outplayed, sometimes he over-presses and goes over the cliff’s edge, and sometimes he fails to find the correct plan. And yes, even Magnus Carlsen commits straightforward blunders. Lakdawala explains the how and the why. This fascinating collection includes the game that put an end to the longest non-losing streak in classical games in chess history. It lasted more than two years and 125(!) games, and ended when Jan-Krzysztof Duda beat Magnus Carlsen at the Altibox tournament in Stavanger on October 10, 2020. It’s wonderful to have a World Champion who is not just incredibly strong but who is also happy to experiment and take risks. That’s what makes Magnus Carlsen such a fascinating chess player. And that’s why he is the hero of this book. There is no doubt that Carlsen has examined all his losses under a microscope. If he benefits from this process, then so will we.

A fun & tricky ambush weapon for Black against 1.e4? In this book, the authors cover the exciting 1.e4 g6 2.d4 Nf6!? which players like Magnus Carlsen, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Richard Rapport, and other strong players have used with powerful effect to drag White players out of their comfort zones into Black's domain. The authors are pulling games from many resources, including their own experiments with the opening to illustrate how it is possible to beat titled players right out of the opening by shocking White's system and beliefs.

In this book, the authors aim to assist the reader in becoming better at finding combinations, constructing plans, and calculating long, forcing variations. For the purpose of instruction, the material is based on the output of former World Champion Vassily Smyslov (1921-2010), using his endgame compositions from various works and publications as well as several of his practical endgames from games from tournaments and matches throughout his career against players such as Mikhail Botvinnik, Paul Keres, Bent Larsen, Efim Geller, Tigran Petrosian, and several other world-class players