Meet the characters that make up a chess army and learn how to fight your first battle in this friendly introduction to the game. My First Chess Book is written clearly and simply, with entertaining examples, making it the perfect starting point for young children - and a handy refresher guide for parents and grandparents! Entertaining illustrations by The Boy Fitz Hammond bring the explanations to life. With expert advice from Sarah Hegarty, former British women's chess champion and director of the world's biggest chess competition, the UK Schools Chess Challenge. Includes fun games and puzzles.

Every chess player needs to decide which openings he is going to play. But where do you start? The risk of drowning in the turbulent sea of opening theory is only too real for beginning amateurs. Often your goals and ambitions will be misguided. Trying to win in 20 moves, copying what's in fashion among top-GM's or memorizing variations are a waste of time. Most likely you will never play your ‘preparation' or end up by jumping from one opening to the other. Experienced French chess trainer Vincent Moret provides a complete, ready-to-go chess opening repertoire for White with a sound set of lines that do not outdate rapidly, do not require memorization and are easy to digest for beginning players and other amateurs. In this complete and user-friendly guide, Moret has selected relatively aggressive variations that will enhance your tactical vision. To show the typical plans and demonstrate underlying ideas and key motifs, Moret not only selected games of Grandmasters. For instructional purposes, he also uses games of young players to highlight the errors they tend to make.

Meet the characters that make up a chess army and learn how to fight your first battle in this friendly introduction to the game. My First Chess Book is written clearly and simply, with entertaining examples, making it the perfect starting point for young children - and a handy refresher guide for parents and grandparents!

Boris Zlotnik is an extraordinary trainer and coach. He was the director of a legendary chess school in Moscow before he emigrated to Spain in 1993. Ten years later, the super talent Fabiano Caruana moved to Madrid with his entire family to live near his trainer Zlotnik. As a former coach of U.S. Champion Caruana, Zlotnik knows how top players work on their chess improvement. And his experience with club players allows him to translate that understanding into practical lessons for amateurs about highly original subjects like creativity or 'putting up resistance' - topics seldom touched on in other chess manuals. Zlotnik covers a wide variety of topics and uses a wealth of material. Readers will love this new book, as they did his first book, Zlotnik's Middlegame Manual. 'A brilliant, important and extraordinarily instructive book', said Florian Jacobs, the book reviewer for the Max Euwe Center in Amsterdam. 'This is how probing, rich and motivating studying chess can be.'

Henry Thomas Buckle, son of Thomas Henry Buckle and Jane Middleton, was born November 24, 1821.