Grandmaster Pal Benko is a chess legend: A challenger for the World Championship, an innovator of many modern opening systems, a problem composer par excellence, and a father figure to his close friend Bobby Fischer, Benko has played and defeated most of the top players of the last fifty years. This biography is a celebration of a great man's creative legacy. Its amazing collection of 138 deeply annotated games which have been carefully prepared to be entertaining, enlightening, and instructive is brought to life by Benko's memoirs of his early years in war-torn Hungary, a world of poverty, chaos, pain, and ultimately, personal triumph. His insights into famous grandmasters transform legends into real people with substance and personality, and his reminiscences of famous tournaments take us on a journey through chess history unlike anything that's been published before. Interviews with note players offer insights into Benko's nature. A massive survey of Benko's openings (by John Watson) shows us the scope of Benko's theoretical contributions to the game. Photos abound, and 300 of Benko's chess compositions allow lovers of the game to become intimately acquainted with a strikingly beautiful aspect of chess that most have overlooked. This highly entertaining and instructive book gives competitors who wish to improve their playing strength a dynamic, fun way to deepen their knowledge and understanding.

Grandmaster Pal Benko is the World's Greatest Authority on the Chess Endgame. Since January 1981, he has written a monthly column in Chess Life magazine entitled "Endgame Lab". This book is a collection of those columns published in the years 1981 through 1986. Grandmaster Benko needs no introduction in the world of chess. He was at one time ranked in the top eight players in the world. He has beaten Bobby Fischer three times. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, whenever Benko entered a Swiss system chess tournament, the only question was who was going to finish second, because Benko almost always won He won the US Open Championship eight times. His articles are about playing endgames. Benko writes about practical endgames that regularly come up in tournament play: Basic endgames such as how to win with rook and four pawns against rook and three pawns or how to draw if you happen to be on the weaker side. In short, Benko teaches you how YOU can score more points in regular tournament play. Benko also shows how even world champions and some of the strongest players in the world have sometimes messed up basic endgames and lost games they should have drawn or lost or drawn games they should have won.

An illuminating profile of the world champion chess player and political activist by the acclaimed author of Searching for Bobby Fischer. Over the course of his unprecedented career, Garry Kasparov dominated the chess world with astonishing creativity and explosive passion. In this unforgettable work of reportage, author Fred Waitzkin “captures better than anyone—including Kasparov himself in his own memoir—the various sides of this elusive genius” (The Observer). Waitzkin had intimate access to his subject during Kasparov’s gripping 1990 matches against his sworn enemy, Anatoly Karpov. As the world chess champion defends his title, Waitzkin analyzes the match play with verve and depth that will delight lay readers and aspiring grandmasters alike. Against this backdrop, Waitzkin assembles a fascinating portrait of a complicated man who is both a generational talent and an outspoken advocate of Russian democracy, brilliant and volcanic, tenacious and charismatic, despairing one moment and exuberant the next.

When you think of chess, you probably think of the strategy game played throughout Europe and the Americas. There is another kind of chess played throughout the world by probably more people than any other strategy game. That game is Chinese Chess. The "Elephant Game" as it is called by the Chinese, dates back more than 2000 years. A cousin of Western Chess, its unique style of play results in a wide-open, quick-moving and aggressive contest. Chinese Chess for Beginners explains both the rules and the strategies of the game clearly and in detail so that you can start playing right away. It covers everything from the opening through the endgame. The book includes a set of paper chessmen that you can cut out and begin to play right away.

"Chess gets a hold of some people, like a virus or a drug," writes Robert Desjarlais in this absorbing book. Drawing on his lifelong fascination with the game, Desjarlais guides readers into the world of twenty-first-century chess to help us understand its unique pleasures and challenges, and to advance a new "anthropology of passion." Immersing us directly in chess’s intricate culture, he interweaves small dramas, closely observed details, illuminating insights, colorful anecdotes, and unforgettable biographical sketches to elucidate the game and to reveal what goes on in the minds of experienced players when they face off over the board. Counterplay offers a compelling take on the intrigues of chess and shows how themes of play, beauty, competition, addiction, fanciful cognition, and intersubjective engagement shape the lives of those who take up this most captivating of games.