“Know Thy Enemy” Sun Tsu, The Art of War Understanding what your opponent is planning to do or trying to accomplish is one of the core skills required to take your game to the next level. Viktor Kortchnoi once wrote, Well, if you do not check what your opponent is doing, you will end up complaining about bad luck after every game. This book consists of four chapters, all associated with the ability to think not only for yourself, but also for your opponent, to put yourself in his place. In this book, renowned author and chess trainer Mark Dvoretsky supplies the reader with high-quality material for independent training. Each chapter starts with a short theoretical section. Then dozens of exercises are given, from easy, even elementary, to difficult. Training your skills in searching for a move and calculating variations will help you at all stages of the game – which is why among the almost 500 exercises, there are opening, middlegame and endgame positions. Finally, the comments in the Solutions are quite detailed. Throughout the book, the author has tried to set forth the logic of the search for a solution, to show how a player can come to the right conclusions at the board. Recognizing Your Opponent’s Resources is virtually unique in chess literature. And Sun Tsu would surely have approved...

Find the Best Squares for Your Pieces! To a large extent, the level of any chessplayer’s skill depends on his or her ability to discover and evaluate positional operations as quickly and correctly as possible. In this book, premier chess instructor and trainer Mark Dvoretsky examines one of the most important aspects of positional skill, namely the art of playing with pieces, of maneuvering and finding the best squares for your pieces. Training your maneuvering skills will help you at every stage of the game – which is why among the exercises there are opening, middlegame and endgame positions, and not only those that are taken from practical games, but also studies. The conscientious student, carefully working his or her way through this book, will help improve positional mastery and significantly enhance overall playing skill.

This book is aimed, first of all, at helping strong players complete themselves. But even amateur players will find something of interest in it, because it is fascinating to peek, perhaps not as an owner, but at least as a guest, into the world of high-level chess, to see with ones own eyes what sort of problems chess pros have to wrestle with (successfully or not), and how far from being complete even their play is? the many exercises differ greatly from one another in their level of difficulty there are a multitude of impressive passages unusual and spectacular moves and combinations the principles, methods and rules, ideas and techniques that lie behind the moves With this, the serious student may take the knowledge and understanding of complex middlegame ideas to the next level.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Start With Why and Leaders Eat Last, a bold framework for leadership in today’s ever-changing world. How do we win a game that has no end? Finite games, like football or chess, have known players, fixed rules and a clear endpoint. The winners and losers are easily identified. Infinite games, games with no finish line, like business or politics, or life itself, have players who come and go. The rules of an infinite game are changeable while infinite games have no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers—only ahead and behind. The question is, how do we play to succeed in the game we’re in? In this revelatory new book, Simon Sinek offers a framework for leading with an infinite mindset. On one hand, none of us can resist the fleeting thrills of a promotion earned or a tournament won, yet these rewards fade quickly. In pursuit of a Just Cause, we will commit to a vision of a future world so appealing that we will build it week after week, month after month, year after year. Although we do not know the exact form this world will take, working toward it gives our work and our life meaning. Leaders who embrace an infinite mindset build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations. Ultimately, they are the ones who lead us into the future.

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From authors of Lean In and Originals: a powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. “I was in ‘the void,’” she writes, “a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.” Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build. Option B combines Sheryl’s personal insights with Adam’s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity. Beginning with the gut-wrenching moment when she finds her husband, Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym floor, Sheryl opens up her heart—and her journal—to describe the acute grief and isolation she felt in the wake of his death. But Option B goes beyond Sheryl’s loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere . . . and to rediscover joy. Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. Even after the most devastating events, it is possible to grow by finding deeper meaning and gaining greater appreciation in our lives. Option B illuminates how to help others in crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, raise strong children, and create resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead. Two weeks after losing her husband, Sheryl was preparing for a father-child activity. “I want Dave,” she cried. Her friend replied, “Option A is not available,” and then promised to help her make the most of Option B. We all live some form of Option B. This book will help us all make the most of it.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry