The History of Chess in 50 Moves tells the 1,500-year story of chess in fifty selections. The fifty people, places, or things all make fascinating stand-alone stories that can be read individually, but taken together they give the reader a sense of how chess has changed, adapted, and thrived down through the centuries. The story begins in the East and follows the movement of chess along the silk trade routes as comes to the West via Persia. From there it spreads to Africa, Russia, and Europe, where it takes the form that is familiar to us today. The greatest players, matches and tournaments of all time get their moments in the sun, but equally important are the bigger trends and patterns, from the evolution of different playing styles to the emergence of computer technology. Chess has a rich history, and The History of Chess in 50 Moves reflects this with a rich selection of historical illustrations and photographs. Specially drawn diagrams also appear throughout to help specific moves come to life.

Mastering Positional Chess is a serious, but entertaining chess instruction book. Daniel started writing it when he realized that his lack of positional understanding was causing him to lose many games.

Garry Kasparov was the highest-rated chess player in the world for over twenty years and is widely considered the greatest player that ever lived. In How Life Imitates Chess Kasparov distills the lessons he learned over a lifetime as a Grandmaster to offer a primer on successful decision-making: how to evaluate opportunities, anticipate the future, devise winning strategies. He relates in a lively, original way all the fundamentals, from the nuts and bolts of strategy, evaluation, and preparation to the subtler, more human arts of developing a personal style and using memory, intuition, imagination and even fantasy. Kasparov takes us through the great matches of his career, including legendary duels against both man (Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov) and machine (IBM chess supercomputer Deep Blue), enhancing the lessons of his many experiences with examples from politics, literature, sports and military history. With candor, wisdom, and humor, Kasparov recounts his victories and his blunders, both from his years as a world-class competitor as well as his new life as a political leader in Russia. An inspiring book that combines unique strategic insight with personal memoir, How Life Imitates Chess is a glimpse inside the mind of one of today's greatest and most innovative thinkers.

Charles Hertan, an experienced chess coach from Massachusetts, has made an astonishing discovery: the failure to consider key winning moves is often due to human bias, since your brain tends to disregard many winning moves because they are counter-intuitive or look unnatural. Charles Hertan?s radically different approach is: use COMPUTER EYES and always look for the most forcing move first! By studying forcing sequences according to Hertan?s method you will develop analytical precision, improve your tactical vision, overcome human bias and staleness, and enjoy the calculation of difficult positions. By recognizing moves that matter, you will win more games!

Explains all legal chess moves, and discusses the regulations governing tournaments, lifetime rankings, and tournament director certification.

This is an updated and largely expanded edition of the highly acclaimed Starting Out: The Sicilian. John Emms goes back to basics, studying the fundamental principles of the Sicilian and its many variations.

The chess playing mind does not work like a machine. Selecting a move results from rather chaotic thought processes and is not the logical outcome of applying a rational method. The only problem with that, says International Master Willy Hendriks, is that most books and courses on improving at chess claim exactly the opposite. The dogma of the chess instruction establishment is that if you only take a good look at certain ‘characteristics’ of a position, then good moves will follow more or less automatically. But this is not how it happens. Chess players, weak and strong, don’t first judge the position, then formulate a plan and afterwards look at moves. It all happens at the same time, and pretending that it is otherwise is counterproductive. There is no use in forcing your students to mentally jump through theoretical hoops, according to experienced chess coach Hendriks. This work shows a healthy distrust of accepted methods to get better at chess. It teaches that winning games does not depend on ticking off a to-do list when looking at a position on the board. It presents club and internet chess players with loads of much-needed no-nonsense training material. In this provocative, entertaining and highly instructive book, Hendriks shows how you can travel light on the road to chess improvement! ,