If you want to improve your middlegame play, you will have to develop a FEEL for positions. That's what Boris Zlotnik has been stressing during his long and rich trainer's career. Clicking through concrete variations (a popular pastime in the computer era) is not enough. To guide your thinking during a game you should be able to fall back on a reservoir of typical ideas and methods. That is exactly what this book offers you: Zlotnik's legendary study material about the middlegame, modernized, greatly extended and published in the English language for the first time. As you familiarize yourself with the most important strategic ideas and manoeuvres, you will need less time to discover the clues in typical middlegame positions. You will find it so much easier to steer your game in the right direction after the opening has ended. Zlotnik's Middlegame Manual is accessible to a wide range of post-beginners and club players. It is your passport to a body of instructive material of unparalleled quality, collected during a lifetime of training and coaching chess. A collection of exercises, carefully chosen and didactically tuned, will help you drill what you have learned.

Opening, middlegame and endgame are the three universally recognized stages of a game of chess, but what about the art of preparation? Winning starts with planning before the game, teaches legendary chess trainer Vladimir Tukmakov in this enlightening and entertaining work on a neglected subject. Exploring and understanding, prior to the game, the strengths and weaknesses of your next opponent and being aware of your own strong points and shortcomings, are a key to success. Tukmakov describes how planning has become a systematic process, how methodical preparation works, and which critical steps you have to take. The role of the computer in preparing for a game has grown tremendously, and Modern Chess Preparation explains how it is used by top players to get organized for success. But you will also learn the limitations on the use of chess engines and databases and how disastrous it can be to overly respect them and rely on them. A separate chapter is devoted on how to prepare for all-important games, games that will decide a tournament, a match or a even an entire career. Modern Chess Preparation is about more than just opening preparation. It also teaches you how to immerse yourself in order to find the best approach to the game. With powerful anecdotes and many instructive high-level games, Tukmakov explains how, as a competitive chess player, you can organize your homework, focus your efforts, and arrive at a viable game plan. Vladimir Tukmakov is a chess grandmaster and a former national champion of Ukraine. In his active career he won many tournaments as well as gold medals in international team competitions. He is universally acknowledged as an outstanding chess trainer and coach. ,

Russia boasts a long and rich tradition in chess education, and Russian chess teachers and trainers are simply the best in the world. The Complete Manual of Positional Chess, probably the most thorough grounding in the history of teaching chess, was recently created for chess teachers at the DYSS, the special sports school for young talents in Moscow. Konstantin Sakaev and Konstantin Landa present a complete set of instructions and tips for trainers and self-improvers. You will learn not only how to enhance your fundamental knowledge and technical skills, but also how to work on your physical and psychological conditioning. In VOLUME 2 you are again handed basic and advanced tools to improve in a wide array of areas: assessing and handling pawn structures, employing positional and tactical means to improve your position, identifying weak spots, mastering attacking dynamics and more. If you complete Sakaev and Landa’s course you will be able to assess virtually any chess position you are confronted with. With its all-encompassing approach this ground-breaking book allows everyone to reap the fruits of the long tradition of instructive excellence in Russia.

Grandmaster Alexander Panchenko (1953-2009) was one of the most successful chess trainers in the Soviet Union, and later in Russia. Panchenko ran a legendary chess school that specialised in turning promising players into masters. The secret of his success were his dedication and enthusiasm as a teacher combined with his outstanding training materials. ‘Pancha’ provided his pupils with systematic knowledge, deep understanding and the ability to take practical decisions. Now, Panchenko’s classic Mastering Chess Middlegames is for the first time available in translation, giving club-players around the world access to this unique training method. The book contains a collection of inspiring lessons on the most important middlegame topics: attack, defence, counterplay, realising the advantage, obstructing the plans of your opponent, the battle of the heavy pieces, and much more. In each chapter, Panchenko clearly identifies the various aspects of the topic, formulates easy-to-grasp rules, presents a large number of well-chosen examples and ends with a wealth of practical tests. The brilliance of Alexander Panchenko’s didactic method shines through in this book. It is hard to give better advice for ambitious chess players than to follow this tried-and-tested and highly instructive road towards mastering the chess middlegame.

‘How can I learn from AlphaZero’s games, aren’t they too advanced for me?’ many club players asked Matthew Sadler after reading his and Natasha Regan’s groundbreaking Game Changer. Here is the answer: you may not be able to replicate their dazzling deep calculations, but every chess player, from club level up, can improve their game by using engines. You will probably be surprised, there is so much more your engine can do for you than just checking and calculating variations! In this thought-provoking new book, based on many years of working with the world’s best chess software, Sadler presents a unique set of methods to work out using your engine. He shows how in your opening preparation, instead of sifting through masses of computer analysis you should play matches against your engine. He also explains how to train your early middlegame play, the conversion of advantages, your positional play, and your defence. And of course: how to analyse your own games. These generic training methods Sadler supplements with concrete middlegame and opening tools. He explains how the top engines tackle crucial middlegame themes such as entrenched pieces, whole board play, ‘attacking rhythm’, exchanging pieces, the march of the Rook’s pawn, queen versus pieces, and many others. He also opens your eyes to typical scenarios that the engines found and fine-tuned in popular openings such as the King’s Indian, the Grünfeld, the Slav, the French and the Sicilian. Sadler illustrates his lessons with a collection of fantastic games, explained with his trademark enthusiasm. For the first time the superhuman powers of the chess engine have been decoded to the benefit of all players, in a rich and highly instructive book.

When should we exchange a piece in the endgame and when should we keep it? Why is it so important? How to make a right choice? Different types of endings and guidance on how to make the correct decision were the subject of my book The Correct Exchange in the Endgame. Two editions were very well accepted by chess players of different levels. I am especially happy that many chess coaches and teachers found it useful for their training programs. The book was announced as a silver winner of the Boleslavsky Award 2016 by the FIDE Trainer's Commission. Many readers and coaches expressed a wish to see more instructive exercises, so together with Thinkers Publishing we decided to make an exercise book. It can be widely used by chess teachers in schools, coaches in chess clubs and all chess players. Trying to solve 120 instructive exercises and then going through the correct solutions, you will certainly improve your decision-making ability and analyzing skills, as well as enrich your knowledge and understanding of the final stage of the chess game.

Chess is 99% tactics. This celebrated observation is not only true for beginners, but also for club players (Elo 1500 – 2000). If you want to win more games, nothing works better than training your combination skills. There are two types of books on tactics: those that introduce the concepts followed by some examples, and workbooks that contain lots of exercises. FIDE Master Frank Erwich has done both: he explains all key tactical ideas AND provides an enormous amount of exercises for each different theme. Erwich has created a complete tactics book for ambitious club and tournament players. He teaches you how to reach the next level of identifying weak spots in the position of your opponent, recognizing patterns of combinations, visualizing tricks and calculating effectively. Erwich has also included a new and important element: tests that will improve your defensive skills. 1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players is not a collection of freewheeling puzzles. It serves as a course text book, because only the most didactically productive exercises are featured. Every chapter starts with easy examples, but no worries: the level of difficulty will steadily increase.