Hikaru is a five-time US chess champion, ranked as high as second in the world with a stratospheric peak rating of 2816, the 10th highest of all time. He is also a top chess streamer with over a million followers across social media, consistently on the list of the five wealthiest gamers in the world. Nakamura has represented the US in 5 Olympiads, earning a team Gold and two Bronze medals.

Who is the greatest chess player of all time, the GOAT? Who is in the top ten? Let the debate ensue!

How do you measure greatness? Is Morphy "greater" than Carlsen? Can such judgements be made, and do they mean anything?

Every chess player faces an opening dilemma: big main lines are complicated and time-consuming to learn, while easy-to-learn sidelines usually suffer from other defects. Finding the best of both worlds has been an impossible dream – until now!

Magic Chess Moves is a book that will enthral you while also testing and improving your chess abilities. You will be invited to solve a collection of exercise positions, but the accompanying text contains far more than simply the solutions. The author offers his reflections on all manner of other fascinating topics, such as how tactics can be coached, and details of the composer’s life story.

Many players approach the opening with a desire to learn sharp lines and out-prepare their opponents. This is an exhausting task, which gets more difficult by the day. However, there is a different strategy which is more practical and designed for longevity. This is to develop an advanced understanding of typical positions. Such a policy is the best approach against different move orders and new ideas.

M Richard Palliser outlines a combative Trompowsky (1. d4 Nf6 2. Bg5) repertoire for White. The lines analysed deal with all of Black’s common responses. A perennial favourite of creative players, the ‘Tromp’ sets Black complex problems from the very beginning.

This opening manual completes the Black repertoire against the Sicilian that uses the Kalashnikov as the main line. When possible, Black will opt for the adventurous moves 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 e5, covered in the book King’s Kalashnikov. But everyone playing 1... c5 has to be ready when White chooses to avoid the Open Sicilian.

The Center Game is a wonderful opening for club players. White starts with a center push, develops quickly, looks for opposite castling, and launches an attack. The setup will feel very familiar to you in no time. And the chess engines show that this opening is both sound and correct, and at least as good as the over-analyzed Ruy Lopez and Italian Opening.

Rook endgames are the most frequently occurring endgames, as well as one of the most exciting and challenging areas of chess. In 2023, Quality Chess published Theoretical Rook Endgames by GM Sam Shankland and its sister volume Conceptual Rook Endgames by GM Jacob Aagaard – a dazzling dyad of domination in endgame literature.

This book advocates the 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 d5 move order for Black with 3.Nc3 Bb4 having been covered in the sister volume Playing the Nimzo-Indian. By waiting for the knight to appear on f3 before transposing to a Queen’s Gambit, Black reduces White’s options.

Spanish GM Renier Castellanos completes his cutting-edge repertoire for Black against 1.d4, with the Vienna Variation (4.Nc3 dxc4) and Catalan (4.g3 dxc4) the biggest topics. This book also provides thorough guidance against all of White’s significant alternatives on moves 2-4.

With thoughtful explanations backed up by precise analysis, Beating the Queen’s Gambit Indian Style! provides everything you need to handle 1.d4 Nf6 variations where White avoids the Nimzo-Indian Defence.

Introduction

Dear chess friends, the collection of exercises in your hands has the main objective of providing you with ample material for practicing evaluation, calculation and overall decision-making in tactically rich positions. The book contains 500 of the most instructive examples from the games played during 2023 in tournaments around the world.

Paul Morphy might well be the most brilliant and enigmatic chess champion of all time. He burst onto the scene in 1857 as a 20-year-old and dominated the chess world for two short years, convincingly defeating all the strongest players. After conquering the European chess scene, Morphy was universally recognised as the greatest player of all time. But at the age of 22 he suddenly and permanently retired from serious competition.

PRACTICAL CHESS TUTOR - FROM BASIC TO MASTERY 2 is a complete manual of chess strategy for club players, with some introductory tactical themes at the very end of the book. All the crucial elements of strategy are examined in great detail by examining the most instructive classical and modern games (100 games in total).

A foolproof guide to choosing your best next chess move, every time.

International Grandmaster Andrew Soltis brings you a foolproof guide to choosing your best next chess move, every time.

500 hand-picked training exercises with detailed solutions.

Why not just to have a simple puzzle book where you are supposed to find best move in each position? Every single position is picked carefully and this method will help you develop different strategic concepts and patterns. There are no chapters or indicative names or comments to help you find solution more easily. Just positions. ”Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication“ - Leonardo da Vinci.

In Chess Survivor – The Last of the Greats a chess legend shares his life story and annotates his best games.

– Mastering Strategies for Winning Concepts – 

Think Like Ivanchuk is a celebration of a true chess genius. This book is a collection of Vasyl Ivanchuk's best games, a chess biography and a highly entertaining training manual all in one.

Although Jose Raul Capablanca was the World Chess Champion a century ago, his games remain among the most interesting to study. The clear logic and simplicity of his moves inspired other great players such as Mikhail Botvinnik and Bobby Fischer. And the clarity of his play will boost the confidence of any chess student. It all seems so easy when you read the explanations, says a student in a comment on Chessable, so much so that you really believe you can play like Capablanca.

Presents 320 pages of the very best in chess:

Velickovic - Editor's Corner

Speelman - Real-Time Action and British Miscellany

Perunovic - Serbian Chess Championship

Afek - Dutch Chess Championships

Kotronias - Najdorf Variation - 6. h3 e6! Repertoire for Black

Prusikin - Michael's Musings

Perelshteyn - Sicilian Dragondorf

Sprenger - Obstructing the Opponent's Plan

Edwards - Correspondence Chess Matters

Gonen - World of Correspondence Chess

Rogers - Candidates Semifinal Matches, London 1983

Griffin - From the Chess Informant Archives

Traditional sections: 287 games and fragments, combinations, endings, Tournament reviews, the best game and the most important theoretical novelty from the preceding volume.

The periodical that pros use with pleasure is at the same time a must have publication for all serious chess students!

In My First Chess Opening Repertoire you will learn how to play the opening. This book gives you a compact and easy-to-learn repertoire for White, starting with the move 1.e4. And it gives you a similar repertoire for Black, with answers to all of White's approaches.

Perhaps the greatest beauty in chess can be found in endgame studies. Delightful twists and turns on the board are combined into true works of art. In studies, chess is distilled into its purest form, with all pieces making only the most essential moves. Endgame studies are also useful exercises for practical chess players, as they show patterns, improve calculation, and inspire out-of-the-box thinking.

"The motif is the effect that a chess piece has towards another (own or opposing) piece, or square" so is the definition by the author in the introduction chapter.

According to Meszaros, motifs fall into two categories: basic or combinational. The elements of both groups can be simple or complex, depending on the number of their components.

Concepts like Potential Attack, Undefended piece or square, X-Ray, Blockade are explained with illustrative examples. 

It is not the quality of your best moves that wins you games; it is the quality of your worst moves. The quickest way to improve your chess skills is to raise the bar.

The book proposes a White repertoire against all variants of the Dutch in the spirit of the London System with 1.d4 f5 2.Bf4.

Georgiev also covers the tricky move orders 1.d4 e6 2.Nf3 f5 3.Bf4, 1.c4 e6 2.d4 f5 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 Be7 (4...Bb4 5.Bd2) 5.Bf4, 1.d4 d6 2.Nf3 f5 3.Bf4 to offer a complete repertoire with Bf4.

This workbook offers over five hundred carefully selected exercises to accompany the book 100 Tactical Patterns You Must Know.

Chess is 99% tactics. A tactical pattern is all about immediate threats that produce immediate results. Learning the 100 Tactical Patterns You Must Know will dramatically improve your performance.

We all have an intuitive feeling of the stress, pressure and frustration on the path to winning a World Championship in sport, but rarely will you get as unfiltered and raw an insight into the struggle to succeed as in The Mental Game.

Have you ever admired an amazing game of chess, simultaneously thinking “I could never play like that”? In Tiger’s Chaos Theory, you will find a different perspective, treating extraordinary play and creativity as a learnable skill. Thinking outside the box is a stock phrase of the commentators; champions expand their box.

The Nimzo-Indian Defence is an ideal weapon for Black at all levels. It has been popular for over a century due to its positional soundness, yet has experienced a revolution in recent years, with modern analysis increasingly highlighting its dynamic potential.

Lessons, motivation and coaching to make you a better chess player.

In an ideal world, any aspiring chess player, at almost any level, would get better with a coach. If that’s not possible, having chess champion coach Thomas Engqvist’s book at your side is the next best thing. 

Understanding and logic are everything you need with static positions on the board.

A chess game is full of decision-making moments, and there are many methods you should use to find solutions.

We will present a wide spectrum of ideas that will help you to decide.

What does it take to become an expert in opening preparation?

How can we learn the secret methods which allow the top players to dominate everyone else in the opening?

The g2-g4 (or ...g7-g5) pawn push is considered unconventional and often associated with backroom chess games or old-fashioned openings like the King’s Gambit.

Despite being one of the most weakening moves available, g2-g4 has been seen more frequently at the top level of chess.

Unlike almost all other books on the Dragon, the focus is not purely on theoretical development. Instead, the author has combined the mist historically important games, the famous players who chose to fight either side (sometimes both sides!) of the opening, and the moist unexpected and interesting stories featuring the Dragon.

World Champions, contenders of the crown, code-breakers, revolutionaries in every sense of the world – all feature in this remarkable and entirely unique look into the history of an opening variation. as the ancient may say: Here be Dragons!

I used to play a lot of chess as a teenager many decades ago. Those days, there were hardly any computers that played the game and there was certainly no Internet. Learning new ideas in the game was possible only through books or magazines and if something was not clear, there weren’t too many people to consult for explanations. 

Do you like chess and want to become a better player without putting in hundreds of hours training? 

365 Steps to Tactical Mastery has a practical approach with a focus on tactics.