Casse-tête : Laby-lock

Viktor Korchnoi (1931 to 2016) was a giant of the chess world with a career embracing seventy years and over 5,000 recorded games. He contested two world championship matches against Anatoly Karpov, coming within a whisker of being crowned World Champion in 1978. He was a world championship candidate, Soviet champion and Olympiad medal-winner on numerous occasions.In this first of four volumes on Viktor Korchnoi's chess career, FIDE Master Hans Renette and International Master Tibor Karolyi deeply analyse 181 games and fragments up until 1968. This period encompasses his bitterly tough childhood involving the Second World War and poverty, the death of his father and grandmother, his mother's mental health problems and his loyal support from his step-mother, but also his chess beginnings and early coaches, his marriage and the birth of his son. We learn about his early rivalry with Mark Taimanov and Boris Spassky in Viktor's hometown of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and his later rivalry with Mikhail Tal and Tigran Petrosian. He exchanged blows with Bobby Fischer on equal terms.Korchnoi won three of his four Soviet championship titles during this period, for the first time in 1960, and according to Chessmetrics rating calculations he began a four-month stint as world number 1 in 1965. He played at the 1962 candidates tournament in Curacao and reached the 1968 candidates final versus Spassky. This volume concludes with two of Korchnoi's most impressive international tournament wins, at Wijk aan Zee and Palma de Mallorca in 1968.The work is supplemented with a generous portion of photos taken in particular from Soviet-era chess publications and the Korchnoi family archive.Hans Renette, a FIDE Master with two International Master norms, is a historian and chess coach. He has written chess biographies of the great players Emanuel Lasker, Henry Edward Bird, Louis Paulsen, Gustav Neumann and John Wisker. Tibor Karolyi is an International Master and chess coach who has written games collections of Magnus Carlsen, Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, Tigran Petrosian and Mikhail Tal, among many other chess books. 550 pages

Capablanca's Endgame Technique : The Astonishing Chess Logic of the Third World Champion by Alex Colovic. 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.

Capablanca's most instructive endgames will help you to understand:
    •    The principle of two weaknesses - the art of creating a second weakness, leaving opponents helpless because they cannot deal with both at the same time.
    •    How to convert an advantage in the endgame, not by brute calculation, but by knowing where best to position your pieces.
    •    Sharpen your intuition in double rook endgames and avoid wasting energy calculating everything and making mistakes.
    •    The key concept of prophylaxis when it comes to trading pieces, a remarkable aspect of all Capablanca's games. You will learn when to trade off unnecessary pieces.

Capablanca's Endgame Technique will help you play with precision at all levels of the game, not just in the endgame. It was Capablanca himself who said, 'To improve your game, you must study the endgame before anything else.'
Alex Colovic is a grandmaster from Macedonia who has won 18 national championships and represented his country in three chess Olympiads. He is a prolific chess writer, drawing on his thirty years of experience as a tournament player and chess coach.

Grey Beige with Yellow Brown and Dusty Ivory.

Leatherette Collection has a refined, elegant appearance while maintaining all of the unique advantages of premium quality eco leather, especially when it comes to noise reduction and durability.

This backgammon is handmade using the art of marquetry (also spelled as marqueterie) which is the art and craft of applying pieces of veneer to a structure to form decorative patterns and designs.

Size closed is 48 x 30 cm

These Pioneer Staunton style chess pieces is very particular with his knight. The set includes a very respectable 3.75 inch king (10 cm); an elegant & well finished design with unique features such as the grooved collars and a nicely weighted feel. Made from fine graded hardwoods and hand turned and polished, these pieces will provide many years of chess playing satisfaction. This set includes 4 queens.

These spectacular pieces are triple weighted, and their size requires a chessboard with 55 mm squares.

The king is 10.6 cm high, the base 4.60 cm, the rook 6.3 cm high, the base 4.00 cm.

The underside is leather, not the usual felt.

The pieces are finely sculpted and the knight, the representative figure in a chess set, is particularly well done!

Throughout fourty well-defined chapters, learn to recognize key moves and motifs in the middlegame in order to find the most promising continuation.This book will help you building an essential chess knowledge.

Arthur van de Oudeweetering is an international master and a chess trainer from the netherlands.