Zenon Franco - L'art de l'attaque aux échecs

The Sicilian Defence is the most attractive and most complicated opening in chess. If you don't play the Sicilian with White or Black, you miss much of the beauty and the challenges our royal game offers. For White 1.e4 players, building a repertoire against 1...c5 should be their priority.

Croatian top grandmaster Ivan Saric is one of today's greatest Sicilian experts. He plays 1.e4 with White and the Najdorf with Black! With The Open Sicilian, based on his highly acclaimed Chessable course, he has managed something impressive: a watertight repertoire against the Sicilian of just over 400 pages. But reading this one volume, your knowledge of this opening and chess, in general, will make a spectacular jump.

The Open Sicilian is not a phonebook crammed with computer lines but a textbook full of 21st-century chess wisdom. Saric covers the entire range of Sicilians, from obscure sidelines to the main lines: the Najdorf, the Taimanov, the Rauzer, the Kan, the Sveshnikov, and the various Dragons. His approach, firmly based on the ideas of the English Attack, is very ambitious, and he supports his claims with deep analysis and illuminating and elaborate verbal explanation.

Saric has written a book that will serve as a standard work for many years. He offers you the content to be fully armoured against all the intricacies of all the topical Sicilian lines.

Ivan Saric (1990) is a Croatian chess player who became an International Master at 17 and a Grandmaster at 18. He became U18 European Champion in 2007, U18 World Champion in 2008, and won the European Individual title in 2018. Saric beat Magnus Carlsen for his country at the 2014 Olympiad in Tromsø.

434 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.