Aagaard - Grandmaster Preparation, Positional Play

The seconds tick down relentlessly toward zero just as your game approaches the critical stage. Your higher-rated opponent is putting your game under severe pressure, so extreme accuracy is needed to hang tough and avoid falling into a losing position. What do you do now – should you exchange pieces to relieve the pressure, lash out with a sacrifice, probe for weaknesses in the opponent's camp, or maybe just give up and get a lesson on how to bring the point home?

The answer is… none of these! At such do-or-die moments, says Steve Hrop, the first thing to do is to sit on your hands and take a few deep breaths. In Defending Under Pressure and Managing Your Emotions at the Chessboard, the author uses critical moments from his own tournament games (most of them against players rated above 2200) to describe the difficulties of thinking straight when the enemy is at the gates, and then outlines methods and techniques to clear your head, evaluate the position, and find your way to the best move. Techniques include how to avoid redundant pieces that critically limit your mobility; when visualization is more important than calculation: and “freeze-framing” positions to eliminate blunders.

Save the draw – or turn a looming defeat into an astonishing victory – with the tips in this practical training manual! 236 pages

Instruction + exercises according to the old Soviet chess school Experienced Russian Grandmaster Yakov Neishtadt reveals the training material that was used in Soviet times to build up young masters. In the first part of the book Neishstadt teaches a systematic course on the most important tactical themes. The second part consist of an exam with hundreds of tests from real-life chess, in random order so as not to give unwelcome hints on how to solve them. The solutions are not just lists of moves, but include instructive prose. This edtion has been checked with modern engines.

390 pages

Turbo-Charge Your Tactics 2 concludes a multi-year effort by GM Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko and world-renowned trainer IM Vladimir Grabinsky to create the perfect chess puzzle books. This second volume builds upon the first, using games from the World Champions and their challengers. Most chess games are decided by tactics, so solving tactical puzzles is the most effective path to improvement.

This book also contains a special chapter with expert guidance on how to use chess engines. The engines might analyse precisely but they can also harm our chess understanding if followed blindly, so we must know when and how to use them. Hardcover 280 pages

This book is the sequel of the successful puzzle-book series from GM Ivan Ivanisevica Known as a great tactical player Ivan Ivanisevic select the 548 puzzles All the puzzles have been collected from practical games (OTB, Blitz, Oline). There are more than 500 examples from GM practice. Puzzles are divided into 5 levels of difficulty. In this book, you can find a lot of tactical motifs and ideas which you can use in your games. Maybe you will find your games in our next book! Have fun and enjoy solving puzzles. 350 pages