Chess Behind Bars offers a guide to chess in prisons that will instruct and entertain regardless of your situation. It covers almost every aspect of chess imaginable - from the rules to chess history, from puzzles to famous games, and even some tips for improvement. It is a smorgasbord of chess, seen from an unusual angle.

Every club player knows the problem: the opening has ended, and now what? With this new edition of his award winning book, International Master Herman Grooten presents to amateur players a complete and structured course on how to recognize key characteristics in all types of positions and how to make use of those characteristics to choose the right plan. His teachings are based on the famous “Elements” of Wilhelm Steinitz, but Grooten has significantly expanded and updated the work of the first World Champion. He supplies many modern examples, tested in his own practice as a coach of talented youngsters. In Chess Strategy for Club Players you will learn the basic elements of positional understanding: pawn structure, piece placement, lead in development, open files, weaknesses, space advantage and king safety. You will master the art of converting a temporary plus into other, more permanent advantages. The author also explains what to do when, in a given position, the basic principles seem to point in different directions. Each chapter of this fundamental primer ends with a set of highly instructive exercises. This new 3rd edition has, besides various corrections and improvements, a new introduction and a brand-new chapter called ‘Total Control’ with new exercises.

'Funny and brutal. A big-hearted book, I enjoyed it.' Stuart Conquest, Grandmaster'Carl is gifted as both a natural entertainer and storyteller. Although this memoir is primarily about chess, the tales in it are filled with a frank and refreshing honesty that will literally have your heart racing with adventure.'Jovanka Houska, International Master'Chess Crusader' is an absolutely fascinating memoir, and most emphatically not only a book for chess players. It reveals how chess is a metaphor for life, and how skills honed at the chess board can be applied in many real-life situations. This compelling chronicle takes you from Birmingham to Moscow, and plunges you into the life of an author with a remarkable original mind, while also highlighting the hazards of stealing a half-cooked sausage from a deranged German.It's a lively, enthralling account of a colourful life dominated by the black and white squares of the chessboard, and their relation to the wider issues of a troubled childhood and the challenges of work, women, love and loss. It's a tale of adversity, but also of achievement and new friendships and experiences.

Traces the history of chess, describes the pieces and how they move, and discusses the strategy of the game.

Convicted of a crime he didn't commit, eighteen year old Riley Parker is forced to carry out his sentence in prison. He expects a cold, hard life, filled with danger and uncertainty. What he doesn't expect is his cell mate Nathaniel Greyson. Nathan is gorgeous and more than a little frightening, but Riley soon finds himself feeling much more than attraction for this hard man, but you can't fall in love in prison...can you?

Written by Barry Hymer and Peter Wells, Chess Improvement: It's all in the mindset is an engaging and instructive guide that sets out how the application of growth mindset principles can accelerate chess improvement. With Tim Kett and insights from Michael Adams, David Howell, Harriet Hunt, Gawain Jones, Luke McShane, Matthew Sadler and Nigel Short. Foreword by Henrik Carlsen, father of world champion Magnus Carlsen. Twenty-first-century knowledge about skills development and expertise requires us to keep such mystical notions as fixed 'talent' in perspective, and to emphasise instead the dynamic and malleable nature of these concepts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in chess, where many gifted players fall prey to plausible but self-defeating beliefs and practices - and thereby fail to achieve the levels their 'natural' abilities predicted. Happily, however, the reverse can be true too; through learned dispositions such as grit, risk-taking, strategic thinking and a capacity for sheer hard work, players of apparently modest abilities can achieve impressive results. Blending theory, practice and the distinct but complementary skills of two authors - one an academic (and amateur chess player) and the other a highly regarded England Chess Olympiad coach (and grandmaster) - Chess Improvement is an invaluable resource for any aspirational chess player or coach/parent of a chess player. Barry and Peter draw on interviews conducted with members of England's medal-winning elite squad of players and provide a template for chess improvement rooted in the practical wisdom of experienced chess players and coaches. They also include practical illustrative descriptions from the games and chess careers of both developing and leading players, and pull together themes and suggestions in a way which encourages readers to create their own trajectories for chess improvement.

“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Who was Bobby Fischer? In this “nuanced perspective of the chess genius” (Los Angeles Times), an acclaimed biographer chronicles his meteoric rise and confounding fall, with an afterword containing newly discovered details about Fischer’s life. Possessing an IQ of 181 and remarkable powers of concentration, Bobby Fischer memorized hundreds of chess books in several languages, and he was only thirteen when he became the youngest chess master in U.S. history. But his strange behavior started early. In 1972, at the historic Cold War showdown in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he faced Soviet champion Boris Spassky, Fischer made headlines with hundreds of petty demands that nearly ended the competition. It was merely a prelude to what was to come. Arriving back in the United States to a hero’s welcome, Bobby was mobbed wherever he went—a figure as exotic and improbable as any American pop culture had yet produced. Commercial sponsorship offers poured in, ultimately topping $10 million—but Bobby demurred. Instead, he began tithing his limited money to an apocalyptic religion and devouring anti-Semitic literature. Bobby reemerged in 1992 to play Spassky in a multi-million dollar rematch—but when the dust settled, he was a wanted man, transformed into an international fugitive because of his decision to play in Montenegro despite U.S. sanctions. Fearing for his life, traveling with bodyguards, Bobby lived the life of a celebrity fugitive—one drawn increasingly to the bizarre. Drawing from Fischer family archives, recently released FBI files, and Bobby’s own emails, Endgame is unique in that it limns Bobby Fischer’s entire life—an odyssey that took the chess champion from an impoverished childhood to the covers of Time, Life and Newsweek to recognition as “the most famous man in the world” to notorious recluse.

In Chess for Everyone, national chess master and coach Robert M. Snyder introduces chess to the beginner in twenty graduated lessons. Mr. Snyder teaches the basic principles and then builds the student's knowledge in a clear and consistent manner. The reader is given a solid foundation in: Basic rules(piece movements, checkmate, castling, en passant, drawn game and more). Opening principles, traps and a basic opening system. Middlegame strategy (checkmate patterns and tactics). Basic endgame strategy including basic checkmates and King and Pawn endings. Upon completing Chess for Everyone students can continue to expand their knowledge in all areas of the game by reading the other volumes in the Chess for Everyone series.

Behind Bars is filled with stories both ancient and urgent of what happens when alcohol meets crime, from illicit stills in the Scottish Highlands to moonshine in the USA, rum smuggled by Caribbean pirates to the roaring times of Prohibition, current-day gangs selling millions of dollars’ worth of fake Bordeaux, and the often-unsolved cases of people walking into a liquor store, stealing whiskey bottles worth tens of thousands of dollars, and walking out, never to be seen again. Award-winning travel and drinks writer Mike Gerrard takes readers on a centuries-long journey highlighting the most bizarre – and expensive – alcohol-related crimes all while revealing the inside world of spirits, how they have been distilled, legislated, imbibed, and infused into our culture for hundreds of years. Featuring colorful tangents and detailed appendices, Behind Bars will whet the whistle of any curious reader. Spanning the stories of ancient wine swindlers in Pompeii to the modern radiocarbon-dating techniques used by today’s cutting-edge scientists to investigate suspect bottles of expensive alcohol, from million-dollar robberies of wine cellars buried deep underground to whiskey rings surrounding the highest reaches of the Presidency, Gerrard smartly and swiftly reveals that the link between alcohol and crime is a never-ending story.