I was lucky enough to play against six world champions and several top players in my modest chess career, but the greatest player I feel privileged to have known, to have spent time with him, was Miguel Najdorf, "El Viejo". This is a chess book, with 275 commented games, it covers all his chess career, but it has also many stories. Najdorf was the most important Argentinean chess player, and he was an exceptional person. Oscar Panno said that Najdorf reminded him of Don Quixote, in the part of the book where he tells Sancho Panza, "Wherever I am, that is where the head of the table is going to be". He successfully overcame the most terrible setbacks, as few are capable of doing. Writing about Miguel Najdorf is one of my greatest pleasures as a chess journalist and writer! Zenon Franco Ocampos, April 2021.

Miguel Najdorf has been described as a flamboyant poet of the chessboard. A celebrated Grandmaster, his playing career spanned six decades. He is perhaps best known for the eponymous Najdorf opening variation of the Sicilian Defence – often used to good effect by Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. A highly influential chess writer he won many International tournaments although never played for the World Championship. Here we have an informed biography complemented by one hundred selected games that demonstrate his originality and brilliance. The games are fully annotated by the well-respected authors.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES MONTHLY BESTSELLER One of the 10 Best Books of March, Paste Magazine A deeply reported insider perspective of Alex Honnold’s historic achievement and the culture and history of climbing. “One of the most compelling accounts of a climb and the climbing ethos that I've ever read.”—Sebastian Junger In Mark Synnott’s unique window on the ethos of climbing, his friend Alex Honnold’s astonishing free solo ascent of El Capitan’s 3,000 feet of sheer granite is the central act. When Honnold topped out at 9:28 A.M. on June 3, 2017, having spent fewer than four hours on his historic ascent, the world gave a collective gasp. The New York Times described it as “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.” Synnott’s personal history of his own obsession with climbing since he was a teenager—through professional climbing triumphs and defeats, and the dilemmas they render—makes this a deeply reported, enchanting revelation about living life to the fullest. What are we doing if not an impossible climb? Synnott delves into a raggedy culture that emerged decades earlier during Yosemite’s Golden Age, when pioneering climbers like Royal Robbins and Warren Harding invented the sport that Honnold would turn on its ear. Painting an authentic, wry portrait of climbing history and profiling Yosemite heroes and the harlequin tribes of climbers known as the Stonemasters and the Stone Monkeys, Synnott weaves in his own experiences with poignant insight and wit: tensions burst on the mile-high northwest face of Pakistan’s Great Trango Tower; fellow climber Jimmy Chin miraculously persuades an official in the Borneo jungle to allow Honnold’s first foreign expedition, led by Synnott, to continue; armed bandits accost the same trio at the foot of a tower in the Chad desert . . . The Impossible Climb is an emotional drama driven by people exploring the limits of human potential and seeking a perfect, choreographed dance with nature. Honnold dared far beyond the ordinary, beyond any climber in history. But this story of sublime heights is really about all of us. Who doesn’t need to face down fear and make the most of the time we have?

Miguel Najdorf has been described as a flamboyant poet of the chessboard. A celebrated Grandmaster, his playing career spanned six decades. He is perhaps best known for the eponymous Najdorf opening variation of the Sicilian Defence – often used to good effect by Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. A highly influential chess writer he won many International tournaments although never played for the World Championship. Here we have an informed biography complemented by one hundred selected games that demonstrate his originality and brilliance. The games are fully annotated by the well-respected authors.

"In Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman explores fundamental questions about memory, thought, emotion, consciousness, and other cognitive processes through the game of chess, using the moves of thirty-two pieces over sixty-four squares to map the structural and functional organization of the brain." --Book Jacket.

“Chess, easy game!” – Miguel el Grande Among major chess figures of the 20th century, few stand out more than Miguel Najdorf. One of the world’s best players for decades, he was also one of the most active and colorful. And his life, both at the chessboard and away from it, was rich in experience, both joyful and deeply painful. In this biography, Najdorf’s daughter Liliana paints an intimate portrait of her larger-than life father. She writes about him, warts and all, showing us her father as a man both greatly talented and deeply flawed, a man at once loving and rage-prone, noble and petty, generous and selfish, jovial but despotic, earthy but vain, exuberant yet deeply sad. A genius who could conduct 40 blindfold games simultaneously and memorize long strings of random numbers, yet forgot where he parked his car. For the English-language edition, Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman has prepared a selection of annotated games and an in-depth foreword. These are complemented nicely by several historical essays, while many photographs round out this engrossing biography of one of the world’s most fascinating chessplayers of the 20th century.

Albin Planinc was born in the middle of the Second World War, on 18th April 1944, in the little village of Brise, near the small town of Zagorje ob Savi, approximately 30 kilometers from Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. He spent his childhood with his mother Ljudmila (unofficially Milka), a simple, uneducated woman who earned money from various unskilled jobs'. This fascinating biography of over eighty-five annotated games and stories are being presented by grandmasters Georg Mohr and Adrian Mikhalchishin. It covers Planinc' entire life and chess career, including his most fascinating games. This fitting tribute of a forgotten chess genius should be found in anyone's chess library. Thanks to this colorful book Albin Planinc will continue to inspire us all and will keep his spirit alive.

The Richter-Rauzer is one of the most complex and rich battlegrounds in the Open Sicilian. This book is the distillation of the authors' decades-long experience in this variation, offering a practical approach based on understanding and knowledge of typical ideas. Do you wish to explore something double-edged and sharp, this book will leave you confident and fully armed to play for a win. For this second revised edition, Grandmasters Kozul and Jankovic teamed up to present you a way to even throw your most experienced opponent off balance!

If you want to improve your middlegame play, you will have to develop a FEEL for positions. That's what Boris Zlotnik has been stressing during his long and rich trainer's career. Clicking through concrete variations (a popular pastime in the computer era) is not enough. To guide your thinking during a game you should be able to fall back on a reservoir of typical ideas and methods. That is exactly what this book offers you: Zlotnik's legendary study material about the middlegame, modernized, greatly extended and published in the English language for the first time. As you familiarize yourself with the most important strategic ideas and manoeuvres, you will need less time to discover the clues in typical middlegame positions. You will find it so much easier to steer your game in the right direction after the opening has ended. Zlotnik's Middlegame Manual is accessible to a wide range of post-beginners and club players. It is your passport to a body of instructive material of unparalleled quality, collected during a lifetime of training and coaching chess. A collection of exercises, carefully chosen and didactically tuned, will help you drill what you have learned.

In the Ruy Lopez chess opening White immediately starts the battle for the centre, fighting for the initiative. This strategic clarity has made the Ruy Lopez, or Spanish Opening, an eternal favourite with chess players at all levels. Inevitably, this popularity has also led to a wealth of opening theory. In this book, Fabiano Caruana takes you by the hand and lays out a complete and practical White repertoire for club players. He avoids chaotic lines, but loves to punish Black tactically for risky choices. In this concise and crystal-clear repertoire book Caruana explains general characteristics, such as permanent weaknesses long-term goals, and is always looking for an advantage for White. The insights of the World #2 in this classic opening, will not only greatly improve your results in the Ruy Lopez, but also sharpen your general chess knowledge.