Grandmaster David Smerdon gives the Scandinavian a welcome twist by using it as an all-out attacking weapon. The repertoire he presents is one he has successfully employed at grandmaster level over many years, and the backbone is provided by the razor-sharp Portuguese and Icelandic gambits.

Chess is a cruel game. We all know that feeling when your position has gone awry and everything seems hopeless. You feel like resigning. But don’t give up! This is precisely the moment to switch to swindle mode. Master the art of provoking errors and you will be able to turn the tables and escape with a draw – or sometimes even steal the full point! Swindling is a skill that can be trained. In this book, David Smerdon shows how you can use tricks from psychology to marshal hidden resources and exploit your opponent’s biases. In a lost position, your best practical chance often lies not in the computer’s best moves, but in playing your opponent – however bad the evaluation! With an abundance of eye-popping examples and training exercises, Smerdon identifies the four best friends of every chess swindler: your opponent’s impatience, their hubris, their fear, and their need to stay in control. You’ll also learn about such cunning swindling motifs as the Trojan Horse, the decoy trap, the berserk attack, and ‘window-ledging’. So, come and join the Swindlers’ Club, become a great escape artist and dramatically improve your results. In this instructive and wildly entertaining guide, Smerdon shows you how.

What’s Old Is New – and Surprisingly Strong! The world’s oldest opening variation, 3...Qd8 in the Scandinavian Defense, has resurfaced in the last decade to give players at all levels a winning edge. Whether you prefer a sharp tactical game or slower positional maneuvering, the 3...Qd8 Scandinavian provides a genuine alternative for club players and grandmasters seeking to play for a win from the outset. Elite players such as Michael Adams, Josif Dorfman, Kiril Georgiev and Julian Hodgson, among others, have successfully raised the banner of the 3...Qd8 Scandinavian. As the author demonstrates, this variation’s doubtful reputation is undeserved. It is completely playable – and easy to learn! 3...Qd8 is not the ugly duckling sibling of 3...Qa5 and 3...Qd6 – it is a superb alternative. “Dan's a strong player, but he’s an even stronger teacher. The book sparkles with practical insight, lucidly explained.” International Grandmaster Zviad Izoria

Every chess player needs to decide which openings he or she is going to play. But where do you start? The risk of drowning in the turbulent sea of chess opening theory is only too real for beginning amateurs.Often your goals and ambitions will be misguided. If you are trying to win in 20 moves, copy what's in fashion among top-GM's or memorize variations, you are wasting your time. Most likely you will never get to play your ‘preparation' and end up aimlessly switching from one opening to the other. After the success of his volume for White, experienced French chess trainer Vincent Moret now provides a complete, ready-to-go chess opening repertoire for Black. It consists of a sound set of lines that do not outdate rapidly, do not require memorization and are easy to digest for beginners and post-beginners.To show the typical plans and the underlying ideas in the various lines of his repertoire, Moret not only selected games of Grandmasters. He also uses games of young, improving players to highlight the errors they tend to make.

The appeal of the Scandinavian Defence is easy to understand: it is very forcing - Black is virtually guaranteed to get his desired structure. There are no annoying 'Anti-Scandinavians' to study! But for many decades the Scandinavian was regarded with some suspicion, as Black apparently loses time recapturing on d5. Modern players have a different view. The great Danish player Bent Larsen kickstarted the revolution with his provocative assertion that it is an improved Caro-Kann (and, not least, beating Karpov with our opening)! But the 21st-century Scandinavian is a different beast altogether; the new main line of the whole opening (3...Qd6) has proven to have great strategic richness, with more than a few tactical tricks lurking just behind the scenes. The Scandinavian has been transformed into an opening that strong grandmasters are willing to use as their main defence, rather than as an occasional surprise weapon. This thoroughly modern guide focuses on these new approaches, while also covering the more traditional main lines. Kasparov guides the reader carefully through each system, explaining his recommendations with wit and clarity. With his help, you will have your opponents wishing there really were some 'Anti-Scandinavian' lines!

First Steps books are based around carefully selected instructive games which demonstrate exactly what both sides are trying to achieve. There is enough theory to enable the improving player to get to grips with the opening without feeling overwhelmed.

To support the many schools that currently use Humanities/SOSE texts to teach in their classrooms, we've created the Humanities Alive Australian Curriculum Transition Packs for Year 7-10 students! These transition packs provide comprehensive coverage of History: Australian Curriculum, Geography, and Economics & Citizenship, and are designed to make the transition to the Australian Curriculum as straightforward and cost-effective as possible. Components of the History Atlas Transition Pack include: * History Alive 8 for the Australian Curriculum Textbook & eBookPLUS + * Humanities Alive Geography 8 mini textbook (includes all Geography content from Humanities Alive 2, 2E text) + * Humanities Alive Economics & Citizenship 8 mini textbook (includes all Economics & Citizenship content from Humanities Alive 2, 2E text) + * FREE History Alive 8 for the Australian Curriculum Student Workbook + * myWorld History Atlas (Card) + * myWorld Atlas (Card) View more information on Jacaranda's range of History for the Australian Curriculum resources.

* The perfect survival guide to the chess openings * All openings covered * Detailed verbal explanations of plans for both sides * Up-to-date and featuring many tips and recommendations * Insights into the 'character' of each opening * Written by one of the world's foremost opening experts The first moves of a chess game define the nature of the whole struggle, as both players stake their claim to the critical squares and start to develop their plans. It is essential to play purposefully and to avoid falling into traps or reaching a position that you don't understand. This is not a book that provides masses of variations to memorize. Paul van der Sterren instead offers a wealth of ideas and explanation, together with the basic variations of each and every opening. This knowledge will equip players to succeed in the opening up to good club level, and provide a superb grounding in opening play on which to build a more sophisticated repertoire. The strategies he explains will, unlike ever-changing chess opening theory, remain valid as long as chess is played, and so the time spent studying this book will be rewarded many times over. Grandmaster Paul van der Sterren has won the Dutch Championship on two occasions, and in 1993 reached the Candidates stage of the World Chess Championship. He is an internationally renowned chess writer and editor: he was one of the founding editors of New in Chess, for whose Yearbooks he has contributed more than 150 opening surveys.

Jovanka Houska reveals everything you need to know about the Scandinavian, whether you are playing it as Black or facing it with White.

A profound knowledge of the past climate is vital for our understanding of global warming. The past 2000 years are both the period which is of most relevance to the next century and that for which there is the most evidence. High-resolution proxy records for this period are available from a variety of sources. Five sections consider dendroclimatology, ice cores, corals, historical records, lake varves, and other indicators. The final two sections cover the histories of various forcing factors and attempt to bring together records from a variety of sources and provide explanations.