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.

‘I started working with Fabiano when he was only five’, remembers legendary New York City chess trainer Bruce Pandolfini. ‘It was obvious that he had a rare intuition, was brave in attack and was one of the most talented players of his age that I had seen.’ Pandolfini had seen right. At 14 years, 11 months and 20 days, Fabiano Caruana became the youngest Grandmaster in the history of the United States and embarked on a glorious career. Among his countless tournament victories Caruana’s legendary win in St Louis in 2014 stands out, making him the third-highest ranked chess player in history. In 2016 he became US Champion and led the golden US team at the Chess Olympiad. His magnificent victory at the 2018 Candidates Tournament in Berlin earned Caruana the right to challenge World Champion Magnus Carlsen in a match for the highest title. Alexander Kalinin chronicles the amazing story of the first American Challenger since Bobby Fischer and follows his development from a pure attacker to a universal, all-round star. This selection of Caruana’s best and most instructive games, arranged in thematic chapters, is a perfect guide for amateur chess players as there is plenty to be learned about all the skills that really matter.

Following on from the enduring success of one of the most important chess books ever written, Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games, and the recently released Magnus Carlsen: 50 Memorable Games, celebrated chess writer Andrew Soltis delivers a book on Fabiano Caruana, the Grandmaster set to rival current world champion Magnus Carlsen. This book details Caruana's remarkable rise from chess prodigy to one of the best chess player in the world, exploring how he acquired the skills of 21st-century grandmaster chess over such a short period of time. This book dives into how he wins by analysing 60 of the games that made him who he is, describing the intricacies behind his and his opponent's strategies, the tactical justification of moves and the psychological battle in each one.

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.

This tactics training book gives you the opportunity to make the same winning moves as super Grandmaster Fabiano Caruana made in his games. One hundred training exercises are offered here, in positions which the Italian turned in his favour. The puzzles start at a moderate level and gradually get more difficult. How many good moves can you make in a row?

The ultimate guide to becoming an expert player of no limit hold’em poker from one of the game’s “premier players” (Erik Seidel, World Series of Poker winner) Phil Gordon. Poker is hotter than ever, with tens of millions of fans dealing in, logging on, and tuning in to global tournaments. And the most popular version of poker is no limit hold’em, long considered the purest form of the game, with appearances in the World Series of Poker, the World Poker Tour, and on Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown. Now, Phil Gordon, acclaimed professional player and cohost of Celebrity Poker Showdown, shares his seasoned expertise and valuable insight in Phil Gordon’s Little Green Book. Featuring a conversational approach and easy-to-digest explanations and diagrams, this is the must-have guide for anyone who wants to go all-in on becoming a better no limit hold’em player.

“A bravura performance…An entertaining book” (Kirkus Reviews) about the dramatic 2016 World Chess Championship between Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Russia’s Sergey Karjakin, which mirrored the world’s geopolitical unrest and rekindled a global fascination with the sport. The first week of November 2016, hundreds of people descended on New York City’s South Street Seaport to watch the World Chess Championship between Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Russia’s Sergey Karjakin. By the time it was over would be front-page news and thought by many the greatest finish in chess history. With both Carlsen and Karjakin just twenty-five years old, it was the first time the championship had been waged among those who grew up playing chess against computers. Originally from Crimea, Karjakin had recently repatriated to Russia under the direct assistance of Putin. Carlsen, meanwhile, had expressed admiration for Donald Trump, and the first move of the tournament he played was called a Trompowsky Attack. Then there was the Russian leader of the World Chess Federation being barred from attending due to US sanctions, and chess fanatic and Trump adviser Peter Thiel being called on to make the honorary first move in sudden death. That the tournament even required sudden death was a shock. Oddsmakers had given Carlsen, the defending champion, an eighty percent chance of winning. It would take everything he had to retain his title. Author Brin-Jonathan Butler was granted unique access to the two-and-half-week tournament and watched every move. The Grandmaster “is not the usual chronicle of a world-championship chess match….Butler offers insight into what it takes to become the best chess player on the planet...A vibrant and provocative look at chess and its metaphorical battle for territory and power” (Booklist).

Learn from the Games of the Best Two Chess Players in the World In every sport, there is that one match-up that electrifies the fans. In soccer, you have Ronaldo vs. Messi. In tennis, Federer vs. Nadal. And in chess, there is Carlsen vs. Caruana. The rivalry of reigning World Champion Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana began 2010 in the Dutch village Wijk aan Zee and culminated in the World Chess Championship 2018. Over the past years, they have crossed swords 71 times: In classical, rapid and blitz chess. All their games against each other - including the thrilling World Championship match - are thoroughly annotated in this book. GM Niclas Huschenbeth gives detailed move-to-move explanations and decodes the complexities of the game, with the aim to improve the reader's chess understanding. After all, what could be better suited to enhance one's understanding than to study the games of the two best chess players on the planet? From the introduction: What You Will Learn From This Book Have you ever played through a top level chess game and asked yourself "Why in the world did he play that move?" or "This move does not make any sense, what's the idea behind it?" If so, I can completely sympathize. "Learn from the best. Analyze their games. Understand what they are doing and how they are doing it." These were the words of my coach when I was in my youth, aspiring to become a good player myself. And I did. Or rather, I tried. All too often, though, I found myself scratching my head when playing through the games of Kasparov, Kramnik & Co. What was the idea behind this move? Why didn't he play that move instead? Back then, the computers were too weak to be of any help. These days, they are a bit more useful. They tell you the best move and the correct evaluation. But they still do not tell you why. It's like trying to work out a difficult math problem and then just being shown the final solution. No learning happens. I was lucky to have my coach guide me through the jungle that chess often is. But not everybody is so fortunate to have a great coach. This is why I wrote this book. In this book, I decode the sometimes mysterious moves and explain the ideas behind them. To me, chess boils down to two basic skills: understanding and calculation. Finding the right plans and finding ways to execute them - the two go hand in hand. But in training, we often compartmentalize, focusing on one specific topic, let's say "how to play with the bishop pair" or "good knight vs. bad bishop." But chess does not work like that. After all, the beautiful thing about chess games is that you usually have some elements of everything. This is why I always found game analyses to be the most rewarding. You learn about chess as a whole and not about one specific detail. It is not without reason that about every coach recommends the study of one's own games as well as the games of the very best.

This guide, intended for tournament players, addresses all the factors that indicate the correct choice of opening lead. The format challenges players to think for themselves before being presented with the solution.

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.