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Silman's Complete Endgame Course. What Can (or Cannot) Mate vs. Lone King Can: Q, Rx2, R, Bx2, B+N Cannot: P, B, K, Nx2 Example: In K vs. Nx2, mate can be avoided by the lone king if the corners of the board are avoided. Minor Piece vs. Queen B vs. Q Black wins by treating the endgame as K+Q vs. K while avoiding squares of the bishop's color. K vs. Q Tips: Look out for knight forks. Use K+Q as a team. Chase the enemy K to the side of the board. Understanding the King Use Your King! K is powerful when there are few pieces Rush K to board center in the endgame Opposition Def'n: when K's are directly opposite one another and share 3 adjacent ("blockade") squares having the move (i.e. if it's your turn) during opposition is BAD during opposition, the active player gives up control of one of the 3 blockade squares Rook Pawns

Silman's Complete Endgame Course. Overkill Mates The Staircase 1. Push the enemy king to one side of the board 2. Cut enemy king off from a rank/file with R/Q 3. Use other pieces to check king off the next file/rank Note: as long as you don't give the queens away or stalemate, you'll win Skipping examples with Q + R and R + R, but same ideas apply. The Box Imprison king in an ever-shrinking box. King + Queen: King + Rook: Stalemate Alert! Definition: king is not in check, but there is no legal move on the board that would not result in the king's capture Example:

"Look at this position and tell me what you see..." Plans Based on a Position According to our friend Pachman, what distinguishes masters from club players is their ability to deduce the correct plan based on a position. Two examples follow: Example One In this game, grandmaster Duras succeeded in occupying the e-file with his major pieces. One way to exploit this positional advantage is to penetrate the 8th rank. He saw the opportunity to do so by sacrificing the exchange on move 35, and infiltrated the enemy camp with rook and queen. With the black king exposed, he evaluated the position resulting from forced moves as won. He needed only to calculate exact moves up up to move 39; beyond that, his intuition and experience led him to believe that checkmate would be in sight when he arrived at the position. Example Two Rubinstein demonstrates a series of positional maneuvers: moving the knight towards the outpost on g5, using mate threats to force the weakening of black's pawn structure, targeting loose pieces to tie down enemy pieces in defense, and dominating the open file to enhance piece mobility. Game Three asdf

Chapter 1: The Development of Modern Chess Summary: In this first chapter, Pachman walks us through the history of chess to help us better appreciate the rise of contemporary play. The rules of chess have evolved through the centuries. Notable advancements included the expansion of range in the movements of the queen and bishops. (For comparison, the equivalent of the bishop in Chinese Chess must move exactly two squares along a diagonal, and is restricted to its original side of the board!) These changes allowed rapid development and sharper attacks than before. The dearth of defensive theory at the time enabled punishing middlegame attacks on the king, as demonstrated in Game 1. Game 1: Polerio-Domenico, Two Knights Defense France gave rise to an opposing school of thought, championed by Philidor. He believed that pawns were key to any game and took great care in advancing them in close support of one another, even prioritizing their movement over the development of the minor pieces. His flaw was in underestimating the potential of the pieces, but his theories concerning pawns surpassed his peers by generations. The following game demonstrates these ideas. Game 2: Brühl-Philidor, Bishop's Opening The radical ideas of Philidor were not passed on by his successors. Instead, the Italian school continued to reign, with La Bourdonnais as one of its proponents. Skillful was he in dominating the center and planning attacks based on a breakthrough in the center. The accuracy of his combinations surpassed that of the Romantic Italians who preceded him. Game 3: MacDonell-La Bourdonnais, Sicilian Defense Anderssen was known for the gambits he played. By giving up material, he gained time and space on the chessboard. He had a solid understanding of tactics, and used them to plan and execute combinations with greater depth and perception than those before him. Game 4: Anderssen-Dufresne, Evans Gambit The chess legend Paul Morphy had a splended feel for combinations that capitalized on the inexactitudes of his opponents. He knew how to maximize the effectiveness of his pieces by opening up diagonals and files. Despite this, he was willing to resort to converting so much as a pawn advantage in an endgame. While unsurprising and perhaps even expected in modern times, his contemporaries criticised the dryness of his style. Game 5: Lichtenhein-Morphy, Scotch Game Chigorin brought the open game to new heights. By playing gambits with logic and sucess during a time that the defensives against them had improved, he advanced the theory of such openings during his chess career. He took great risks to create active play, gracing the chess world with many artistic games. Staunton, on the other hand, represented the English school of chess. He aimed to achieve sound positions and only made sacrifices with clear-cut consequences. The following is an example of his play.Game 6: Cochrane-Staunton, Queen's Gambit Anderssen representing the Continental style defeated Staunton in the London tournament of 1851, representing the triumph of the Italian over the English school. Modern chess strategy, according to Pachman, began with Steinitz who began under the Italian school. Later on in his career he began to question historical games that the chess community regarded as masterful works. Steinitz criticized aimless attacks that succeeded only due to careless defenses and strived to develop strategic principles for correct play: Positions are equilibria Sharp attacks can only arise from disturbances in these equilibria Attacks must target weak points Defenses must require minimal pieces for the sake of efficienc Steinitz's weakness was in his stout belief in his principles, which caused him unnecessary defeats when he underestimated the potential of dynamic play that contradicted his principles. In other words, his guidelines failed to account for the positional advantage of dynamism. His successor Tarrasch attempted to carry out such principles through practical play, and was criticized by Nimzowitsch (who, ironically, authored a famous chess book titled My System). Lasker took the teachings of Steinitz in a different direction and applied chess principles with greater precision. As perhaps the greatest chess psychologist of all time, he viewed the game as a struggle between two individuals, and considered human error as an inherent component of the game. The chess exemplar Capablanca employed Tarrasch's ideas of simplification with razor-sharp accuracy. His unparalleled technique encouraged many of his contemporaries to believe that chess was nearly 'solved'. Nonetheless, the Neo-Romantic movement arose during his reign, and gave birth to the hypermodern defense. Instead of directly contesting the center, these 'Indian Defenses' originally named as a joke strived to attack the center from the flanks. Their rejection of principles allowed them victories over older masters, but the bizarre and unnatural setups that they employed prevented them from prevailing over Capablanca's precision. Dr. Alekhine injected a spark of brilliant creativity back into the world of chess with his combanitive play, only possible with his tactical and positional mastery. Armed with this, artist triumphed over technician in the championship between Capablanca and Alekhine. In post-war years, an overwhelming number of Soviet masters dominated the chess scene. These included Bronstein, Tal, and Geller, who played with a style reminiscient of Alekhine's brilliance, Smyslov, Petrosian, and Taimanov who played with precision similar to that of Capablanca. Others, such as Botvinnik, Keres, and Spassy, demonstrated a versitality of style. The key factor that enabled the success of the Russian masters was the systematic preparation and analytical approach that they applied towards the study of chess. Only when foreign nations began to adopt similar methods of preparation could they begin to compete with the Russian players. These included the American Bobby Fischer (World Champion at the time Pachman's book was published) who possessed the technique of Capablanca, and dared to obtain double-edged positions and rely on human errors in the same way that Lasker did.

Hello! :D Chess.com graciously extended trial free memberships many years ago, and I took the opportunity at that time to create this group. It was unclear to me at the time for what purpose this little haven on the web might serve, only that it was nice to have access to a space to cultivate ideas pertaining to chess--hence the ambiguous name of this group. In short: before your eyes is the stash of acorns that I stowed away for many years. I'm digging it up now to share with you! 'Tis I, Prehistoric Hoarder Is this guy nuts? Have you ever opened up a chess book (or any book, for that matter), glanced at it, and slowly closed it and backed away out of fright? Oh I certainly have. But it's important to learn from books, I say! Those hardcover tomes saved my life in engineering, and are about to send me off (fingers crossed!) to medical school. Professors forget, lecture slides may lie, but books have passed through the scrutiny of editors, colleagues, and peers because they are a testament to the world as if to say, "Hey, let me show you something neat that I figured out. Come look!" It takes quite a bit more gumption to thrust one's thoughts onto permanent pages that one presents as something worthy of another's dinero; such works tend to be of higher quality than most. My personal library looks something like this. Comprehensiveness and quality tend to go hand in hand, at the expense of the reader. Books generally have a beginning section that nobody reads (yoohoo, nothing like breaking the fourth wall and pointing at this post!) available so that in the case that someone random passes by and picks them up, everyone can quite literally begin on the same page. So what's THIS group really for? Through my years of study, I have found that the best way to digest piles of word junk (with all due respect, O Honorable Book Deities) is to break them down and chew them piece by piece. A pleasant way to do so is to share the pain with others! Misery loves company, after all. So that's what brings me here--to share my journey through some fundamental chess books with fellow enthusiasts. I'm here to learn with you! The Forecast As an amateur chess player (OTB ~1300 last time I checked in high school), I will be focusing on studying the middlegame, endgame, and opening in that order. Pedagogy may vary (some say to study the game backwards, from endgame to opening), but I prefer this order because frankly, it's more fun to learn how to wipe the floor via early checkmate than to build an advantage, simplify, and clean up the endgame. (And learning is faster when it's fun!) Tactics take precidence before all of these, but there exist plenty of free resources for drilling those on this website and others. Without further ado, here's the list of books I hope to go through: Complete Chess Strategy Vol 1 [CCS1] - First Principles of the Middlegame by Ludek Pachman Complete Chess Strategy Vol 2 [CCS2] - Principles of Pawn Play and the Centre by Pachman Complete Chess Strategy Vol 3 [CCS3] - First Principles of the Middlegame by Pachman Endgame book, to be decided A King's Pawn game (e4 e5) book by Nunn (not entirely certain about the author, have to dig it up sometime) The Bb5+ Sicilian A book on the French A King's Indian Defense book