Chess Guide for the Intermediate Player

What do you need to know?

You need to understand the rules of chess. This book is for intermediate players, so we'll talk about openings, tactics, and strategy.

You also need to understand the chess notation, such as 4. Nc3!?.

If you know rules and notation, then you can read this book!

Chess960

Here's an interesting question: What's the most unbalanced 960 position? We'll talk about Chess960 later.

Chess960 is a very popular variant of classical chess. The positions of non-pawn pieces are shuffled (on ranks 1 and 8) in the starting positions. We will analyze most such positions.

Example Games

You can take a look at the "Example Games" chapter anytime. It is somewhat analysis for games. (Some of them, more actually, almost all of them are my own games!)

Table of contents

1. Some basics for openings
2. Tactics for beginners
3. Common checkmate patterns
4. Endgame basics
5. More opening tricks
6. More tactics
7. Strategy
8. Complicated checkmate patterns
9. Advanced endgames
10. High-level openings
11. Tactics that you never saw before...
12. Strategy is powerful
13. Hidden checkmate
14. It's really hard to win!
15. Chess960
16. How to analyse
17. Opening wiki
18. Chess Developer: Engine Programming
19. Example Games
20. High-level
21. Bye