A few weeks ago my chess-blog-fellow The Prodigal Pawn announced a chess books giveaway for those who read his chess blog and are active there (it means leave comments there at least).

As I am one of those cases, I kindly asked The Prodigal Pawn for Chess Endings: Essential Knowledge by Yuri Averbakh. The author is one of the best teachers of chess endings and those of you, who read my blog carefully, knows that my knowledge of chess ending is something what I want to improve rapidly next year.

Tommy (the real first name of The Prodigal Pawn) was so nice and he sent me also another book – Purdy’s Fine Art of Chess Annotation: Volume Two by C. J.S. Purdy. I hadn’t known too much about this author but when I looked at his book, it grabbed my attention almost immediately. Purdy describes there a method how to study and learn much from masters’ games. I will disclose more details about the method in some of next posts here.

Unintentionally the books became another Xmas gift for me as they were delivered by post yesterday ;)

I would like to thank to The Prodigal Pawn for very nice books this way. I will go through them carefully, do not worry! I am sure they will be useful for me! If you do not know his blog yet, please, go here and enjoy his interesting articles!

Are you a fan of former world champion Bobby Fischer? Some of us call him even the strongest chess player in the history.

Now you have chance to go through all his competetive games and learn a lot from his legacy. Both weak player and very strong player should understand Fischer’s games from the book according to the author.

The book “Bobby Fischer The Career and Complete Games” was released last week and you can order it (for example) in my favorite chess shop New in chess.

Here is a short video from the press conference held for the book release occasion:

Thanks to Chess Master or Bust blog for this info.

If you like the games of women’s world chess champion Alexandra Kosteniuk, you should not miss her new book called “Diary of a Chess Queen”.

The game described Alexandra’s way to the top and it is full of her games. The book will be released on December 1st, 2009, but if you order it now you will get the author’s autograph.

You can preorder the book here: http://chessqueen.com/index.php?productID=35

BTW: Alexanadra Kosteniuk has prepared a video ad for the book. You can watch it here: http://chessmovies.com/index.php?id=151

I have decided to share good chess books, which help me, with you. The first one is “Chess Training Pocket Book II” of the authors Lev Alburt and Al Lawrence.

This book is focused on improvement one’s calculation skills and spotting tactic. It brins 320 training positions from different stages of chess games. So you can solve puzzles from complicated middlegames, but on the other side, the book contains also simple positions from chess endings.

The base of the book is development of chess thinking and also chess knowledge. By solving the tactic puzzles from the book, the reader will learn typical patterns and collect them in his memory. All the diagrams are instructive and based on real games.

“Chess Training Pocket Book II” contains also a kind of short manual “How to think”, which is very instructive and many players will find it very useful.

The readers of this book should not be absolute novices in chess. There is needed to have some chess background and some knowledge to study the book successfuly. So I would tell that average club players and the beter ones up to ELO 2000 could profit the most from this book.

It is something what is worthy of attention. I can recommend the book, at the moment it is my best friend when I am traveling to my office by train each day.

Chess Training Pocket Book II
How to Spot Tactics & How Far Ahead to Calculate
by Lev Alburt, Al Lawrence
Publisher: CIRC, 2008
Edition: Paperback small
Pages: 208
Language: English

One of my favorite online chess shops New In Chess is just running 50% sale on chess books.

You can chose from 23 publications like Lasker’s Manual of Chess, The Complete Book of Chess Strategy, Tal – Botvinnik 1960, New In Chess 2006 Complete among others.

The sale will end up August 23th, 2009.