In the summer of 1972, with a presidential crisis stirring in the United States and the cold war at a pivotal point, the Soviet world chess champion, Boris Spassky, and his American challenger, Bobby Fischer, met in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the most notorious chess match of all time. Their showdown, played against the backdrop of superpower politics, held the world spellbound for two months with reports of psychological warfare, ultimatums, political intrigue, cliffhangers, and farce to rival a Marx Brothers film. Thirty years later, David Edmonds and John Eidinow have set out to reexamine...

In this book, I. A. Horowitz, Chess Editor of the New York Times and former U.S. Open Champion, applies some of the ideas and convictions acquired from thirty-five years of playing, teaching and analyzing the royal game. He emphasizes the tactical aspects of the game: how to recognize the big chance and hit hard when it occurs. He also stresses the ideas and methods in opening play, rather than the routine memorizing of variations that takes the joy out of chess for so many beginners.

When you have completed this book, you will be able to play chess with pleasure and some...

Clear, concise, and written in accessible language, Chess Self-Teacher reviews basic chess strategy in eight lessons, taking players from the basics to checkmates, pawn endings, minor tactics, mating combinations, and strategic objectives.

In the tiny Russian province of Kalmykia, obsession with chess has reached new heights. Its leader, a charismatic and eccentric millionaire/ex--car salesman named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is a former chess prodigy and the most recent president of FIDE, the world's controlling chess body. Despite credible allegations of his involvement in drug running, embezzlement, and murder, the impoverished Kalmykian people have rallied around their leader's obsession---chess is played on Kalmykian prime-time television and is compulsory in Kalmykian schools. In addition, Kalmyk women have been known to...

How, to Be a Winner at Chess is the result of twenty years' experience and study: and it is something unique in chess books -- an amusing, easily read, and even more easily understood book for the vast majority of "in-between" players, those who have been checkmated too many times or who have been bogged down in the innumerable rules of various experts.

Fred Reinfeld gives you twelve basic, simple rules for winning play. All the types of checkmates, the relative importance of the chess pieces, and...

With this book you'll find out how easy chess is to learn. The exposition is clear and informal and strikes a rather unique level. Whereas most introductory manuals are either sketchy and undeveloped or else lose the reader in a maze of technical detail, this volume is one of the very few intermediate accounts. It covers the most elementary procedures and also takes you through the development of basic strategic notions. Written by a well-known British master and chess correspondent, it packs an amazing amount of material into its pages, and it gives you a quick, easy-to-follow, full...