Universal Chess Training

The book that you have in your hands is constructed in a very specific manner. Here are a few principles that I followed while writing it in order to make sure that you profit from it the most:

1. Original content: The 90 games selected for this book have been cherry-picked out of thousands, without resorting to other books or commentaries available online. Most of them come from the years 2018-2019; only a handful are slightly older. Simply put what you are getting here is value for what you paid.

2. Three levels of difficulty: This book is aimed to benefit a very wide chess audience starting from 1600 upwards. The first part, titled ‘What every Russian schoolboy solves’ is aimed at players rated 1600-1900.
The second part ‘Enter at your own risk: Puzzles may bite’ is designed for 1900-2200 players. They are, therefore, more complex in nature.
The third and last section is titled ‘Grandmasters wept solving these’ ... and there is a reason for this. The only thing I can say about them without spoiling the fun is that they require the highest level of abstract thinking to be solved.

3. Mixed exercises with no hints: To further advance your learning curve I decided that the puzzles should not be sorted according to themes. They are only sorted according to difficulty. In my view offering a hint about the topic of a given exercise will bias the person solving them, and in so doing neutralize the learning effect. 

4. Focus on what remained behind the scenes: The average playing strength of the chess populace may, indeed, be rising globally. But it has still been an arduous task to find suitable training material. The book that you are holding represents the result of approximately 400 hours of hard work with a quarter of these hours dedicated exclusively to the selection of games.