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. More Opening Tricks
4. More Tactics
5. High-level Openings
6. Strategy
7. Hidden Tactics
8. Endgame Basics
9. Common checkmate patterns
10. Complicated Checkmate Patterns
11. Advanced Endgames
12. Hidden Checkmate
13. It's really hard to win!
14. Chess960
15. How to Analyse
16. Opening Wiki
17. Chess Developer: Engine Programming
18. Example Games
19. High-level
20. Bye