Soszynski - Double trouble scandinavian style (two repertoires for black)

The Russian Boris Spassky was the perfect gentleman. He was a chess genius who became World Champion in 1969. But he was also gracious in defeat after he lost his title to the American Bobby Fischer in 1972 in the Match of the Century. This biography includes fifty of Spassky’s best games, annotated by former Russian champion Alexey Bezgodov, and a biographical sketch of a few dozen pages, written by Dmitry Aleynikov, the Director of the Chess Museum in Moscow. Spassky was born in St. Petersburg in 1937; he moved to France in 1976 and returned to Russia in 2010. On his road to the World Championship, he defeated all his contemporaries convincingly in matches, including Paul Keres, Efim Geller, Mikhail Tal, Bent Larsen and Viktor Korchnoi. He lost his first match for the ultimate title against Tigran Petrosian but won in his second attempt in 1969. With his all-round style, fighting spirit and psychological insights, he could beat anybody anytime and, for example, won at least two games versus six other World Champions: Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Fischer, Karpov and Kasparov 279 pages

Very nice rosewood chessboard combining solid wood and marquetry. Will perfectly suits with rosewood or ebony chess pieces. Green baize below. 

Available in 3 different sizes.

Chess students love a Puzzle Rush. And solving tactics puzzles certainly helps you improve your pattern recognition and will help you find good moves in tournament games. But there is a downside to most tactics puzzles — we always know who is supposed to win!

Chess in real life is different, not just because no one taps us on the shoulder and tells us to look for a tactic. Sometimes tactics work, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes your opponent has a few tricks up their sleeve, too.

This book shows the reality of chess tactics. It explores a chess player's challenges over the board: attack, defense, and counterattack! It exposes the actual give-and-take nature of chess tactics. 224 pages

Konstantinopolsky - Obsession : A Chess Biography of Vsevolod Rauzer. Vsevolod Rauzer, born in Kiev in 1908, was one of the world’s leading chess opening theoreticians and thinkers in the 1930s. As a player, he was an uncompromising attacker, trying to avoid draws as well as to prove that 1.e4 wins by force. According to Mikhail Botvinnik, “His opening research…with linked middlegame plans, gives us every reason to place V. Rauzer among the founders of the Soviet chess school.”

Awarded the Master of Sport title in 1929, Rauzer’s best tournament performances included joint eighth place in the 1931 Soviet Championship, sixth in 1933 and eighth in 1937. According to Chessmetrics, he was ranked in the world’s top 30 for several years.
He made big contributions to theory in the Sicilian, French and Caro-Kann defenses among others. The book’s introductory articles contain deep dives into Rauzer’s opening laboratory and shed light on the historical development of key variations.

The present work contains 96 games, nearly all of them played by Rauzer. Opponents include Botvinnik, Fine, Levenfish, Lilienthal, Romanovsky, the author and other leading pre-War Soviet players. Many games come with Rauzer’s own annotations together with analysis by Konstantinopolsky, Botvinnik, Levenfish and others. The commentary has been updated by International Master Grigory Bogdanovich using the latest engines. Ultimately, Rauzer’s story was a sad one. Chess, and especially opening analysis, was an obsession for him: he once told Panov: “Unfortunately, I just can’t make myself work on theory of the game for more than 16 hours a day! My head can’t endure more.” This obsession eventually drove him mentally ill and he spent much of his final period in care. Vsevolod Rauzer lived largely in poverty and tragically died in the Siege of Leningrad. 237 pages

Viktor Korchnoi (1931 to 2016) was a giant of the chess world with a career embracing seventy years and over 5,000 recorded games. He contested two world championship matches against Anatoly Karpov, coming within a whisker of being crowned World Champion in 1978. He was a world championship candidate, Soviet champion and Olympiad medal-winner on numerous occasions.In this first of four volumes on Viktor Korchnoi's chess career, FIDE Master Hans Renette and International Master Tibor Karolyi deeply analyse 181 games and fragments up until 1968. This period encompasses his bitterly tough childhood involving the Second World War and poverty, the death of his father and grandmother, his mother's mental health problems and his loyal support from his step-mother, but also his chess beginnings and early coaches, his marriage and the birth of his son. We learn about his early rivalry with Mark Taimanov and Boris Spassky in Viktor's hometown of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and his later rivalry with Mikhail Tal and Tigran Petrosian. He exchanged blows with Bobby Fischer on equal terms.Korchnoi won three of his four Soviet championship titles during this period, for the first time in 1960, and according to Chessmetrics rating calculations he began a four-month stint as world number 1 in 1965. He played at the 1962 candidates tournament in Curacao and reached the 1968 candidates final versus Spassky. This volume concludes with two of Korchnoi's most impressive international tournament wins, at Wijk aan Zee and Palma de Mallorca in 1968.The work is supplemented with a generous portion of photos taken in particular from Soviet-era chess publications and the Korchnoi family archive.Hans Renette, a FIDE Master with two International Master norms, is a historian and chess coach. He has written chess biographies of the great players Emanuel Lasker, Henry Edward Bird, Louis Paulsen, Gustav Neumann and John Wisker. Tibor Karolyi is an International Master and chess coach who has written games collections of Magnus Carlsen, Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, Tigran Petrosian and Mikhail Tal, among many other chess books. 550 pages