Monthly Archives: January 2023

Chess Amateur vs Professional: The Difference

How does a 10-year-old book reach #1 in the Amazon top-100 Chess Kindle list?

Because the Botez sisters mention it in the description of a YouTube video. With BotezLive, they have more than 1 million subscribers. They educate and entertain the 'new' chess players. Chess used to be a game dominated by grumpy old males, spearheaded by a charismatic and sexy world champion from Norway. It has turned into a game for everyone. The new players start watching on TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube. They play on Chess.com, our new parent company. And eventually, some of them will enter a tournament, find a club, and buy a chess book. In the video, Andrea Botez shows the difference between a Chess Amateur and a Professional with the help of Woman Grandmaster Dina Belenkay. Dina uses an exercise from 'the book about strategy every Russian kid has studied', called Techniques of Positional Play, by Valeri Bronznik and Anatoli Terekhin, published in English by New In Chess. PS: New In Chess has three other titles in the Kindle top-10, all well suited to adult improvers: 1001 Chess Exercises175

Matthew Sadler's book reviews from New In Chess magazine

Sadler on Books (2023#1)

These book reviews by Matthew Sadler were published in New In Chess magazine 2023#1 When I picked up 1001 Chess Endgame Exercises for Beginners by Thomas Willemze (New In Chess) I hadn’t actually noticed the ‘For Beginners’ part so I blinked a little bit at the title of the first chapter: ‘Mate in one move’. The title doesn’t quite cover the content of the book in my opinion. In principle, this book is tailor-made to teach beginners the elements of tactics starting with the simplest mates. It starts off with simple single-piece mate-in-ones delivered by the queen and then moves on to combination mates (for example rook and bishop pinning the opponent’s king to the back rank). Each mate is described in precise detail. One nice touch is how much attention Willemze pays to the role of the opponent’s own pawns and pieces in blocking escape squares for the king. After mate-in-one, we move on to ‘win a piece in 2 moves’, then ‘mate in 2 moves’ and then ‘win a piece in 3 moves’. Just a small example175