Author Description

London 1851 is both a historical document and an excellent book on how to calculate. This fourth edition has new topics and more diagrams. Good books on how to analyze, and how to calculate in particular, are hard to come by. The Turning Points series gives loads of well-analyzed exercise positions in problem-solution form, culled from famous tournaments, in which there was a possible inaccuracy, and challenges the reader to solve them better than the players did. The solutions not only contain the variations and some hindsight, they also point out the positional features that motivate our selection of candidate moves, steer us to the right decisions and guide our calculations. These features are known as the motives. Motives, like the Trema, Consecutive Rooks, the Knight's Collateral Squares, Pawn Links, the Queen Penetration Sac, and many others, will become easily identifiable on the board and the player will be equipped with characteristic ways to react to them. A new addition for June 2015 is "Running Captures". London 1851, with 166 analysis positions in problem-solution form and about 100 more in the appendices, is the best of the Turning Points Series so far: the difficulty ranges from very easy to extremely difficult so that the motives also range from the most fundamental (Kings-Floaters-Lines) to much more subtle ones like King Side Preponderance, which can clue the player in to highly surprising speculative sacrifices. The Appendices cover: A) Kings, Floaters, Lines, with a detailed look at the most fundamental motives B) The Attack, with a more in-depth look at attacks from the tournament C) (a brief look at) Promoting the Pawn, an area in which even today's top players still make serious mistakes. The book concludes with an extensive index.