The advice frequently given to chess-players eager to improve their results is straightforward: study tactics! But there is often little useful guidance as to how this is best done.

By solving puzzle positions? Or endgame studies? By dissecting the games of great tacticians? Few books present a structured approach to tactics, so this book fills a valuable niche in the ambitious player's library.

The authors present each major tactical theme in turn, explaining how it works and providing inspiring examples. They then explain how you can spot the idea in your own games and use it to your advantage.

You immediately get a chance to put your knowledge to the test, as there are challenging exercises throughout the whole book, with detailed solutions.

The second part of the book offers more advanced material, and takes us inside the professional's tactics laboratory. Here we see how tactical themes are combined, and employed to achieve strategic goals.

We are also shown how grandmasters spot the targets for their breathtaking combinations, which we thus come to see not as sheer witchcraft, but as the product of disciplined thought and training.

Bulgarian grandmaster Dejan Bojkov is an extremely active player and writer on chess, whose reports appear on Chessbase.com and in Chess Today, among many others.

Vladimir Georgiev is also a grandmaster from Bulgaria, who now plays for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - he has won the national championship of both countries. He is the trainer of former Women's World Champion, grandmaster Antoaneta Stefanova.

Contents:

Symbols 4
Introduction 5
Part 1: The Basics
1 Pin 7
2 Deflection 16
3 Overload 23
4 Decoy 28
5 Double Attack 36
6 Knight Fork 44
7 Discovered Attack 50
8 Clearance 56
9 Obstruction 64
10 Removing the Defender 71
11 The Power of the Pawn 77
12 Back-Rank Mate 85
13 Stalemate 91
14 Perpetual Check and Fortresses 96
Part 2: Advanced Tactics
15 f7: Weak by Presumption 103
16 The Vulnerable Rook’s Pawn 111
17 Attacking the Fianchetto 118
18 The Mystery of the Opposite-Coloured Bishops 125
19 Chess Highways: Open Files 131
20 Trapping a Piece 141
21 Practice Makes Perfect 149
Solutions 158
Index of Players 188
Index of Composers 191