The eBook versions are fairly straight forward. You see a diagram with the choices. You cannot see the answer until you go to the next page on your device.
With paperbacks it is a little more complicated. You need to cover up the current page with a sheet of paper or card and move it down one line at a time. When the choices are displayed, do not move to the next line until you have chosen the move.
To make this easier, there is only one column on each page. The instructions are in each book.
You do not need to know how to play chess to read this. Many of the ideas are similar to those in chess, however they will be fully explained when they are introduced. Checkers is a simpler game than chess, however there is still much subtlety and a wide difference between skill levels. With a good approach a player can improve at checkers very quickly.
It covers the rules. Many social players do not know how to play according to the rules. This is a shame because rules such as forced capture determine the tactics in the game.
It also covers basic strategy and tactics. Strategy includes strategy in the opening, middle game and endgame. A wide variety of tactical ideas are demonstrated, which you can use to outwit your opponents.
There are tips on how to look ahead moves and calculate variations. A method is presented that can be used to help select your moves.
There is also analysis of complex positions and a complete game. Studying complex positions can help bring your play up to expert level.
This book explains how to run a tournament between chess engines. It gives ideas on:
A sample series of tournaments is described. Tournaments include qualifying tournaments, a semi-finals and a finals. Engines playing include some of the top engines in the world, including the neural network program Leela.
There is a collection of 36 annotated games from the Finals. They are annotated by Bill Jordan, a chess coach, Fide Master and national senior champion. Notes are written in the style of notes for games between humans. Games can be played through with or without a board and set. Players of any level can learn from them or they can be played through just for fun.
My other books on computer chess include How to Write a Chess Program, How to Write a Bitboard Chess Engine, The Joy of Chess Programming and Think Like a Computer.
Another book on computer chess games is Calculation versus Intuition : Stockfish versus Leela.
For readers without programming experience I suggest my book The Joy of Chess Programming.
This book designed for people who have experience or understanding of chess programming or have read one or more of my books:
It presents programming ideas from my strongest chess engine Simplicity. It also mentions ideas from open source engines such as Crafty, TSCP and the very strong StockFish. Also mentioned are ideas from engines with no open source such as Fruit, Rybka and Houdini.
The author is a FIDE master and national senior chess champion in addition to being a chess programming enthusiast. He was also an IT trainer for 10 years, teaching programming languages such as C++ to adults.
When I was a junior I played through many master games, in many cases guessing the moves. It helped me to become national Junior champion.
One suggested approach was not to take too long on the moves, say about 10 seconds or so. You could score correct guesses. If the move was totally unexpected, then it would be a good time to see if you could understand why the move was played. Every move should have a clear idea behind it. If you cannot see the idea, there is a learning opportunity there.
Some books contained similar exercises as well as some columns in magazines etc. The exercises here are a little different. Instead of having to look at all possible moves, you will be given between one and four choices. This is similar to a multiple choice exam. This makes the task easier than having to look at all moves and may mean you examine some moves you would not have normally considered.
For a number of opening moves you will not need to guess the move. The number will vary from game to game and will generally be between 8 and 12 moves (for each side).
After these opening moves have been played, you will then try and predict your players moves. Your choice will be selected from a number of candidate moves. In a few cases you will only have one move to choose from. In this case you shall get the correct answer. In most cases you will be presented with the maximum number of options which is 4. In same cases there will be 2 or 3 options.
If you guess correctly you will score points which will range from 1 to 6. This depends on the approximate complexity and difficulty of the move. If you score incorrectly you will not score for that move. Regardless of whether you are correct or not the correct move will be played. You can either write down or otherwise keep track of your total score and see what category you reach.
These are based on the FIDE (The international chess federation) rating system developed by Professor Elo.
The rating of 2400+ is only an approximation of the strength needed to be an international master.
Each book features a different world champion. How many of their moves can you guess?
Note that the total score is out of 100, unlike in Rate Your Chess and Rate Your chess 2 in which the score is out of 50.
The challenge is to increase your rating with each game!
Some time before creating this series there were some issues with the way I created chess diagrams in my books. Look Inside the Book would frequently split the boards and create gaps between the ranks. One of my readers pointed out that the diagrams in one of my books did not display correctly on his phone.
The way I was creating diagrams was to use tables in html. One advantage was that this led to small book files. This made them quicker to upload and download.
Another advantage was the Amazon delivery fee was minimal. The delivery fee is subtracted from the author's royalty.
Because of the issues with tables I decided to change the way I created tables. I went to some trouble to convert all my diagrams to image files. OK I wrote a program to do it. Did you think I would convert tens of thousands of diagrams manually?
Part of one of the diagrams is on the above book cover.
Unfortunately this caused the delivery fee to blow out in books with many diagrams. In many cases the royalty went to zero. A good example was what happened with my Rate Your Chess series of 2 books. Diagram numbers could not be reduced as there needed to be a diagram for each position a move was to be guessed in.
My solution was to split the 2 books into 4 moves while improving and adding text. And that is why there are 4 books instead of 2.
It looks at some historical cheating incidents, including the story of the chess playing machine in the 1800s. It explains some the reasons why the chess clock was invented.
Included is cheating in various forms of chess including in OTB (over the board chess), correspondence chess, online chess, blitz, simuls etc.
It looks at cheating in world championship matches.
It includes issues such as passive smoking in chess events, computer cheating, the story of dunny gate and many other stories.
There are only decisive games. Draws are not included.
To prevent games being repeated, openings are fixed. Each engine plays both white and black in each fixed opening position. Some openings are risky and dubious. In some cases both engines lost when playing one colour.
A wide variety of openings has been selected, including gambits and some leading to highly unbalanced positions.
Stockfish plays good solid chess, relying on a deep and fast search and good positional evaluation. Stockfish represents calculation.
Leela generally plays well strategically, especially for an engine. However it often does not mind sacrificing material for piece activity. Leela searches deeply with it’s Monte Carlo Tree Search, but does not search as many positions as StockFish. The contrast of styles makes for interesting chess. Leela represents intuition.
While Stockfish was the overall winner, Leela won it’s share of games.
