How to Play Better Checkers

This book is for anyone interested in checkers (or draughts), from beginner to intermediate players. It is written by a chess master and national senior chess champion.

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.

How to have fun with computer chess tournaments

The top computer chess programs (or engines) are much higher rated than the strongest humans. Top chess engines can play some very interesting games.

This book explains how to run a tournament between chess engines. It gives ideas on:

• What engines can be used.
• What software to use.
• What time limits can be used.
• How games can be adjudicated.
• What other settings can be used.
• And more...

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.

Other Books
You can view my author page billjordanchess on Amazon. Some of my other books include:

• Chess Basics Made Easy.
• Chess Concepts Made Easy.
• Tactical Patterns Made Easy.
• Opening Moves Made Easy.
• Opening Strategy Made Easy.
• Optimise your Chess Thinking.
• Play Fast, Positionally and Accurately.
• A series called Tactics Move by Move.
• A series called Endgames Made Easy.
• A series called Play Like a World Champion.

Advanced Chess Programming

Advanced Chess Programming presumes the reader has some knowledge of C or C++ programming and understanding of basics of how engines work. It is not just for those who have tinkered with chess programming, but anyone who is curious about this topic.

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:

• How to Write a Chess Program
• How to write a Bitboard Chess Engine
• How to write a JavaScript Chess Engine

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.

Rate Your Chess Books 1-4

Playing through master games is a proven method of improving. One method is to take one side, usually the winning side, and try and guess the next move. With practice you will correctly predict more moves. Doing so helps develop chess fluency.

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.

How to Score

Chess rater consists of a collection of 20 old master chess games. You may simply play over the games for their own sake if you wish. To use this program to the fullest you will choose one of the games and play over them and take the role of the winning player. The winning side will always be playing up the board.

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.

RATING

The score for each game will always be out of 50. Scores may vary from game to game so to get a consistent rating average your score over 10 games.

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.

Play Like a World champion series

This similar series of books is based on the following World champions.

• Steinitz
• Lasker
• Capablanca
• Alekhine
• Euwue
• Botvinnik
• Smyslov
• Tal
• Petrosian
• Spassky
• Fischer
• Karpov
• Kasparov
• Anand
• Kramnik
• Carlsen

Each book features a different world champion. How many of their moves can you guess?

• 91-100 2500+
• 81-90 2400 - 2499
• 71-80 2200 - 2399
• 61-70 2000 - 2199
• 51-60 1800 - 1999
• 41-50 1600 - 1799
• 31-40 1400 - 1599
• 21-30 1200 - 1399
• 11-20 1000 - 1199
• 0 -10 below 1000

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.

The Art of Cheating in Chess

This is a not too serious look at the myriad forms of cheating in chess, including intentional and unintentional cheating and legal and illegal cheating.

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.

Calculation versus Intuition

The top computer chess programs (or engines) are much higher rated than the strongest humans. Top chess engines can play some very interesting games. This is a collection of about 40 annotated games from games between the very strong Stockfish and Leela chess engines. Games are from one of their matches in the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC). 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.

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.

Adventures in Correspondence Chess

This is a book about some of my experiences of playing correspondence (also called postal) chess. It was a time when chess by email was new and chess engines were not as strong as they are now. Playing correspondence chess can teach many things. The book includes some games I played when I was a junior, still new to chess.

CC Master Tim Runting wrote in the national correspondence chess magazine: Bill Jordan's winning of the 1995 Australian Championship with 12.5/13 in what was one of the strongest events ever has unfortunately gone unnoticed in the CC world. Although chess engines were around then, I won the event without using a computer. This book includes all my games from the championship.

How to Write a Javascript Engine

There are a number of reasons why you may be interested in how a chess program is written:

• You are learning programming and interested in learning something different.
• You are a programmer who is interesting in developing their programming experience.
• You are a chess enthusiast and would like to improve your chess by learning how chess programs work.
• You are interested in developing a chess program and playing against it.
• You are interested in developing a chess program and having it play other engines.
• You do need to be an expert programmer to understand this book. The code is written as simply as possible. The code is designed to be simple even for intermediate and even novice programmers.

If you are not a programmer, but am interested in chess, this book may be of interest.

The book includes annotation of the source code for a complete chess engine the author has developed as a teaching tool. The complete source code is available at GitHub. The program can be edited with any text editor and run on a web page. You can alter the code and see if you can make it stronger.

The program is a derivative of my program referred to in my earlier book How to Write a BitBoard Chess Engine.

The engine is strong enough to beat most social players.

Features of the engine include:

• It can play a human or itself.
• It has the ability to load positions.
• It is reasonably fast.
• It displays the best line of play for both sides.
• Detects checkmate.
• Detects draws by repetition, 50 move rule, stalemate or reduction of material.

Evaluation

The engine evaluates elements of a position including:

• Material.
• Piece position.
• King safety.
• Pawn structure.
• Passed pawns etc

Search

The engine uses a standard alpha-beta minimax search including:

• Cut offs.
• Move ordering.
• History moves,
• Hash tables.
• Extensions.
• Reductions.
• Capture search.
• And much more…

My other books on computer chess include How to Write a Chess Program, The Joy of Chess Programming, How to Write a Bitboard chess Engine and Think Like a Computer.

How to Write a BitBoard Chess Engine

Introduction
There are a number of reasons why you may be interested in how a chess program is written:

• You are learning programming and interested in learning something different.
• You are a programmer who is interesting in developing their programming experience.
• You are a chess enthusiast and would like to improve your chess by learning how chess programs work.
• You are interested in developing a chess program and playing against it.
• You are interested in developing a chess program and having it play other engines.

You do need to be an expert programmer to understand this book. The code is written as simply as possible. The code is designed to be simple even for intermediate and even novice programmers.

If you are not a programmer, but am interested in chess, this book may be of interest.

The book includes annotation of the source code for a complete chess engine the author has developed as a teaching tool. The complete source code is available at GitHub. The program can be compiled using a freely downloadable compiler. You can alter the code and see if you can make it stronger.

The program is a derivative of my program referred to in my earlier book How to Write a Chess Program, which did not use bitboards. The book explains how bitboards work and some of the many ways they can be useful in programming. The bitboard version runs considerably faster and is consequently stronger.

Alternatively you can simply download the exe file and run the program.

The engine is strong enough to beat most social players.

Features of the engine include:

• The ability to load positions.
• The ability to play in chess engine tournaments, with programs such as Arena.
• Its very fast.
• It displays the best line of play for both sides.
• Detects checkmate.
• Detects draws by repetition, 50 move rule, stalemate or reduction of material.

Evaluation

The engine evaluates elements of a position including:

• Material.
• Piece position.
• King safety.
• Pawn structure.
• Passed pawns etc

Search

The engine uses a standard alpha-beta minimax search including:

• Cut offs.
• Move ordering.
• History moves,
• Hash tables.
• Extensions.
• Reductions.
• Capture search.

And much more…

My other books on computer chess include How to Write a Chess Program, The Joy of Chess Programming and Think Like a Computer.

Tactics Move by Move Books 1-5

This is a series of 5 puzzle books. There are different levels of difficulty. Most puzzle books give a position and then a line of play as the answer. This is different in that you need to find each move of the answer, move by move. Note that Look Inside removes page breaks, the full Kindle version has page breaks before moves are shown.  

Why learn tactics?
The most important skill in chess is tactical skill. The stronger the player, the faster they can see tactics. There is a good correlation between how quickly a player sees tactics and their rating. There are several ways in which tactics help your Chess skill.

• You can checkmate, win material, queen a pawn or draw a weaker position with tactics.
• Seeing your opponent's tactics helps prevent them from happening.
• You learn to recognise positions that are tactically weak.
• You learn to recognise positions that are tactically strong.

I am an experienced Chess master and Chess coach. I have read many tactics books, and grew up on books like Fred Reinfeld's 1001 Checkmates and 1001 Winning Sacrifices. All the strong players I knew in those days had worked through quite a few tactical puzzles.

Move by Move
You are only expected to find one move at a time, just like in a real game. This is different from most puzzle books where you are given an entire line of play as the answer.

Order of Difficulty
Positions at the start of Book 1 are suitable for novices, while positions in Book 5 are challenging enough for strong club players.

Avoiding Blunders
A point has been made you may only have a few tactical opportunities per game. However, almost every move you have the chance of making a tactical blunder. Tactical skill is invaluable in checking whether a move is safe or not, before you play it!                  
How difficult should positions be?
Easy positions means you will get through more positions and become familiar with more themes. Difficult positions helps develop the ability to calculate variations in complicated positions. I prefer the first approach based on my coaching experience. It's the easier and more efficient approach.

Comments about notes
Here are explanations for some of the notes. Mating on the file or mates on the file, typically mean it will be mate soon after one or more useless blocking moves. The same applies to mating on the rank or diagonal.

A contact check is when a piece is one square away from the king. If the checking piece is defended a contact check is often strong. Queen contact checks tend to be especially strong.

A discovered check often wins material.

A double check forces the king to move.

Notes sometimes refer to tactical devices such as pins, skewers etc. There is more information about tactical ideas in my book Tactical Patterns Made Easy.

The notes are written are in a way to demonstrate how different types of moves fit together.

Enjoy the positions and have fun!

Other Books
You can view my author page billjordanchess on Amazon. Some of my other books include :

• Chess Basics Made Easy.
• Chess Concepts Made Easy.
• Tactical Patterns Made Easy.
• Opening Moves Made Easy.
• Opening Strategy Made Easy.
• How to Write a Chess Program and other books on computer chess.
• Optimise your Chess Thinking.
• Play Fast, Positionally and Accurately.
• A series called Tactics Move by Move.
• A series called Endgames Made Easy.
• A series called Play Like a World Champion.

     

Play Fast, Positionally and Accurately

When I played in the World Junior, I met International Master David Strauss He was the second of US player Larry Christiansen, who came second in the event. David Strauss gave me this advice. Play fast, play positionally and analyse accurately. What did this mean?

Play Fast

This does not not mean to play so fast that you make silly mistakes. It means you play fast enough to avoid getting very short of time. Playing fast and soundly puts pressure on a slower moving opponent. Playing fast may mean you play more intuitively than otherwise. Play Positionally Playing positionally does not mean always playing timidly or cautiously. It means having a sound positional basis for your moves, regardless of whether the position is quiet or wild.

• Keeping your king safe.
• Placing your pieces on good squares.
• Taking the pawn structure into account.
• Making good exchanges.
• Aiming for good endgames.
• Analyse Accurately.

There are some good intuitive positional players who make errors because they don’t analyse (or calculate) enough when needed. Accurate calculation helps avoid tactical errors. Combining These Combining playing fast, playing positionally and analysing accurately together helps you bring out your best. This book includes 25 annotated games.

I have used some of my own games. This makes it a little different from most chess books.

It is unlikely that you have seen the games before (unless you were one of the players)! I know what I was thinking and feeling during the games. There is very little computer analysis, which can be overwhelming. The focus is more on why moves were played, not what was missed. There are good moves and not so good moves. Games may fluctuate. One has to play the move that creates the best chances.

Games

Games were played in State Championships over the last 3 years. Each championship was a ten player round robin. The time limit was 90 minutes for the game plus a 30 second increment per move. There is a wide variety of openings played and types of middlegame and endgame positions.

I believe you will find the games interesting and instructive.

Enjoy!