Learn Chess the Right Way! Book 1: Must-know Checkmates
Susan Polgar — former world champion and an award-winning coach — built the five-book Learn Chess the Right Way series to give novices, beginners and intermediate players a structured path through the patterns that decide games: delivering checkmate, winning material and defending against both. Every volume is a workbook of 500 puzzles, arranged so that each skill is learned before the next one is added.Book 1 is devoted to mate in one. The opening five chapters each assign the finishing blow to one particular piece, starting with the queen and the rook and working down from there. Chapters 6 to 8 bring in mates that rely on a tactical twist, such as a pin or a discovered check. In Chapter 9 the training wheels come off: the puzzles are mixed, and nothing tells you which piece should give mate. Chapter 10 then takes the step that the rest of the book has prepared for, presenting the simplest patterns of mate in two.The method distils more than four decades of Polgar’s experience at the board and in the classroom. Work through these positions and the most common mating patterns will start to jump out at you in your own games.About the AuthorSusan Polgar has won four Women’s World Championships and is the top-ranked woman player in the United States. She reached number one among the world’s women at the age of 15 and spent more than twenty years in the top three. She was named U.S. Coach of the Year in 2013 and FIDE Trainer of the Year in 2014, becoming the first person ever to receive both distinctions. Between them, the SPICE squads she has guided — first at Texas Tech, then at Webster University — have claimed the National Division I collegiate title five years running.