Learn Chess the Right Way! Book 4: Sacrifice to win
Former world champion Susan Polgar, an award-winning coach, wrote Learn Chess the Right Way as a five-volume puzzle series for novice, beginner and intermediate players. Together the books cover the key tactics for checkmating and gaining material as well as the basics of defence, with more than 500 puzzles in every volume.Book 4 is about giving something up to get more back. Every exercise calls for a sacrifice that leads either to checkmate or to a material gain.Chapters 1 to 5 each feature one piece being offered up to mate the enemy king, beginning with the queen and the rook. In Chapters 6 to 10 you are no longer told which piece to sacrifice, but you do know the prize — the opponent’s queen, rook, and so on. Chapter 11 removes every clue: sacrifice something, then either mate or come out ahead in material. Many of the solutions rely on forks, discoveries, pins and other motifs from the first two volumes, and most require you to see two or three moves for each side ahead.Built on more than forty years of Polgar’s experience as a top player and teacher, this volume moves you on from spotting single tactics to calculating short, forcing sequences.About the AuthorSusan Polgar is the top-ranked woman player in the United States and has won four Women’s World Championships. She rose to number one among women worldwide when she was just 15 and held a top-three place for over twenty years. Her coaching brought her U.S. Coach of the Year honours in 2013 and FIDE’s Trainer of the Year title in 2014 — a combination no one had achieved before. Her SPICE program has won six national Division I collegiate titles in a row, at Texas Tech and then Webster University, and she was the first woman head coach to lead a team to a national collegiate title.