Are you looking for something a bit different? Do you wish to surprise your opponent on the first move? Do you enjoy playing creatively from the beginning of the game? Look no further than 1 b4! With this aggressive pawn lunge White takes the game into relatively unknown territory and forces Black players onto their own devices. Those facing 1 b4 are not allowed to fall into the comfort zone of established theory; instead they have to think for themselves from very early on.This opening has been seriously neglected by chess literature... until now. In this landmark book, Yury Lapshun and Nick Conticello take an in-depth look at 1 b4 and its many variations. The authors use illustrative games to highlight key ideas and tactics for both sides. They also provide a practical and fun-to-play repertoire for White, offering options against both Black's main defences and his more offbeat tries. Read this book and confound your opponents with 1 b4! *A complete repertoire for White*Presents answers to all of Black's possibilities*Ideal for ambitious and adventurous players

The perfect and necessary addition to any personal chess library from America's foremost chess coach and game strategist for Netflix's The Queen's Gambit. In this comprehensive, accessible reference, National Master Bruce Pandolfini covers every aspect of the game, from chessboard and pieces to history and strategy, and addresses virtually any possible question or situation that may arise. From algebra notation to zugzwang, Pandolfini has created the chess bible for players of all levels. And in addition to answers to over 500 questions, he has included his terrific short chess course plus tournament tips and endgame maxims. You'll learn the difference between a mating attack and a mating net, the best way to gain control of the center in the opening, why the Russians are so successful at chess, what happened to Bobby Fischer, and more! For an edge up on the competition, look no further than Pandolfini's Chess Complete.

This book is partly designed as an autobiographical experience focusing on the processes that arise in the life of a chess player that have be translated into everyday life. In part, the book incorporates psychological theories that generally explain these processes, but overall it can be seen as a guide on how to use any activity to learn skills that will enrich your life. There are several activities in life which can be seen in the same way if we know where and how to exploit the opportunities. The truth is that all aspirations are interconnected when we keep an eye on the thematic links. I believe that this book will give you a new insight into how any ability can be transferred from a particular activity to the universal wisdom of life. It will awaken your networking skills and teach you how to turn life activities into lifelong skills that will improve your well-being. The course of the book follows the typical process of playing chess, starting with training, followed by the tournament situation, the course of the game, the time after the game and the tournament. Since I am not a poet, I have often borrowed some quotations from famous, imaginative and clever people from all over the world. I believe that these valuable thoughts have enriched the book. One thing I ask you to do while reading this book is to open your mind and enjoy the inner journey. So let us go and try to become aware of the processes behind our life activities. Let us find out what and why we do what we do in our daily lives.

Covers every significant aspect -- from palming to clairvoyance, vanishing and producing an object, using essential apparatus, etc. Explains hundreds of astonishing tricks -- with coins, cups and balls, handkerchiefs, cards, more. A book with an excellent reputation among professional magicians for teaching techniques. 57 illustrations.

Eternal Night of Lockwood is an adventure book, filled with intrigue, mystery, and horror, Powered by Zweihander RPG. RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT Five days ago, a starless and moonless night fell over the Lockwood forest and pioneer town of Ertol. The sawmills have gone quiet, and the lumberjacks have begun to revolt. The Eternal Night has come, and all of Ertol is in the grips of panic and fear. But where there's darkness, there's opportunity. As citizens of Ertol, you'll find yourselves drawn into a pitch-black web of urban conspiracy and rural horror, spanning the gloom of the six boroughs and into the ancient Lockwood. Will you rise to the occasion as a light in the darkness, or will you succumb to the Eternal Night? This ZWEIHAENDER RPG book is a campaign-length adventure, taking characters from Basic to Advanced Tier. Its adventure can also be broken up into ten individual quests to suit your gaming group's needs. Intended to be used by both players and gamemasters, this book provides a host of new character options, expanded bestiary, and customizable adventure difficulty settings to accommodate higher Tier adventures.

teNeues NYC Stationery is proud to share our newest offering, classic Playing Cards with our signature style curated from museum art and illustrations from our favourite artists around the world printed on embossed, premium blue-core card stock in a gift box with flip-top magnetic closure. Cactus Party by the French artist who goes by Hello Marine is bold and fun with geometric shapes with on trend bold blue, aqua and neon yellow details. An update to the eighties party aesthetic we all love. Our little portable box is giftable and great for travel, fits in any bag and the magnetic closure keeps the cards together between games. Standard deck of 54 playing cards including 2x joker cards Full-colour, richly -printed artwork on embossed, blue-core card stock Giftable flip-top box with magnetic closure Box measures: 69 x 95 x 25 mm Hello Marine is a French illustrator and printmaker living in the UK. She was raised in Paris and the southwest of France. Hello Marine's style is bold, colourful, and joyful. Her illustrations appeal to adults and children alike.

Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu. Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art--especially in terms of aesthetics--of role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.

Nothing more clearly separates chess master from chess wannabe than winning endgame play. For most chess players, victory is the real finish line. And the endgame is the last lap of the race. This revised, updated edition of Just the Facts brings English readers the once strictly guarded and time-tested Soviet training methods, the key to the 50-year Russian dominance of the chess world. Winning Chess Endgames can take you from beginner to master.

Following on from the long success of one of the most important chess books ever written, Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games, renowned chess writer Andrew Soltis delivers a book on today's blockbuster chess player Magnus Carlsen. Magnus Carlsen has been the world's number one player for more than a decade, has won more super-tournaments than anyone ever and is still in his prime. He is the only player to repeatedly win the world championships in classical, speed and blitz chess formats. This book details his remarkable rise and how he acquired the crucial skills of 21st-century grandmaster chess He will defend his world championship title this autumn and if he wins, it will set a record of five championship match victories. This book take you through how he wins by analysing 60 of the games that made him who he is, describing the intricacies behind his and his opponent's strategies, the tactical justification of moves and the psychological battle in each one. This book is essential for chess enthusiasts, competitors and professionals of all skill sets.

There are definite benefits in allowing a One No-Trump opening to include a 5-card major. More and more experts at international level have adopted such a style.;If you are an ambitious player and are keen to improve the range of your no-trump bidding you will need a method to locate a 5-card major with opener or to discover a 4-4 major fit.;5-Card Major Stayman provides an easy structure that allows you to do just that and still enables you to use transfers to either major, even after a INT:2C response.

The evolution of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game begins here! This 416-page rulebook contains everything you need to create and advance your Pathfinder Playtest character from level 1 to 20, as well as hundreds of new and updated spells, magic items, feats, and Game Master rules necessary to run a complete Pathfinder Playtest campaign! Delve the deepest dungeons with a brand-new goblin alchemist hero, or convert your favorite existing characters to the new system! With gorgeous interior art from Pathfinder cover artist Wayne Reynolds and new rules concepts on nearly every page, the Pathfinder Playtest Rulebook is your gateway to the future of Pathfinder. The only thing missing is your playtest feedback! This deluxe special edition is bound in faux leather with metallic deboss cover elements and a bound-in cloth notebook. The perfect way to commemorate Pathfinder's new edition! (Note: The public playtest begins August 2 and runs through the end of 2018. Due to this limited time window, this book will NEVER be reprinted!)

The a...6 Slav is a relatively new phenomenon in a very popular opening, and over the last few years it has attracted the attention of some top class players: Alexei Shirov, Sergei Movsesian, England's Julian Hodgson, and more recently, world number one Garry Kasparov. In this first ever book solely devoted to the a...6 Slav, Grandmaster and openings expert Glenn Flear delves into the secrets of this complex line. He explains the tactics and positional ideas for both White and Black and presents a comprehensive coverage of the theory, concentrating on all the new wrinkles and discoveries.
* Written by a prominent openings theoretician
* All major lines are covered
* Ideal for club and tournament players

With Weapons of Chess, National Master and highly acclaimed teacher Bruce Pandolfini brings us the most accessible and easy-to-use chess strategy book ever.

Written for beginning and intermediate players, Weapons of Chess is the first encyclopedia of chess strategies that doesn't rely on the usual baffling chess notation. There are no symbolic chess moves, no charts or sequences in chess notation: every move is explained in words.

Arranged alphabetically for easy use and based mainly on pawn formation, the incredibly detailed and thorough entries in this book talk a player through dozens of common strategic dilemmas, such as "doubled pawn," "bishops vs. knights," and "hanging pawn pair." Diagrams illustrate the terms, first showing the basic position and then strategically moving to more complicated versions of it. Players will learn how to formulate plans once they have reached a middlegame, enabling them to make wiser strategic decisions after the first few moves of the game.

Designed for use as a ready reference during actual practice games, and usable without a chess board, Weapons of Chess is a unique and invaluable resource for any developing chess player.

I look one move ahead...the best!A", Siegbert Tarrasch Chess is a wonderfully rich and complex game, but ultimately the goal can be simply defined as finding the best move, time after time. If you are able to do this, you will win your games. However, the million dollar question is: how can we give ourselves the very best chance of doing so? Per Ostman is convinced that there are three key elements that we require: first and foremost, a structured move-by-move thinking process; second, the desired skills to execute this process; and finally, traditional chess knowledge we can build upon. Ostman examines these three vital building blocks which form the basis of what we need to master. He describes in detail a clear thinking process he has developed over several years as a chess teacher, a process to guide us in our ultimate search to find the best move. *Improve your chess by structured move selection *Numerous examples to illustrate clear thinking processes *Covers calculation, planning and attacking skills *Includes opening, middlegame and endgame play

Based on his private course for students, America's foremost chess coach and game strategist for Netflix's The Queen's Gambit presents an easy-to-use guide that explains invaluable "inner circle" endgame concepts for players of any level. The endgame has always been a particularly instructive phase of chess play. It provides the perfect opportunity for understanding the potential power of each chess piece in every chess situation-from opening move to checkmate. But the endgame is often viewed as an inaccessible area of play by most players whose experience is limited to watching championship games. Now, Pandolfini changes all of that. With one endgame example per page and covering every endgame category in order of difficulty, Paldolfini walks you through all the basic concepts including: --square of the pawn --critical squares --corresponding squares --other new approaches not mentioned in classic references Featuring a glossary of concepts and diagrams throughout, this volume is the not-so-secret password to a whole new realm of chess play and entertainment for the average player.

Competition brings many benefits - or so all the politicians say. Bridge players certainly subscribe to the theory. These days somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all auctions see both sides entering the fray. Having a basic knowledge of how to get into or stay in the bidding is therefore a key attribute for success at the bridge table. You will often hear rules quoted such as 'do not double them into the game' or 'leave the five level to the enemy'. This book covers all the rules likely to help you and, as usual in this series, you will find plenty of examples both for and against each one.

These slot-together building cards are creative fun for all the family Turrets, ramparts, portcullises, arrow-slit windows, walls, roofs, flags and more - create your own medieval masterpiece. Each box contains 64 cards (105 x 69 mm) in a variety of graphic designs. Clever paper engineering allows you to slot the cards together, building up and out in whichever way you like! Also included is a short booklet, with information on the architecture of castles and suggestions of card building methods. The instructions tell you how to build a castle, or you can let your imagination run riot and design your own! Renowned illustrator Paul Farrell has designed these cards in a cool, graphic style - turning the image of a castle into a work of art.

Based on six games played by the "Kasparov generation" of Soviet chess players, America's foremost chess coach and game strategist for Netflix's The Queen's Gambit presents a complete course in intermediate chess logic. The "Kasparov generation" of Soviet chess players is perhaps the best-trained crop of young players ever to come out of the country, holding the world title for 55 of the last 60 years. With the clarity of instruction for which he is renowned, Bruce Pandolfini illustrates such concepts as Light Squares, Time, Attack, Pawn Advances, and Counterattack in six chapters structured around each of the six games. Featuring a Grandmaster Glossary, 101 diagrams, an index, and algebraic notation throughout, this uniquely crafted volume puts the most valuable concepts in world-class chess at the intermediate player's fingertips.

To bid in a controlled auction to a successful slam is one of the great pleasures of bridge. Understanding Slam Bidding teaches you the important modern conventions, but more importantly, it shows you how to think so that you can tell whether a card in your hand is just what partner wants, or is waste paper. If you take the time to study this book you will find yourself bidding successful slams with fewer points than is normally considered necessary, and you will avoid bidding slams that are doomed to fail when you have lots of points but no fit.

Improve your RPG campaign with this comprehensive and interactive guide to making the most out of your gaming experience. Whatever RPG game you play, from D&D to Call of Cthulu to licensed games like Star Wars, every detail is important. From setting the scene to choosing the right music or even adjusting the lighting to create the right atmosphere, every choice helps maximize your gaming experience. The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide provides practical advice for everything from pre-game preparations and in-game improvisation to working out a plan of attack with your teammates to learning how to lean into the setting of your game. Including instructions, prompts, and activities, it offers everything you need for successful, fun role-playing with your friends every time you play. Create hours of narrative and make the most out of your storytelling skills by setting the perfect scene for your adventure. Whether you need advice on your character or working better with your gaming group, James D'Amato includes everything you'll need to take your game to the next level.

The Pathfinder Society is a globe-trotting organization of adventurers, scholars, and warriors all dedicated to exploration, collecting lost knowledge and treasure, and sharing it with the world. Lost Omens: Pathfinder Society Guide details everything players and GMs need to know about the Pathfinder Society, from the basics of membership, to the Society's various factions, to the various lodges littered throughout the Inner Sea region. This book is the go-to source for the history and lore of the Pathfinder Society and features new rules content including new equipment, wayfinders, and support for Pathfinder-related archetypes! A useful book in its own right, this helpful volume is a must-have for participants in Paizo's massive Pathfinder Society worldwide organized play campaign, and a great way to get involved in the international campaign! Written by: Kate Baker, James Case, John Compton, Vanessa Hoskins, Mike Kimmel, Ron Lundeen, Dennis Muldoon, kieran t. newton, Michael Sayre, Clark Valentine, Tonya Woldridge, and Linda Zayas-Palmer