It is essential to play purposefully and to avoid falling into traps or reaching a position that you don't understand.This is not a book that provides masses of variations to memorize. Paul van der Sterren instead offers a wealth of ideas and explanation, together with the basic variations of each and every opening. This knowledge will equip players to succeed in the opening up to good club level, and provide a superb grounding in opening play on which to build a more sophisticated repertoire. The strategies he explains will, unlike ever-changing chess opening theory, remain valid as long as chess is played, and so the time spent studying this book will be rewarded many times over.

    In this volume, Tal sets the stage and explains every one of the 21 games, telling both the on- and off-the-board story of this clash of styles and thought.

    Capablanca was a World Chess Champion and one of the greatest players in chess history, yet he wrote very little about the game. Chess Fundamentals, though normally for the beginning player, contains valuable insights that will benefit players at all levels of understanding, including masters. Capablanca explains:·How to obtain and nurture a passed pawn·How to get and keep the initiative·Cardinal rules for rook and pawn endings·How to attack using knight as the main force·How to cut off enemy piecesChess Fundamentals is one of the jewels of chess literature.

    Christopher Devon tries to make a new life and, after a bit of persuasion from his daughter, to meet a new woman. But how to find one? And how to placate a son who thinks you should never have split up in the first place? Dr. Devon is not the only man with woman trouble. Tiger Wilson has been married just a little too comfortably for 30 years, and Gary Flynn is a serial womanizer who refuses to settle down. But soon all three of their lives are turned upside down, and not just by women. This entertaining novel shows how reality can prove a fly in the ointment of living happily ever after.

    An essential pastime of Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries, and later adopted by the Communists as a symbol of Soviet power, chess was inextricably linked to the rise and fall of the “evil empire.” This original narrative history recounts in gripping detail the singular part the Immortal Game played in the Cold War. From chess’s role in the Russian Revolution -- Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky were all avid players -- to the 1945 radio match when the Soviets crushed the Americans, prompting Stalin’s telegram “Well done lads!”; to the epic contest between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972 at the height of détente, when Kissinger told Fischer to “go over there and beat the Russians”; to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, White King and Red Queen takes us on a fascinating tour of the Cold War’s checkered landscape.

    Ace Double 51375 includes:The Lord of the Trees by Philip José FarmerThe Mad Goblin by Philip José Farmer

    Plunged into an underworld of illegal immigrant communities, they discover that the murdered girl's studies at a London College may have threatened to reveal things that some people will go to any lengths to keep secret.‘A Dark Redemption’ explores a sinister case that will force DI Carrigan to face up to his past and DS Miller to confront what path she wants her future to follow.

    In his remarkable new thriller, Emerson fuses together a gripping drama with unforgettable scenes of peril that, in this realm, can explode at any second.Jason Gun, a risk-taking rookie firefighter who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, has found in his firehouse the family he never had as a child. Then, in one ill-fated turn of events, it all begins to go wrong.A bizarre accident brings a thrill-seeking woman into Engine Company 29–and into Jason’s life. Suddenly, his future on the job is at risk. Two fellow firefighters know that he missed a call because of some sexual heroics at the wrong time and place. Now, deeply in their debt, he will find out what kind of men his partners really are.When these two firefighters come upon a fortune in missing bearer bonds–money found in a dead man’s house–Jason is forced to become an accessory to their crime. And when evidence of their greed, foolishness, and thievery begins to emerge, Jason is witness to an even darker deed.Suddenly, the twenty-four-year-old, who only wanted to do the right thing, is trapped behind a wall of silence. Trying to undo his mistake, Jason moves further into the darkness, where a beautiful young woman might just be his emotional rescue–or yet one more very wrong move. Unfortunately for Jason, the worst isn’t behind him. Like a fire hit by wind, the killing has raged out of control.Capturing the thin line that separates a hero from a criminal, and an enemy from a friend, Earl Emerson’s new novel is a gripping tale of a man’s dangerous fall from grace–and of his fierce battle for redemption.

    The progressively more difficult puzzles include a double murder.

    In the ruthless pursuit of his goals he would sacrifice anything - even another climber's life. His friends and family know and fear it. So when he sights a virgin peak in the Himalayas that exists on no map, no one is surprised when he becomes obsessed with being the first to scale it.Together with his climbing partner, Bill Taylor, they set off into a region of Tibet highly restricted by the Chinese. But a freak accident puts one of their team in mortal danger and it is left to a local Tibetan girl to lead them to Geltang, a monastery that has been hidden from the outside world since the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when most of the monasteries were pillaged and burned. Soon, as the Chinese secret police get wind of them, Luca and Bill find themselves embroiled in an age-old struggle, not for their lives but to protect the precious secret that Geltang hides and the legacy of Tibet itself.

    Written by the man who started the adventure, Behind Deep Blue reveals the inside story of what happened behind the scenes at the two historic Deep Blue vs. Kasparov matches. This is also the story behind the quest to create the mother of all chess machines. The book unveils how a modest student project eventually produced a multimillion dollar supercomputer, from the development of the scientific ideas through technical setbacks, rivalry in the race to develop the ultimate chess machine, and wild controversies to the final triumph over the world's greatest human player.In nontechnical, conversational prose, Feng-hsiung Hsu, the system architect of Deep Blue, tells us how he and a small team of fellow researchers forged ahead at IBM with a project they'd begun as students at Carnegie Mellon in the mid-1980s: the search for one of the oldest holy grails in artificial intelligence--a machine that could beat any human chess player in a bona fide match. Back in 1949 science had conceived the foundations of modern chess computers but not until almost fifty years later--until Deep Blue--would the quest be realized.Hsu refutes Kasparov's controversial claim that only human intervention could have allowed Deep Blue to make its decisive, "uncomputerlike" moves. In riveting detail he describes the heightening tension in this war of brains and nerves, the "smoldering fire" in Kasparov's eyes. Behind Deep Blue is not just another tale of man versus machine. This fascinating book tells us how man as genius was given an ultimate, unforgettable run for his mind, no, not by the genius of a computer, but of man as toolmaker.

    In this ingenious collection, multiple award-winning mystery author Lawrence Block leads us into dark, unprotected fields, where human sheep gather in terror of predatory wolves. And we follow willingly-through a hayseed's bloody mid-life crisis, into the explosive heart of a vengeful CPA:s account-balancing...and onto the streets with p.i. Matthew Scudder, as he spends an inheritance from a baglady to hunt down the old woman's killer.

    With strict admission standards and a progressive curriculum, Brooklyn's Edward R. Murrow High School has long been one of New York's public-education success stories, serving a diverse neighborhood of immigrants and minorities and ranking among the nation's best high schools. At Murrow, there are no sports teams, and the closest thing to jocks are found on the school's powerhouse chess team, which annually competes for the national championship.In "The Kings of New York" sportswriter Michael Weinreb follows the members of the Murrow chess team through an entire season, from cash games in Washington Square Park to city and state tournaments to the SuperNationals in Nashville, where this eclectic bunch competes against private schoolers and suburbanites. Along the way, Weinreb brings to life a number of colorful characters: the Yale-educated calculus teacher (and former semipro hockey player) who guides the savants while struggling to find funding for his team; an aspiring rapper and tournament hustler who plays with cutthroat instinct; the team's lone girl, a shy Ukrainian immigrant; the Puerto Rican teen from the rough neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant who plays an ingenious opening gambit named the Orangutan; and the Lithuanian immigrant and team star whose chess rating is climbing toward grandmaster status.In the bestselling tradition of such books as "Word Freak" and "Friday Night Lights, The Kings of New York" is a riveting look inside the world of competitive chess and an inspiring profile of young genius.

    And it falls to untrained Thane, whose proud ancestry has become a laughingstock, to alert the border garrisons at distant Underfall.

    Until now, his charisma, sheer size and, when all else failed, powerful fists had been enough to dispatch his enemies. But on a smoldering deck off the coast of Madagascar, his shipmates dead or dying all around him, his cutlass has just claimed the lives of six pirates. Finding himself surrounded by their revenge-thirsty crewmates, Silver fears his promising merchant navy career is at an end. But then the pirate captain makes him an offer he can't refuse.On the other side of the world, Joseph Flint, a naval officer wronged by his superiors, plots a bloody mutiny. Strikingly handsome, brilliant but prey to sadistic tendencies, Flint is regarded as the most dangerous bandit on the high seas.Together these gentlemen of fortune forge a deadly and unstoppable partnership, steering a course through treachery and betrayal while amassing vast treasure. But the arrival of Selena, a beautiful runaway slave with a murderous past, and Flint's schemes to secure the pieces of gold for himself trigger a rivalry that will turn the best of friends into sworn enemies. And so the legend of Treasure Island begins -- an epic battle of wits and blades that unravels the mysteries of Robert Louis Stevenson's greatest work on the sweltering seas of the Caribbean.