By Efstratios Grivas

Published by GAMBIT

 Grandmaster Efstratios Grivas lives in Athens, and is also an International Chess Arbiter and Organizer. He has represented his country on a great many occasions, winning an individual gold medal at the 1989 European Team Championship and an individual silver medal at the 1998 Olympiad. He is a FIDE Senior Trainer, a Greek federal trainer and an experienced writer.

Chess College is an exciting new series of books that will take intermediate players to new levels of chess understanding. Efstratios Grivas, a grandmaster and highly experienced chess trainer, provides a wealth of instruction on many important aspects of the middlegame. The emphasis is on practical understanding: whenever he introduces a new idea, Grivas immediately illustrates it with a number of entertaining and instructive examples, many of which are drawn from his own practice.

Volume 1: Strategy looks at important training methods and general issues related to preparation for competitive play. This book discusses a number of major strategic themes, including attack on the king, positional sacrifices, and various types of positional advantages.

The chapters are as follow…

• Introduction

• Getting to know ourselves

• Training

• Attacking the uncastled king

• Attack on the king: Castling on the same sides

• Attack on the king: Castling on opposite sides

• The exchange sacrifices

• The positional sacrifices

• Outposts

• Open files

• Semi-open files

• Foreposts

 In the first main chapter, "Getting to know ourselves", Grivas gives us some example charts for the reader to fill out to help him or her become more familiar with themselves, their style of play, and strengths and weaknesses. The next chapter "Training" talks about the different kinds and levels of personal chess trainers as well as "The Ideal Trainer". This is followed by the 3 chapters on attacking the king: Attacking the uncastled king, Attack on the king: Castling on the same sides, and Attack on the king: Castling on opposite sides. These chapters are nicely illustrated by some nice attacking games. Next Grivas goes over typical sacrifices, the exchange sacrifice and the positional sacrifice. After that he shows some typical positional advantages, such as: Outposts, Open files, Semi-open files, and foreposts.

First of all, every game in this book is one of Grivas's own except for one. This does have both positives and negatives and I will leave this up to the reader to decide. The only other thing I would have liked to see is a chapter dedicated to defence, an important topic often missed in books like this. Over all it is a good book and will definitely help teach some important ideas to the intermediate players.

NSG rating = 9.4 of 10