Lessons from a great teacher vol.3

Suppose you are a club player who has the opportunity to talk long and hard with a great teacher.

How would I seize that opportunity? Club players are not usually able to appreciate the subtleties of high competition.

Great players can analyze chess with a depth that is not affordable for fans.

However, it is possible that precisely for having reached that level of excellence, it is difficult for a great coach to understand the mental gaps of an amateur player.

Lessons with a great teacher bridges the great player and the amateur through a series of conversations between a teacher, the famous grandmaster Boris Gulko, and his pupil, Dr. Joel Sneed, a psychology professor and club player.

The lessons are based on Gulko's own struggles against his colleagues, and focus on strategy, tactics and the role of psychology in competition.

Boris Gulko is one of the most prestigious masters in the world. He was a Soviet champion and has also won the US Championship twice since his immigration in 1986, making him the only player in the world to hold Soviet and American titles.

In this volume: strategic and tactical ideas, and how to combine them on the board. Among other matters, it deals with attack and defense, the exploitation of weak squares, the struggle for initiative, Sicilian strategy and the pair of bishops.