There's no limit to what's available to a Chess student today, you can find more than 500 Gbytes of books, in PDF or even Chessbase format, programs, hundreds of instruction movies, a forest in which the Chess student can go astray. A large choice of endgame books is available, each proposing some hundreds of sequences, and when you have finished reading them, may be you will recall three or four which struck your imagination: and over the board you will recall that in a similar position there's a winning sequence, but it does not come back to your mind.

As when visiting an important Museum, at the end of your visit your mind will be confused, and you will remember just a couple of masterpieces.

It is a common opinion that strong players see a position divided in elementary groups (chunks), each having exact and known characteristics, due to the huge number of games they played, analyzed and stored in their deep memory. They immediately recognize winning patterns.

This book includes only (?!) 50 patterns, but they are chosen among the essential patterns, which must be engraved in your mind, which you must recognize immediately (in less than 2 seconds), against you and to your advantage, without any doubt, no hesitation, at once. Not to lose your precious time in their evaluation. Keep them in your eReader, and go through them frequently.

Patterns whose knowledge is essential to be able to play well. Not lists of endless moves, impossible to remember, but positions that occur frequently, that you must recognize without thinking, the way Masters do.

Novice and intermediate players are the target of this book, up to 1.700 Elo rating, even if I found some expert not so sure what to do in some of these patterns. Going periodically through them, will help you not to lose precious points, and even to gain them, and sure your thinking time will be reduced.

If only one of these patterns was unknown to you, or you had doubts, your learning time will not be wasted. If you knew them all instead, and never fell into them, great, do tournaments, and enjoy Evelyne Nicod's illustrations.

Enjoy the reading, and play well..

Rodolfo Pardi, FSI (Italian Chess Federation) instructor

**** Some word of notice: ***

This translation by me is based on an ebook written in Italian, which I found was bought also by English speaking chess players (in Italian!). It will be later controlled by an English teacher, but for the moment I guess it's full of grammatical errors.

My reasoning was that, if decades ago chess players from everywhere, used to a descriptive English notation, bought also Russian books, written in Cyrillic, with chessmen symbols hard to recognize, the diagrams were more important to them than the description.

This is a book of patterns, to be understood certainly, but mainly to be memorized! so text is less important

So pity the poor translator, and just see if the patterns shown can be useful to you. Many are well known, as they have to, some is really unusual, but important.
To help, notation is algebraic with figurines, one of the few ebooks with this feature!

If a correct English is important to you, please skip this book till this notice is removed.

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