For all chess-players, from beginners to world champions, from kids to seniors, delivering checkmate is the greatest thrill the game has to offer. The ability to spot checkmates is a vital skill - and this easy-to-use book shows you how it is done. With the help of Grandmaster John Nunn, you will be ready to shock your next opponent with a deadly checkmate, whether in a school match, a club tournament - or even a championship game!
By focusing exclusively on positions from real games, ranging from junior events to grandmaster encounters, Nunn ensures that the mates featured are those which arise most often in real life. He also highlights themes and ideas that are often missed in practice. While solving these puzzles, your all-important 'mental library' of patterns will grow, leading to an immediate increase in your playing strength.
All 1001 puzzle positions have been carefully checked, and are graded by theme and difficulty. Points are awarded for finding the checkmate, so you can measure your skill. Most of the puzzles are suitable for novice and junior players. The last chapter challenges you with 'extreme checkmates', but don't worry: you'll be ready for them!
Dr John Nunn is one of the best-respected figures in world chess, having numbered among the world's leading grandmasters for nearly twenty years. He has won four gold medals in chess Olympiads, and has three times been crowned World Chess Solving Champion. Nunn's playing style is notoriously aggressive, with sacrifices, king-hunts and checkmates featuring in many of his finest wins.
Download a pdf file with a sample from the book.Watch a YouTube video in which GM John Nunn presents a sample from this book.
"John Nunn, renowned king-hunter, presents 1001 checkmate puzzles. Players who study this book will learn much about tactical motifs leading to mate... a delightful tome for any lover of chess" - Bab Wilders, Nederlands Dagblad
"...like a feast for me! The long list of chess stars to be found there includes hundreds of players with whom I am either very well acquainted, or at least slightly so, and it's a lot of fun to try to find the same brilliant moves that they actually played at the climax of real battles. Though the book is quite thick and heavy, weighing in at over 300 large pages, its content is so enjoyable and easily readable for me that my feeling when packing it in my summer holiday suitcase is that I'm taking along a light yet precious companion." - GM Paul Motwani, The Scotsman
"Absolutely recommended!" - Uwe Bekemann, Deutscher Fernschachbund
"The recommendation is to read this book, to read it over and over, and improvement is assured!" - Martin Eden, soloscacchi.altervista.org/
"A new book that I found delightfully appealing" - Bruce Pandolfini, www.chesscafe.com
"...1001 puzzles varying from elementary (great for beginners and even experienced players to 'remember where it all began') to extreme mate challenges (much harder indeed). These positions are taken from real play and I am pleased with that because I am not the greatest fan of artificially composed positions, though some are simply wonderful. The positions in this book mean that someone has either found or missed the solutions in a real situation. Hey, even Kramnik missed a mate in one once so it does happen to us all." - Carl Portman, www.carlsplanet.co.uk
"Recognizing patterns has long been recognized as one of the hallmarks of chess mastery and 1001 Deadly Checkmates offers a series of exercises to train this skill arranged by theme and increasing difficulty. To challenge those of a competitive nature points are awarded for each correct answer with solvers able to track their success." - IM John Donaldson
"There is no better way to learn chess!" - John Elburg, chessbooks.nl
"It is a great book, which I think will be useful to a wide range of players, say from 1400 to 2400. I'm 2200 OTB and can solve most of the problems pretty quickly (197 out of the first 200), but still find them useful for honing my tactical skills. They should be even more useful for lower-rated players, who will find a lot of mating ideas that are new to them. Chess is largely a matter of pattern recognition, so exercises like these are useful to everyone." - Frederick Rhine, www.chicagochess.blogspot.com
"Since taking up otb chess again after many years devoted entirely to the correspondence variety, I have found that puzzle books can serve as a good preparation. Thirty minutes spent tackling a number of positions such as those in this book prior to a game really sharpens the mind and brings about a greater awareness of the tactical possibilities that may arise in the course of a game. Even without such a goal, it is a pleasure simply to play through the book and wonder at the beauty and infinite variety of the game of chess." - Alan Sutton, En Passant
"This is an excellent collection of checkmate puzzles and one which I thoroughly enjoyed trying." - Sean Marsh, marshtowers.blogspot.com
"There are lots of chess puzzle books available, so why should you buy this one? To answer that I would recommend that you ask the question 'What do I really want from such a book?' I mean, do you want something simply for puzzle solving on a train or a aeroplane? Do you want it to 'do' more? Perhaps at the end of it all you want it to have improved your skills at assessing positions for when you play at the board. Maybe you want some really original puzzles at various levels of difficulty to share with friends, chess students and the like. This book ticks all the boxes for me, it really does." - Carl Portman
Gambit books by John Nunn: 1001 Deadly Checkmates, Endgame Challenge, Grandmaster Chess Move by Move, Grandmaster Secrets: Winning Quickly at Chess, John Nunn’s Best Games, John Nunn’s Chess Course, John Nunn’s Chess Puzzle Book NEW EDITION, Learn Chess,Learn Chess Tactics, Nunn’s Chess Endings volume 1, Nunn’s Chess Endings volume 2, Secrets of Grandmaster Chess, Secrets of Pawnless Endings, Secrets of Practical Chess NEW EDITION, Secrets of Rook Endings, Solving in Style, Understanding Chess Endgames, Understanding Chess Middlegames,Understanding Chess Move by Move, Vishy Anand: World Chess Champion (with Vishy Anand).