Study Chess With Matthew Sadler

Matthew Sadler

Sample pages (pdf)

Matthew Sadler is one of the UK's strongest ever players. He became a Grandmaster at 19, won the British Championship twice and, amongst other amazing achievements, made a gold medal winning score of 10½/13 on board four for England in the 1996 chess Olympiad.

After the category 18 Tilburg tournament of 1998 Matthew decided to stop being a professional chess player. However, he re-emerged in 2010 to play a rapidplay tournament in Wageningen, Holland which he promptly won with 7/7. In 2011 he played in strong international events at Barcelona and Oslo and won them with the Fischer-like scores of 8½/10 and 8/9 respectively. After over a decade away from the game, these results are simply astounding.

Matthew's extraordinary ability at chess stems not simply from natural talent but is based on a brilliant aptitude for preparing the game. He understands exactly what needs to be studied and how to go about it. In this book he recounts how he organised the preparation for his "comeback" and from his results the success of this method is self-evident.

In this book Matthew tries to explain the most important skills for a practical chess player and how to develop them. These skills are:
* How to find new ideas in the chess openings
* How to adopt new openings confidently and quickly
* Various way of solving practical middlegame problems
* How to think in the endgame

As well as being an exceptional player, Matthew is also a fine writer who conveys his ideas with ease. His book on the Queen's Gambit Declined won the British Chess Federation Book of the Year award in 2000. Matthew currently lives and works in Holland.

Published 2012, softback, 140 pages.