SCP, a Bunch of strategic Chess Patterns: Positional Patterns, Rules and Guidelines. To avoid learning them the hard way.

by Rodolfo Pardi, Evelyne Nicod (Illustrator)

While my past books about Patterns covered visual situations where what to do is evident or at least well known and established, just a matter of learning by heart, this handbook comes in when one does not know what to do.

While the move is always demanded by the position, the many rather equivalent possibilities are not evaluated simply by a sequence of candidate moves, or by brute force in case of computers, but require reasoning with words. Which are generally addressed as rules or guidelines or what you want, being actually Strategy, strategic Patterns.

The content of this handbook is aimed to beginners who should follow religiously at least these two dozens of patterns, the titles are well known, I tried to explain why, and gave examples, the way deductive teaching is done. Links are provided for the games, which will aid the understanding without the need of a chessboard if you can connect to Internet, with Wifi or other.

Pawn structures are not considered due to the many good books available on this subject, and as their reading is suggested when one reaches expert level.

Knowledge of algebraic notation is required, which is easy, refer to Wikipedia in case of doubt. To help, figurines are used for the pieces instead of letters.

This time there is no previous Italian edition, therefore, besides the usual grammar error for which I apologise, the content, while checked for correctness, did not yet pass the control of many readers; so I encourage my readers to write me in case of doubts, discrepancies, missing links, uncompleteness and the like.

Rodolfo Pardi, librarian, instructor and arbiter of FSI (Italian Chess Federation)

117 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 27, 2015

About the author

Rodolfo Pardi has had many careers in his lifetime. He was an electronics engineer for military aircraft equipment for 25 years, then a publisher for 20 years. Since 2010, he has been librarian, coach and arbiter of the Italian Chess Federation (FSI); he prepared more than 20 chess manuals in English and many more in Italian, covering many subjects not often seen in chess books.

His book, Chess Patterns, became a bestseller on Amazon.com.  As with all his chess books, there are plenty of diagrams, reducing the need for a chessboard. Piece names are not foreign capital letters, but figurines - one of the first ebooks with this feature.

Books are also linked to sample games on his website, keeping the books neat, but making it easy to follow many more games, and download the PGN versions. Additional free training material is also available on the site.

Most books target novice and club players, up to 1700 ELO.

While English is not his native language, the books are well-structured and easy to read.

The cat covers are designed by Evelyne Nicod, to be found in Goodreads as an illustrator.