How to Become a Candidate Master

"A Practical Guide to Take Your Chess to the Next Level"

Surprise yourself and reach higher!

This book is based on real amateur games and shows you how an average club player can proceed through the ranks and reach Candidate Master level. It’s a hard struggle, nothing comes for free and your path will be strewn with setbacks and disappointments. Just like in real life.

Alex Dunne guides you in the more than 50 games that you will be ‘playing’ and offers lots of practical, straightforward and effective advice. Slowly but surely, you will improve in all phases of the game: the opening, the middlegame and the endgame. Dunne explains when and how to activate your pieces and how to recognize and punish the errors your opponents are bound to make.

At the end of the book, having absorbed these lessons, your experience, technique and confidence will have improved in such a way that your first win against a master will not come as a big surprise.

Alex Dunne is an American FIDE Master, ICCF Correspondence Chess Master and author of more than a dozen chess books. He lives in Sayre, Pennsylvania.

This is a revised, improved and extended edition of the 1985 classic.

Excerpt