Study Chess With Matthew Sadler

Reinvent Your Chess with This Practical Guide
to Improving Your Entire Game

When Grandmaster Matthew Sadler emerged from his 11-year retirement from competitive chess, he was in for an uphill battle.

His opening knowledge was stale. The competition was more intense than ever. And after over a decade of not playing a serious tournament, surely both his tactical and strategic skills would be rusty.

But in his first tournament after retirement, GM Sadler scored a perfect 7/7 amidst fierce competition. Shortly after, he won another strong tournament in Barcelona with 8.5/10, and another tournament in Oslo with 9/10. Even after such a long hiatus, it seemed his chess was better than ever.

How Did He Do It?

No, the 2-time British Champion does not have any Magnus Carlsen-like chess superpowers; he attributes his success to good old preparation. And in Study Chess with Matthew Sadler, he shares his secrets to preparing for your own chess successes over the board.

In the course, you’ll learn how to approach several critical aspects of the game which together constitute a winning formula for total improvement of your chess.

♚ Opening: you’ll learn how to practically inject fresh thinking into your existing opening repertoire to stay ahead of your opponent’s opening preparation. You’ll also learn how to employ unorthodox openings to force opponents into staying on your own turf and out their comfort zone

♚ Middlegame: GM Sadler will teach you the 3 thinking styles of the middlegame and when you should use each. You’ll learn how to think independently with helpful questions that will steer your mind in the right direction so you can learn the proper planning process for yourself

♚ Endgame: Much like the middlegame, the endgame requires conscious thought and strategy at all times; GM Sadler shows you how master players carry out ‘book endgames’ in actual tournament play

♚ Learning from Your Mistakes: You’ll learn how to properly execute one of the most fundamental techniques of chess improvement: analyzing your own games. By looking at where master players went wrong in their games and finding lines that would win those games, you’ll learn how to improve the quality of your own games in the post-mortem

A Multi-Faceted Approach to Learning

But what really sets this book apart from others is GM Sadler’s approach to learning. You won’t learn simply from annotated master games saying “look what this GM did here” in this course.

In addition to general practical advice about handling each stage of the game, you’ll get plenty of exercises that cut the model game short and ask what you would do in the situation and why.

You’ll go through many ‘what-if’ variations and in some cases even play out the position from both sides so you can see what happens when a certain move is played versus another – ensuring that you totally understand the position. In each exercise, GM Sadler asks questions that point your thinking in the right direction, and with repetition they will be ingrained in your thought process whenever you play over the board.