This booklet is about 3 families of patterns: #10 (Smothered Mate) and #52 (Illusory pin) of my book "Fundamental Chess Patterns", and the attack to the castled King. Covering many variants.
The main manual did just show 50 patterns, the aim was to fix them in your memory, while here each pattern is shown in different situations, to help the process of identification. So it will take longer to go through the whole book; no scrolling, you'll have to read.
Some word of notice: If you came here, you probably have already read the above book, being so familiar with my basic English, which with the help of many diagrams should be capable to explain these concepts. This translation by me is again based on an ebook written in Italian, not still controlled for proper language.
I apologize for the grammatical errors: you can get easily a refund if not satisfied, the overall refund rate for my English books stands at a bare 1% now.
Most of the time you can follow through the moves (algebraic description with figurines, one of the few ebooks with this feature), and on many diagrams help is given by arrows (red and green if your reader supports color).
Novice and intermediate players are the target of this book, up to 1.700 Elo rating.
Here you must not simply memorize, but you have to understand, before been able to identify the pattern visually, the way masters do (they know ten thousand patterns and more!).
In chess, as in many disciplines, both knowledge and ability are important, they are complementary, one alone is not enough. This booklet will not improve your ability, for that you must play, applying your knowledge, but it will add some important pattern to your memory.
It will not (and could not) be a replacement to the wide specialized available literature, paper books or ebooks.
There's no limit to what's available to a Chess student today, you can find more than 500 Gbytes of books, in PDF or even Chessbase format, programs, hundreds of instruction movies, a jungle in which the Chess student can go astray. A large choice of endgame books is available, each proposing some hundreds of sequences, and when you have finished reading them, maybe you will recall three or four, which struck your imagination:
and over the board you will recall that in a similar position there's a winning sequence, but it does not come back to your mind. As when visiting an important Museum, at the end of your visit your mind will be confused,
and you will remember just a couple of masterpieces.
It will focus just on three specific patterns, making more easy to remember them.
Enjoy the reading, and play well.
Rodolfo Pardi, FSI (Italian Chess Federation) instructor and tournament director