Carl Sagan famously said that science is more a way of thinking than it is a body of knowledge. The same is true for chess. There are already hundreds of books on chess, but this one distills the game into the essential ideas needed to achieve a winning perspective. This should not be your only chess book, but it should be your first chess book.

My approach here is to distill my own 15 years of experience into a comprehensible foundation on which you can build your own success, whether it is to impress your friends and family or to aim higher and make a name for yourself in the chess world. No library of books can make you a great chess player, but studying only a few of them very well will give you the proper perspective necessary to see the forest through the trees.

Scott A. Potter has been a computer networking professional since the early 1990s, musician since the 1980s, science and chess enthusiast since 2010. He currently lives in Eastern Ky with his girlfriend, 4 crazy dogs, and one crazy cat.