For the first time, the Spanish chess classic in English.

Generations of Spanish-speaking players learned chess from Roberto Grau. His four-volume course has been taught and reprinted for ninety years. It has never appeared in English until now. Volume I teaches you how to think. What you see at a glance Grau calls immediate vision; what only reasoning reaches, mediate vision. Strength is the second built on the first - and it can be trained. How a move relates to its reply. How a plan hardens into a combination or a trap. Then the heart of the book: why analysis fails - the errors of mediate vision, above all the strong move nobody looks at, each one named and drilled. The last chapter turns the method on material: double attack, pin, discovered attack, entombed piece. Nearly 500 diagrams, over a hundred complete games, exercises with solutions.

First of four volumes - Fundamentals, Combinations, Pawn Structure, Higher Strategy - carrying a player from the moves of the pieces to mastery. Every diagram has been reset from the original positions, every game replayed and verified move by move, and the notation set in modern algebraic throughout, with a guide to the annotation symbols. Translated and edited by Carl Boor,

FIDE Master. Roberto Grau (1900-1944) was six times champion of Argentina, one of the twelve who signed FIDE into being in Paris in 1924, and part of the Alekhine team that dethroned Capablanca - the Chess Machine - in 1927. He played first board for Argentina at four Olympiads. Twelve years after the match, that acquaintance is what brought Alekhine back to Buenos Aires to train the Argentine team.