Ebook: The Tao of Chess: 200 principles to transform your game and your life

Avon, Massachusetts: Adams Media, 2004. — 258 p.Contents:
Acknowledgments.
Introduction.
Technical Matters
The Board. How well do you know the playing field?
The Pieces. Know the tools you are given to work with; they’re all you have.
Development. Wake the pieces up from their initial slumber or pay the consequences.
The Center. Inject your game with life by bringing out the best in all your pieces and pawns.
King Safety. The king is the whole game, due to that peculiarity called checkmate.
Material. It is essential to know the relative value of the various pieces and pawns that occupy the board.
Pawn Structure. The pawn structure provides the clues to any possible future plans.
Space. The territory you control is an important factor in assessing any position.
Tempo. The move is your major weapon. Use it wisely.
Mobility. Give your pieces and pawns somewhere to go and something to do.
Tactics. Tactics are the immediate, forcing moves that disturb the balance of a position in any way.
Forcing Moves. Captures, checks, promotions, and threats to capture, check, or promote demand an immediate response.
Sacrifice. A correct sacrifice is no sacrifice at all. Rather, it is an investment, giving up one thing to obtain something of greater value later on.
Strategy. Long-range ideas that help you achieve the result you want are called strategy.
Defense. Defense is harder than attack, because it’s more fun to attack and, psychologically, the burden of defense is often hard to bear.
Calculation. Combinations and plans have a better chance of working when they are backed up with good calculation.
Piece and Pawn Cooperation. The relationships between pieces and pawns are intricate. Understanding these relationships is essential to good chess play.
Exchanges. You should know which pieces and pawns to exchange and when to exchange them.
Planning. Predicting the future is not easy, especially when you have an opponent who wants a different outcome.
Openings. Sometimes, the game will start out with a bang. Other times it may start out with a yawn. How much do you know about your opening?
Middlegames. After the pieces have come into the action and the kings are settled in, the middlegame takes over.
Endings. The endgame is not necessarily the end of the game, as the name would indicate.
Human Matters.
Know Yourself. Knowing yourself includes knowing your style, proclivities, will to win, capacity for hard work, and so many other bits of information about yourself.
Know Your Opponent. You don’t play chess in a vacuum. Your opponent is trying to thwart everything you do.
Seeing Ahead. Visualizing possible future positions while looking at something else is one of the most important skills to strive for.
Courage. It’s not necessarily bad to fear your opponent, his moves, or any of his ideas. But you need to face those fears squarely and not give in to them.
Opportunity. When opportunity knocks, the good player seizes it.
Trust. You have to trust in your own analysis and your own ideas. If you don’t, who will?
Mistakes. Nobody plays mistake-free chess for very long—not even the best players.
Reaction. How you react to the changing situations during a chess game reveals how good a player you are.
Fighting Spirit. Your capacity for imposing your will on positions may be the most critical skill you can foster.
The Moment of Decision. The moment when you must make a decision arrives whether you want to recognize it or not. It’s probably best to recognize it.
Using Time. The time you have to think about your moves is usually very limited. Learn to use this time wisely.
Thinking. Whether analytical, logical, or haphazard, your thoughts during a game have a lot to do with how strong a player you are.
Concentration. Some players are easily distracted. Others don’t seem to notice what goes on around them. Why is that?
Patience. All strong players possess this virtue in abundance, at least during a closely contested game.
Luck. If you think luck doesn’t play a part in chess, you probably haven’t played a whole lot.
Practice. You will learn to make good decisions by making many decisions.
Study. Find out what those who have gone before you have learned, and you build up a good foundation of knowledge.
Passion. If chess has not captured your soul, you probably will not do as well as one who is enthralled by Caissa.
Knowledge. There have been more books written about chess than about all other games combined. In addition, there are databases with millions of chess games. You can spend your entire life learning about chess, but you will never learn all there is to know about it or come close to examining every important game that has ever been played.
Excuses. Why do you lose? Finding excuses for not performing at your best is easy to do. But it can also retard possible later improvement by taking your attention away from the real problems.