How to Become a Candidate Master: A Practical Guide to Take Your Chess to the Next Level

Review
"Dunne is quite aware that the journey to improvement is rarely a smooth one, but imparts plenty of very handy practical advice." ― CHESS Magazine (UK)
"As anyone who has watched the Queen's Gambit on Netflix knows, book study is an important element of advancing your skills. Dunne adopts a unique methodology, offering 52 actual tournament games that pit a Candidate Master against another player. He puts the reader in the chair of the Candidate Master, challenging you to come up with the right moves and strategies. This is a clever pedagogical tool. While it's instructive to study games between grandmasters, it's practical to see how the typical Class C or B player reacts in a variety of situations. Dunne's writing has a wonderfully homespun quality. He talks to the reader plainly and simply. There are no highfalutin phrases or theories, just solid advice." -- Cecil Rosner ― Winnipeg Free Press - Canada
This book is based on real amateur games and shows you how an average club player can proceed through the ranks and reach master level. It is a hard struggle, nothing comes for free and your path will be strewn with set-backs and disappointments. Just like real life.
Alex Dunne guides you in the more than 50 games that you will be playing and offers lots of practical, straightforward and effective advice. Slowly but surely, you will improve in all phases of the game: the opening, the middlegame and the endgame. Dunne explains when and how to activate your pieces and how to recognize and punish the errors your opponents are bound to make.
At the end of the book, having absorbed these lessons, your experience, technique and confidence will have improved in such a way that your first win against a master will not come as a big surprise. After all, you will have reached master level yourself! This is an improved and extended edition of the 1992 classic, published under the same title.