Resourceful Chess Defense And Counterplay Volume 1 by GM Boris Avrukh

Crumbling Under Pressure?

Discover the essential defensive patterns for steadying your ship against a raging initiative — saving the half-point when worse — and transforming even the grimmest-looking position into your winning moment!

Imagine playing your usual game of chess — then BAM! A shocking sacrifice rocks your ramparts.

Threats real and imagined eat away at your focus. Indecision creeps in. But time’s running out…

So you play on impulse, only to get hit by an instant, heart-wrenching refutation.

Defending often sucks. But fortunately:

Just like tactics and combinations, pro-level defense can be distilled into…

Patterns Everyone Can Learn

And Grandmaster Boris Avrukh already did the heavy-lifting for you!

In Resourceful Chess: Defense & Counterplay Vol. 1, Avrukh examines the most common defensive scenarios you’ll run into…

Like trying to survive a mating attack — bungling one’s pieces onto awkward squares — or missing a tactic and dropping material in the process…

Then he shows you the defensive patterns for holding and turning these difficult positions around.

The course draws from Avrukh’s 20-year-experience as a grandmaster and FIDE senior trainer. Inside, you’ll learn how to:

🛡️ Dodge bullets with your king, while building your defensive calculation skills and tenacity.

🛡️ Sacrifice the queen to reduce the number of enemy attackers, and set up potential tactics.

A queen sac changes the character of the game,
enabling the defender to take over

🛡️ Undermine the opponent’s extra material. Or, simplify to an easily drawn endgame through active counterplay.

🛡️ Stop enemy passed pawns using 2 time-tested strategies.

🛡️ Avoid difficult positions in the first place — and gain the easier, more dynamic game with a timely pawn offer.

🛡️ Set up an iron-clad fortress. Secure a threefold repetition. Or launch a winning counterattack by sacrificing the exchange.

🛡️ And decide whether to accept or decline a sacrifice by using the process of elimination.

All of these lessons are packed into 25 hours of video and 31 deeply annotated games — some by Avrukh himself.

You’ll also revisit modern defensive masterpieces by Magnus Carlsen (16th World Champion), Fabiano Caruana (2018 World Championship challenger), and David Anton Guijarro (8-time Spanish champion)…

Plus a chapter dedicated to the miraculous saves by Hans Niemann (2021 World Open champion).

And to round everything up:

You’ll also be given 281 MoveTrainer exercises to drill the must-know defensive patterns into your memory.

So even when the game takes a sharp turn and you find yourself under pressure…

You’ll defend with confidence and precision because of your newfound intuition.