Lessons with a Grandmaster II

Description

♟️ What is this book?

Volume 2 of the Gulko Method picks up where volume 1 left off — with the same honest, transparent annotation style applied to more complex and more competitively significant games. The positions in this volume required harder decisions, and the annotations reflect that: more candidate moves considered, longer calculation trees, more difficult evaluations, and moments where even a world-class player’s thinking process showed genuine strain.

🎯 Who is this book for?

• Players who have read volume 1 and want to continue with the same approach at greater depth
• Advanced club players who understand the theory but want to see how elite decision-making works in positions where theory runs out
• Coaches using the Gulko series as a model for teaching decision-making to advanced students

📖 What’s inside

A selection of Gulko games from the middle of his career, annotated with the same format as volume 1 but at greater complexity:

• More complex candidate move selection, with longer chains of reasoning shown
• Moments of serious evaluation difficulty — positions where Gulko himself wasn’t sure
• Resources that nearly changed the result, explained in detail
• Competitive context: how tournament situation affected decision-making

📚 The progression: why this volume is harder

The games in volume 2 come from a period when Gulko was competing at the highest level, against the strongest opposition. The decisions were objectively harder, which makes the annotations more instructive for advanced players who want to understand how to handle positions that go beyond standard patterns.

♟️ Why we recommend it at Chesscul

At Chesscul we recommend volume 2 to students who genuinely absorbed volume 1 — not just read it, but applied its lessons to their own games.

🔗 Recommended to pair with

• The Gulko Method Vol. 1: read this first.
• The Gulko Method Vol. 3: the final volume, covering the most demanding positions.
• Positional Decision Making in Chess: Gelfand and Aagaard take a similar inside-the-thinking approach to elite positional decisions.