Formation Attacks - Joel Johnson

As a Chess Master who has spent many years playing aggressive and attacking chess, I was quite dismayed during a recent visit to my local bookstore. I was in search of a book that covered an array of attacks against many Pawn formations in an organized fashion.

Needless to say, my search came up empty. The books on attacking fell short in many ways. Many of the books were simply a small collection of attack games with no instruction about the art of attacking or about the skills required to become a great attacker.

None of them provided the reader with any reference information about attacking or the weaknesses of various Pawn formations. None of them contained games with attacking themes like the Traxler Variation of the Two Knight's Defense, and the Jack Young Fishing Pole.

None of them contained any wild attacking ideas that can stream from opening gambits such as the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, King's Gambit, Scotch Gambit, Nakhmanson Gambit, etc. So, as a result, I felt compelled to write the ultimate attack book, and this it!

Joel Johnson earned the National Master title in 1979 and later the Life Master title. Joel is a tactical chess player that has won many chess tournaments during his roughly thirty-five years of playing chess at Master Level. In 2007, he won the U.S. Senior Chess Championship. Joel was an award winning Editor of "Chess Horizons", the official state chess magazine for the state of Massachusetts and is a past Games Editor for the magazine.