I don’t remember laughing out loud ever before while reading a chess book. And I mean that in the best possible way. Gormally should be a writer. I don’t want to diminish his chess accomplishments, but I think his talents are almost wasted on chess. His captivating writing style, his witty, almost Schopenhauerian sense of humour, and his ability to explain complex ideas in a simple way, make him one of my favorite chess authors, despite having read only one of his books.

The Tournament Battleplan, or how to outprepare your opponents on and off the board is a toolbox of both useful and applicable ideas you can try to implement in your own play and tournament preparation, and of Gormally’s thoughts on …well, basically everything. With 23 chapters, ranging from highly useful topics such as “Do you need a coach?”, or “What Grandmasters do wrong and what you can learn from it”, that are relevant to every improving chess player, to confusing topics such as a full chapter on accommodation during tournaments, Tournament Battleplan is a book whose parts vary in usefulness. Despite some of the topics being “offtopic”, each chapter covers games (mostly Gormally’s) which makes it useful nonetheless.

The best thing about the book is the quality of the annotations. Gormally gives us an insight into how a strong player, who’s never managed to climb to the very top thinks, and how he approaches his own improvement, learning from the top players like Micheal Adams, combined with his views on how club players should approach their training, preparation, tournament planning, playing over the board, playing online, and much more.

Tournament Battleplan doesn’t just feel unique. It is, in my opinion, a completely unique chess book. Gormally covers topics no one has tried to explain in context of chess improvement before in such great detail; the use of engines, coaches, chess content creators and whether they can help you improve, as well as more mundane topics such as your ability to play technical positions well, how super Grandmasters are able to focus on the heart of the position and how we can emulate that, and much more.

I have enjoyed the book, found it inspiring, and I think I also managed to learn a lot. There is a lot of value in Gormally’s annotations. His ideas are explained in great depth, and, since most of the games (almost all of them) given in the book are his, we really do get to hear how he approaches different types of problems on and off the board. That, combined with his remarkable ability to captivate the reader with his writing style, make the Tournament Battleplan one of my favorite chess books.