Beyond the Board

What lies beyond the board?

After a lifetime moving pieces at the highest level — against legends and World Champions — GM Francisco "Paco" Vallejo Pons tells his story: what he won, what he lost, and what he learned across more than 30 years of professional chess.

Beyond the Board is his life exactly as it happened, without embellishment: his father, his family, Menorca, the hard years that forged his character, and the people who marked him along the way.

The book closes with 66 games annotated by Paco himself, from the youth tournaments of 1991 to 2023: victories over World Champions — Anand, Kramnik, Topalov, Ponomariov — sacrifices in the style of Tal, and the honesty to annotate his own mistakes.

• 210 pages · PDF · English edition of "Más allá del tablero"

• Narrated with Santiago Gastón Gómez "Sagas"

• 66 deeply annotated games with diagrams and figurine notation