![]() ![]() My ratings of the publisher's books have ranged from 3 stars to 5 stars. Note: The publisher provided a review copy of this book to me in exchange for my honest review. ![]() Work diligently through this book a couple of times and you are bound to become a stronger player. Otherwise, though, the quality of the printing is impeccable.ĭo not let these are minor flaws discourage you, though, from obtaining this good, useful, and in some ways novel chess tactics book. ![]() They are not so small as to be unusable, but I would have preferred more and/or larger pages so that the diagrams could be 15% larger. In fact, I have never seen another chess book with such small diagrams. The small size of the diagrams might be a problem for some readers, as well. Used in this fashion, the book can be helpful for players up to about 1600 ELO. Heisman frequently recommends this kind of remedial tactics practice for club players, and I agree wholeheartedly with him. And if you too often say something like, "I was winning, but I just missed that stupid knight fork," this book can help you strengthen basic tactics pattern recognition. This book, on the other hand, would be an excellent second book on chess tactics for anyone. A better first book for the newbie is A World Champion's Guide to Chess: Step-by-step instructions for winning chess the Polgar way. I do think the title is a bit misleading, as most of the positions after the mate in one chapter would be hard for a true beginner to solve. The book closes with solutions in figurine algebraic notation and a glossary of chess terms. I did spot a couple of solutions which do not discuss the opponent's strongest reply, but even in those cases there is a winning continuation for the player to move.Ĭheckmate in 1 move (obviously very easy positions to solve) * Unlike Reinfeld's "1001" books, this one is a model of accuracy. Moreover, the positions were mostly new to me-unlike some tactics books which rely heavily on the "classics." Other chess tactics books often offer only 300-500 diagrams. * 1001 diagrams provides a lot of practice for the money. This exercise is quite novel in chess books, but again very useful. Obviously you won't be able to just drop a piece on the ideal square in a real game.but if you can learn to say, for example, "if I could just get a rook to h8 it would create checkmate," you just might find a winning rook maneuver. This exercise helps the reader learn to envision a winning position, which is an important part of finding good moves. * The chapter on "the missing piece" invites the reader to add a particular piece anywhere on the board, in order to achieve a particular goal like checkmate or trapping the opponent's queen. Learning to look out for your opponent's responses, rather than just moving and hoping, is a key part of advancing in chess, so the authors' approach is very useful. Hope chess is when you play what looks like a good move and simply hope that your opponent does not have a good response-rather than checking to see that your opponent cannot reply with a strong threat, capture, or check. Right away the reader is learning not to play "hope chess" (to adopt Dan Heisman's terminology). * The explanations of the various tactics (pin, skewer, deflection, etc.) demonstrate not only how they can succeed, but also how a clever defense can thwart them or even turn the tables. This well-translated edition of a popular Italian workbook offers a lot of value for the right audience: Having coached scholastic players for a few years, I am always interested in finding good resources for chess neophytes. ![]()
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