Rating: 
Summary: Masterfully organized and easy to understand book!
Review: After having seen the first book by this author, "Chess For Juniors" (the best beginner's book around) I was wondering what the author would have as his second book.
If you read "Chess For Juniors" you will note that it ends off with the last instructional chapters covering games, with a comment on every single move. Ah! So this book adds 24 more games to "Chess For Juniors" with a comment on every move. What a great idea.
"Unbeatable Chess Lessons For Juniors" is organized by Opening. This makes it easy learn your Openings. The book shows you important variations of each Opening used in the games without losing you.
This book is also great if you want to learn more about either tactics or positional play in the Middlegame. Showing how an attack builds before delivering a decisive blow (often a sacrice) against the castled or uncastled King is shown in several games. But the use of brillian positonal play is shown in Karpov's game against Spassky along with a sacrifice. The book is a showcase for the author's own games demonstrating his own skills put into lessons.
It would be logical to assume that many of the games in the book don't lead to endgames. However, there are some very nice instructional endgames in this book.
The author has a way of crafting games into the most wonderful lessons which are so easily understood. And, this book is also recommend for adults who can live with the word "Juniors" on the cover. When you get it you will see why I gave it a five star rating!
Rating:
Summary: My favorite Intermediate Chess Book
Review: After I finished reading CHESS FOR JUNIORS I got Mr. Snyder's second book, UNBEATABLE CHESS LESSONS FOR JUNIORS. His first book ends off with two games where every move is commented on. This book ads another 24 games! They are organized by the type of opening and are very fun and instructive games. The explanations are clear and easy to understand for a 12 year old like me, or even younger. My father likes reading this book too! It has helped me to get my rating up over 1100 in the Chess Federation in about half a year of tournament play.
I have some other books, but his one is the best for an intermediate level player.
Rating:
Summary: Great Instructiional Tool For Chess Trainers and Students!
Review: As a chess teacher I find this book to present very high quality chess lessons by a quality chess instructor. This book's layout not only comes highly recommended for kids in the 9 to 16 year old age group, but provides a chess teacher with some wonderful lessons to provide to their own students.
What I especially like about this book is the wide range of ideas covered and using players of various playing abilities in these games.
The way the games are formatted into lessons, allows a student to gain and understanding of all aspects of the game.
Take Fischer's games against both Bryne and Shocron for example. The analysis and explanation in this book is far, far superior than that found in Fischer's own book, My Sixty Memorable Games. As a fairly highly rated player I carefully analyzed the differences in the analysis - and by golly, I cannot find a single analytical error in Unbeatable Chess Lessons For Juniors! OK, so the analysis is of very high quality. What is even more important is that important things such as "General Rules" are explained as applied to the games at many points. The student is challenged to find the best moves throughout the games.
This book is not for the absolute beginner. But anyone from advanced beginner to expert will learn a lot from this masterpiece of a work!
Rating:
Summary: My favorite book - It is UNBEATABLE!
Review: As a teenager who has played in tournaments and considers himself an intermediate level scholastic chess player I have found this to be the most enjoyable and instructive book I have for my level. I actually got started with the author's book for beginner's, "Chess For Juniors" which really helped me improve and helped me get to an Intermediate Level.
"Unbeatable Chess Lessons For Juniors" continues where "Chess For Juniors" left off by making games into lessons. There is an analysis of every single move. The book does a great job of showing where general rules apply at important parts of the game and shows the plans in the games. This creates great lessons!
The author understands how people think and makes it so that you are left with few if any questions while going through the lessons.
It has a lot of material in it. However, when you finish game #24 you wish there was a #25, a #26 ..... You get the point!
Rating:
Summary: wow!
Review: I am 1500+ on FICS. I have only read first 50 pages of the book
and I am absolutely in love with it! is short the reasons are:
1. tells you how to take advatage of small advantages
2. each move is explained in detail and yet in simple words
3. this book is firt book I found that tells you about
strategy in simple words. ever get in a situation
where you are ahead in development and/or space and don't
have clue as to what to do next? what to plan for?
This book covers that beautifully!
Rating:
Summary: Great for older students too!
Review: I am 16 and found this book to be great in helping me prepare for tournaments. It helped me learn my openings while seeing how the there is a transition from the opening to the middlegames (and in several games into the endgame from the middlegame). Along with studying tactical problems I found using this book to be a great study guide. Even though the book is supposed to be for younger kids, I found it perfect for me.
Rating: 
Summary: Dull writing style. Odd selection. Good reinforcement.
Review: I am surprised at many of the other reviews here. Should an instruction book have new theoretical ideas on openings? Can a single book be appropriate to the wide range of students with USCF ratings from 800 all the way to 1600? Is it really wise for a book to have a split personality, half GM games and half games by the author? Would Chernev's Logical Chess really be a logical successor to this more advanced book?Obviously, Mr. Snyder's students are submitting reviews. Here is an unbiased review. This is a collection of 24 games, half involving the author, and many of those being correspondence games. It is the strangest selection of games I have ever seen. Some are instructive; some, amazing; some, technically impressive; and some, a bit of an ego boost to the author. The moves of each game are explained, one at a time, in English, and occasionally with variations. The explanations are what make this book worth reading. They do not provide much instruction, but they REINFORCE lessons which you may have received elsewhere. What I mean is that the examples in the book do not prove the validity of principles. Instead, they remind you of those principles. If you are aware of them and already believe them, you can have many moments of "aha!" reading Snyder's explanations. He points out all the reasons behind each move, which reminds you to consider all those ideas in your own games. If, however, you need to be convinced of the soundness of the principles (as I believe we all do) you will have to look elsewhere, perhaps Chernev's Most Instructive games. I think that this book is a solid companion to instruction by a live chess coach. It would also supplement the study of basic strategy in another book. But on its own, it suffers from several deficiencies. Foremost are the games themselves. 12 are the author's own games. Fine. Master-level games can be more instructive to the amateur than deeper, flawless GM games. Unfortunately, most here are correspondence games. At least they pre-date the age of computers, but they still are much deeper than what an amateur can fathom. Then there are the 12 non-Snyder games, mostly GM games. Snyder has chosen them for their surprising twists, or for use in explaining opening theory, rather than for instructive value in the middlegame. In general, Snyder focuses on opening theory. This is consistent with his inclusion of so many correspondence games, where opening theory is often tested and developed, but it is completely inappropriate for a book aimed at juniors. Some of his explanations are superlative--e.g. from the Ruy Lopez games I now understand the subtle reasons behind some standard moves--but most of the lines in the notes are beyond even a 1600-rated player's ability to follow without a board, esp. for the Queen's pawn games. The most annoying thing about the book is the lack of variety and clarity in the writing, especially the over-use and abuse of the word "active". Every move is "active". Every piece gets "developed actively". Every new square is "more active" than the old one. Though I can see his intention to emphasize the principle of piece activity, this repetition grates on me. But it's not just the repetition. Snyder is being lazy. When he says "active", he often means "mobile", or "advanced", or "threatening", etc. I could think of dozens more specific adjectives. It is their flair and precision which makes authors like Chernev and Purdy so enjoyable. It's hard to specify an audience. It is similar to Dan Heisman's Improving Annotator, but with a vastly inferior selection of games for instruction. There are also better books on correspondence chess. But it is an easy read, which is worth something.
Rating:
Summary: About the best selling intermediate level chess book
Review: I can see why this is the best selling chess book for players of an intermediate level (well beyond how the pieces move, but not professional level players). I want to write a series review (though I loved the humor of a previous review of this book "The Schwartz is with this book" - Star Wars was a top move and so is this book!). I have completely gone over "Unbeatable Chess Lessons for Juniors" and a good number of the reviews to see what others felt. Other than a few silly kid's reviews by kids or adults in disguise who don't really say anything except a couple of crude remarks about the author who they probably never met, this book has got overwhelmingly good reviews. Rightfully so!
The quality of the construction of the book itself (not mentioned in any other review I have seen) consists of good quality paper with solid binding (it isn't going to crumble on you with heavy use). This is true of all David McKay Chess Books (actually Random House).
Now onto what is inside the book itself!
This book is not a simple copy of one of the all time best sellers, "Logical Chess Move by Move". It has every single good point of "Logical Chess Move by Move", except for all the improvements. "Unbeatable Chess Lessons for Juniors" is well suited for players who want to go over games in a lesson format that point out the most important up to date opening lines. With the ideas behind each move each game is arranged by opening.
Using the analysis of every move in every game it doesn't keep on finding a way to comment on the first move of the game (i.e. 1. e4) with what quickly becomes very silly. It simply expects that if the same move was played previously, it doesn't repeat the same thing or find a differnt way of saying the same thing.
"Unbeatable Chess Lessons for Juniors" focuses on instructive elements first and foremost.
It applies to situations that occur in the games IMPORTANT GENERAL RULES AND PRINCIPLES so that you build a solid foundation of knowledge. This is done with extreme clarity.
It is great to see the depth of thought behind some of the author's games and how he uses them in his lessons. The author played many games on, especially on the world championships correspondence level, that were of much higher quality than some of the world champions games today. A magnificent player (I found his International rating to be 2405, about 2500 USCF).
Too many writers at this level or even with higher ratings tend to expect the reader to know too much so they gloss over too many basic things. It is great that someone of such playing ability has developed a wonderful skill of relating to young readers who are not able to understand books of a complix nature written for an adult audience.
"Unbeatable Chess Lessons for Juniors" has taken the idea by Chernev ("Logical Chess") and greatly improved on it. There is not a better book on the market for the Intermediate Level Player (of any age!).
Rating:
Summary: My most useful chess book
Review: I did very well in the sixth grade section the National School Grade Championships in Chicago. The author did a book signing there and I got this book signed by Robert Snyder.
I wanted a book that would show me good openings to use and how the openings lead to the middlegame. This book uses complete games with an analysis of every move to form fantastically enjoyable and useful lessons. As mentioned in some of the other reviews Robert Snyder's 30 years of teaching experience shows in the analysis and explanations - he does answer almost every question about the positions that form in my mind. He knows how people think and what they need to know to learn.
Mr. Snyder's game against Schmellef of Australia was one of the most interesting. A serious of moves are used to quickly pass from the opening to a winning endgame. The book uses games that are designed to show certain important ideas.
I liked where there is both games by some of the world champions and games played by Mr. Snyder that show how to take advantage of weaker opponents mistakes. This is very helpful for players like myself who play against a lot of other kids who make certain kinds of mistakes. There are diagrams every few moves that makes sure you have the correct position set up from the beginning to the end of each game. The book does not lose you with many long variations like some books do.
If you want to learn tactics, openings, positional ideas and even improve your endgames this book covers all of these things in a way that is easy to understand.
Rating:
Summary: Best Game Analysis for the Intermediate Player
Review: I found this book to be both instructive and fun to read! The very first game starts off with a fantastic "King Hunt" where the King is driven across the board. The final result will suprize you! The book shows you how to build up Kingside attacks in a couple of neat games too.
The book also showed some improved ideas in the openings I use. I enjoyed how clearly a couple of the endgames were covered.
A well rounded book with a lot of neat ideas not found in other books.
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