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Summary: Sharpen your tactical skills
Review: A very lucid text covering a welter of chess tactics. There are lots of good exercises to check your progress. The examples and exercises are referenced. You can enjoy this book without having a chessboard in front of you (in fact, the authors encourage this to improve your "calculation" skills).If you don't improve your performance after reading this it is because you are already a master chess player or you weren't paying attention.
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Summary: An outstanding tactics trainer!
Review: Alburt and Palatnik deliver the goods. Insightful, well-written, and awesome! The book is divided into tactical themes with plenty of examples and exercises for you to solve. I've read it three times in the space of two months...worth every penny! Recommended especially for 1200-2000 players.
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Summary: Just the Best book on tactics a beginner can buy
Review: As I am well on the way to master level starting out from scratch I think I can give a good overview.
Fisrtly most chess players have a tendency to jump from book to book, thats a lot of time wasted. What I like about this book is all the key info on tactics is in the book so you do not have to get tactics info from several books. Yes thats a lot of time saving and money saved. All the keys areas (Pins, Discovered check, Xray etc) are included with both classic and modern examples. There are exercises at the end of each chapter to test your and reinforoce your knowledge.
Two years ago I went all the way through this book and jumped about 200 elo points. You can do about 10 pages each day easily (Approx 1 to 1 1/2 hours). So you can finish the book in a month. Every 6 mths I revise the book and each time I understand the examples to a deeper level. When I first went through it was understanding that these ideas existed (pins for example). Now when I look at the diagram I see the motifs, how and why these tactics exist e.g. Bishop control of key diagonal, over worked piece, etc. Its amazing now on ICC I see the motifs and my opponents just seem to place the pieces where I want them to, and the combination results. So this book covers it all along with the next volume (King in Jeapody) they are all you need to reach to master level. Especially good in this book is the calculation chapter which is over 40 pages long and is the last chapter. You would need to buy Kotov's Think like a GM and Soltis's book to get this info. How do we calculate variations? Its laid out in a simple yet effective way. In a nutshell all the info is easy to understand, comprehensive, practical and can be reviewed again and again. This book should raise your Elo about 100 to 200 points. Yes there is a lot of off beat advertising in the book; However the secret Russian method is there, 1) The best most efficient examples so you maximise study time. 2) Ideas are reinforced with end of chapter questions that you can solve under time pressure. 3)There is chess culture, examples are from all chess eras, today's ideas do not originate in a vacuum they progress from the greats of old (Capablance, Alekhine, Morphy etc...). I will also be reviewing the Pirc & Just the facts books in separate reviews. Thanks, email me if you want other chess book reviews (I have over 60 books, that I use not 1000 on the shelf lol)
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Summary: Buy the whole series...why don't you?
Review: Excellent and extremely instructional but I question how important it is to go through the series. If you are levels B or C or even a high D (USCF) and you absolutely insist on going through Alburt and Palatnik's tutorials then this is the best place to start because you won't be missing much from Comprehensive 1 & 2 (Well-written and very instructional, but there is not enough information to cover the money spent). You can learn just as effectively from others great chess books, though with a different instructional approach much cheaper and without the commitment to the author.
Rating:
Summary: Buy the whole series...why don't you?
Review: Excellent and extremely instructional but I question how important it is to go through the whole series. If you are levels C or higher (USCF) and you absolutely insist on going through Alburt and Palatnik's tutorials then this is the best place to start because you won't be learning much more than what you already know from Comprehensive Chess Course 1 & 2. For the same amount, you can purchase 8 or more as oppose to 7 books, though with a different teaching approach, nonetheless just as effective.
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Summary: A Great Book Revisited
Review: I love this whole series. (I ignore the first two books of the series, which are for rank beginners to learn the moves. Start with the Tactics book, then Attacking the King, then Chess Strategy, and Endgame Facts.) A simple four volume course to play chess at the expert (1700) level. Listen, I am not the most talented chess player, and was 1100 on the ICC for months, losing to my friends. I decided to study or to stop playing. I read Silman, Nimzovitch, others and none helped; it was too hard for a dummy like me. This was my last-ditch effort (I figured it worked for school kids in Russia, and I was OK at homework.) It worked. By the time I was through volume 2, I was 1600+. I am in volume 3, so the full impact should go to 1700, as promised in the ads :) A simple effective chess intro. This, and Fred Reinfeld's combo books for practice are all you need to get pretty good at chess, then move on to other skills -- leaving a good chess game in your back pocket for fun now and then :) In particular, the tactics book is the most inspired of the series. It glistens with sharp definitions of attacking motifs (e.g. distinguishing properly between an x-ray and a skewer), a nice discussion of the tactical THINKING process (1.recognizing a motif, 2. generating a combo idea, then 3. calculating the forcing variation), and featuring nice modern examples from Kasparov, Kramnik, and Anand throughout. Really I think this kind of material was the training used to generate a tactical monster like Kasparov. I sometimes wonder if the later books in the series were thrown in for the sake of completeness, not truly inspired. Or it may be that in chess, all the beauty is in the combo :)
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Summary: Does NOT live up to the hype!
Review: If this book were truly representative of "the once-secret Russian method of chess training" no Soviet player would ever have become a grandmaster in the entire course of chess history. This book simply does not live up to the hype. Keep in mind as you read the following that according to the authors the alleged goal for these books is "to provide the knowledge necessary to reach expert strength." Nobody is going to reach anything remotely near expert strength using this book or its companions.
My complaints are numerous:
[1] The material oscillates between being absurdly simple for the alleged target audience to being absurdly unclear. For example, at one point they explain what a pin is. Elsewhere, they provide a complicated example from the Fischer-Spassky 1972 match with absolutely zero commentary.
[2] The examples are too many and too sparsely commented (many have no comments at all) to be of any use to a student trying to learn from them. As just one ridiculous example, page 180 contains a 19-move analysis with a single comment ("now follows a beautiful variation"); well, thanks, that was very useful. The famous game Lasker-Bauer, Amsterdam 1889, merits comment to only one move as well.
[3] Many of the examples are downright useless, consisting of a single move. We are given no indication of how the position was arrived at or how the magical move (1. Qa7!!) was arrived at or even why it merits two exclamation points.
The bottom line is if you are rated below 1700, you will not learn anything from this book, so try Jeremy Silman's or Yasser Seirawan's books instead. And if you are rated above 1700, you will not learn anything from this book either, so try Dvoretsky's well-respected series.
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Summary: This book is a must buy!
Review: If you are looking at this book review it's probably because you want to see if this book is worth buying. Well it is!!!
IT IS "a highly instructive" as GM Larry Evans said and it is great for improving tactical play. If you want more than just tactical puzzles but explanations as well then get this book!. Although it is part 3 in the "comprehensive chess course series" this book is great stand-alone. It may even make you want to purchase the rest of the "comprehensive chess course series"!!!. This book should be in any improving player's library and after going through it you will notice how your tactical recognition is improving, and the book is so well structured that you can go through it many times within a short period of time. Pehaps a lesson a day and with nine lessons in the book that's 9 days and you can do the whole thing over and over again improving each time. Understand tactics don't just do puzzles...get this book!
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Summary: Should be titled " . . . for the serious player"
Review: If you are serious about chess and want to improve, then this book is for you. It is just like a textbook and it should be read from cover to cover. However, it's difficult to get anywhere with this book unless you dedicate an hour a day to it almost every day. The examples are great and the explanations are good. If you are serious about chess, then this book may be the one for you.
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Summary: A great book that will sharpen you're tactical skills
Review: This book is excellent. It not only studies on simple tactics like pins, and skewers, but it also concentrates on destuction, destructive combinations, destroying the pawn cover, and so on. This book has helped me greatly and I reccomend this highly.
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