Chess Tactics for Kids

Rating:
Summary: First Class Training Material
Review: Chess tactics can confuse a lot of inexperienced players (like myself!), but as I have recently learnt, there are some great tricks of the trade you can learn. This book reveals how masters use their knowledge of similar positions to help them find combinations easily. The amazing thing is - even beginners can do the same. Chess Tactics for Kids shows you every important tactical device that can be used to win material, and reinforces each lesson with several similar examples. Brilliant.


Rating:
Summary: Best Book on Tactics
Review: If you are not already an experienced player, this neat little book will improve your game for sure. It's all about pattern recognition: spotting familiar clusters of pieces that alert strong players to the possibility of a combination. There are 50 different motifs covered, and all win material in one way or another.
All strong players know and use these patterns frequently. Learning them is essential if you want to improve. Chandler's book is clearly intended for the lower level player (though not only juniors), but it is an intelligent read, and often fun. The author is a grandmaster, and you can be sure he knows what he is talking about.
Layout is friendly and I like it that the book opens flat,a benefit of hardcover.

Rating:
Summary: Best book on tactics
Review: Like other reviewers, I found this book a revealing guide to the way top players find chess combinations. Of course there are many books on tactics - one reason this one stands head and shoulders above the rest is because of the quality of the examples, and the logical presentation.
Most home players would improve very quickly studying this book.

Rating:
Summary: Number ONE book on tactics!
Review: Put simply, this is the best book on tactics you can buy. All the motifs are there, the layout and typesetting is excellent, and the examples are clear and easy to follow.


Rating:
Summary: Great Book in Combination
Review: This hardcover book is an introduction to the basic tactical concepts, such as how to use a pin, fork or skewer. Featuring "50 Tricky Tactics" it follows on from the author's book of checkmating patterns, covered in How to Beat Your Dad at Chess, and the material is presented in a similar fun format. The game examples, 362 diagrams in total, are well chosen. Generally two illustrative positions are given to teach the tactic in a very basic form, and this is reinforced by up to four more examples, all taken from competitive tournament games.
Some of the examples, such as the Caro-Kann trap, show specific opening traps which opponents can fall into. There are also some amazing and inspiring endgame motifs, showing clever "Rampant Rook" stalemates which are explained in a way even beginners will understand.
At the end of the book there are tests on motif recognition - 8 puzzles - and a tactics test of 54 positions.


Rating:
Summary: Chess Tactics for Everyone!
Review: This is a sequel to the book How to beat your Dad at Chess and once again Murray Chandler gives us an overlooked work of genius. This book is not just for kids, it's for all beginners to intermediate players who want to get ahead in the middlegame. This time instead of giving tactics leading to checkmate it allows you to gain material- from a pawn to a queen- or save a game by forcing stalemate. I think it should have been called Using Tactics to beat your Dad in chess.

The sub-title of this book is 50 Tricky Tactics to Outwit your Opponents, and it contains 50 tricky tactics that can get you out of a tough situation. While the beginning tactics teach the more basic tricks, like forks and pins, when you get deeper into the book, you'll find tricks that even grandmasters could miss. In the introduction, there is a great page that explains the algebraic notation which can help all chess players to read moves made in the book and enable them to write down moves in their own chess games. This isn't new information, but I like the concise way its explained and the symbols used through out the book.

How to beat your Dad at Chess was all about pattern recognition and this one is about motifs. Each tactic merits its own chapter. He breaks studying tactics into three steps. Step one is learn what the basic tactical motifs are and how they operate. He says there are 12 basic tactical motifs, which are: forks, pins, skewers, decoys, deflections, overloads, discovered attacks, discovered checks, double checks, desperado sacrifices, stalemates, zwischenzugs (in-between moves), perpetual checks, and breaking the pin. In the first chapters he teaches you what every one of those tactics are and how you can use them to crush your opponent's defenses.

Step two is recognizing typical patterns by seeing where piece formations make it possible to execute different tactics. Chandler gives three examples. I find this part the most difficult to identify because the tactic is often hidden from both yourself and opponent. When using tactics, you need to look ahead more than one move, and be intentional in your choices of strategy. You always have to look ahead. Once you see patterns often enough, it becomes easier to recognize. That's why you have to play a lot and study different games to be able to "site read" the formations and recognize patterns quickly.

In Step three, he combines tactics to out-calculate the opponent. This is also a very difficult step because instead of just having to recognize where one tactic can be used, you have to recognize other tactics to set up one ahead of time. An example is sacrificing a knight to pin the opponent's queen. I knew this before, however, Chandler gave me new distinctions by telling how to recognize that the sacrifice will gain material. Near the end of the book, he shows you how to use step three.

A great example of combining tactics is Tricky Tactic #13, The Rook-c8 and the Knight-e7 check Trick. Some hints to show you when you can use this tactic, or when your opponent can use it on you, are:

A White knight on d5 and a White rook on the open c-file;

A black queen on d8 and a black king on g8; and

Black's e7 square is undefended, except by the black queen.

I have fallen victim to this tactic several times before reading this book. What happens is the White rook comes down to the c8 square, using itself as a decoy sacrifice. The Black queen then takes that White rook putting herself in position for a knight fork. Then the knight on d5 jumps to the e7 square. This forks the Black king and queen and wins the Black queen for the White rook.

Once again, at the end of the book, there is a wonderful test to determine how much you've learned about tactics. First, you're tested on identifying the tactics, then on how well you can find and executive tactics.

I think that people should read Chess Tactics for Kids before reading How to beat your Dad at Chess because Chess Tactics for Kids helps you get to the middlegame and endgame positions where you can use the checkmates shown in How to beat your Dad at Chess. So even though Chandler may have written this second, I think it should read first. I recommend this book to beginner and intermediate players of all ages because it will help you defeat any opponent that comes at you or maybe even your poor old suffering Dad. It might even help your Dad if you let him read it!

Rating:
Summary: Chess Tactics Made Easy!
Review: This is the sequel to Chandler's HOW TO BEAT YOUR DAD AT CHESS (a terrific little book om checkmating patterns that has become virtually a textbook on the subject). Following the DAD model in layout and format, Chess Tactics for Kids covers 50 different motifs, but in this case the book features standard devices that win material rather than mate. In each Tricky Tactic first one simple example is carefully explained, and this is then followed up by a variety of well-chosen positions (all from real tournament games).
After covering the most basic tactical motifs - forks, pins, skewers, deflections etc - the examples move on to positions where familiar tricks can be used (such as the move Nd5 in lots of positions, or ...Nxe4 for black where a pin is broken). Chandler also has a bit of fun, with the incredible themes of the Rampant Rook and Kamikaze Queen. These two (as he concedes) are more exotic, but we can forgive this thanks to the sheer entertainment value - chess in the twilight zone!
I can see this book being extremely popular with chess coaches as well as kids, as it is a virtual course-book on every important tactical theme in chess. At $14.95 for a Gambit-quality hardback the price is good value too.