Combinations: The Heart of Chess

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, Inexpensive, Effective History, Good Training.
Review: Chernev's classic is not simply a collection of combinations for drilling yourself on pins, forks, smothered mates, and so on - although there are plenty of combinations (300+) for that - it shows how the great players used them in their games. You get a history lesson while learning how Tarrasch, Nimzovich, Capablanca, and many other world-class players, employed combinations in their games. I like how Chernev uses extended game fragments and his own enthusiastic commentary to explain the combinations. I have several tactics books and I enjoyed Chernev's less common approach to combinations: most books just give the position as though it just "appeared" out of the blue to settle the game. Somehow with Chernev, I get the idea that you have to work to get there. Descriptive notation.

Rating:
Summary: A good primer on chess tactics.
Review: I once walked into a used bookstore in Atlanta, and found like 12 copies of this book sitting on the shelf. They only wanted a buck or so each, so I bought them all.

I was teaching chess at that time at a private school in Pensacola, The Creative Learning Center.

I gave most of those 12 books to my students. They enjoyed them tremendously.

If a student wanted to ask me what book should be his "First" book on tactics, I would probably whole-heartedly endorse this book. 'Nuff said?

Rating:
Summary: This is one of THE books on chess tactics
Review: Learn from the examples-- good and bad -- from the masters from Anderssen to Fischer, simple and complex, short and long, how to master piece co-ordination. A classic. Check out Chess Life and Review April 1975 p. 245 col 1 wrt #69. Working through this book can add hundreds of points to an average tournament players' rating, whet his appetite and keep him off the street for days... Not just for beginners, the 356 positions on 240 pages although not their primary source nor a dry categorical treatise, will challenge delight edify and entertain an interesting reader for years...