Imagination in Chess : How to Think Creatively and Avoid Foolish Mistakes

Rating:
Summary: Surprising
Review: This book contains 90% exercises and 10% text (if you include the solutions, the ratio is about 95-5), which certainly isn't what I expected. In fact, I think a more sutiable title for this book would be "How to structure your thinking and implement your ideas".

There are no recipies here for avoiding blunders, as could be implied by the title. Through 756(!) exercises, the reader is tought to approach positions (mostly tactital) in a systematic way: If calculation shows that your initial idea cannot be carried out, do you abandon the idea or do you try to eliminate the cause of it not working (i.e a certain pawn or piece)? If the cause cannot be removed directly, can an auxillary idea solve the problem? If pure logic cannot help, what about imagination, and excercising mental agility?

The excercises are grouped according to how they are to be solved (by an idea, auxillary idea etc), and diagrams are included at the start of each chapter to clarify recommended thinking patterns. This approach seems very valuable, at least to a certain point - when mental agilty and imagination must enter the picture, patterns become far less clear-cut.

This is not beginner material. The exercises are ranked in difficulty from 0 to 5, and my guess is that even grandmasters will struggle with some of the rank 5 exercises if only using the diagram. Thankfully, they are not very numerous, there is a clear majority of excercises in the 0-2 range. None of the exercises are dead easy, so I would recommend this book for experienced club players and above. Occasionally, the exercises doesn't seem to fit with the theme of the chapter, if this hadn't been the case, I would have given this book 5 stars in a second, but this is a good buy anyway.