<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Great little book of tactics
Review: About 300 tactics puzzles, divided into 20-question tests. According to the intro, the questions get progressively more difficult. Since there is a grading scale for the number of correct answers out of 20, I assumed that the questions must get harder throughout a given test. Unfortunately, the tests themselves get harder, so the grading scale is worthless.But maybe this is a good thing. For learning, it is better to have puzzles grouped by difficulty. (For accurate grading, try Test Your Chess IQ.) The difficulty seems to be around 1400-1800. There is a book by Lein (Sharpen Your Tactics) which has about the same range. These are combinations mainly, not checkmate puzzles. Reinfeld's How to Checkmate would be a good companion. And if you can find it (OOP) Chernev and Reinfeld's "Winning Chess" is, in my opinion, the very best way to learn the types of combinations to look for. (Seirawan's Winning Chess Tactics and Znosko's Art of Chess Combination are also good for that, though the latter is quite a bit more advanced.) This book is nothing but diagrams for drilling. No explanations. And no hints! That's closer to real conditions than some puzzle books are. And as the puzzles are from real games, they are of course realistic, not contrived compositions. However, many of them point out real blunders and real oversights! The diagrams are very clear, not old-style--maybe a bit small, but only because the book's dimensions are small. At the bottom of the page is a little comment about the game, usually revealing nothing about the solution. This really does make each puzzle more interesting. The answers, at the end of each 20-puzzle section, are described in words as well as in algebraic notation, and that helps to make the book less dry as well. New algebraic edition, thankfully. A 5-star book for the money.
<< 1 >>
| 
