Winning Chess Traps

Rating:
Summary: One to avoid
Review: Of the hundreds of books on chess this is one of the best four or five ever written. Not a lot of wasted verbiage, it shows the beginner or starting tournament player how to decisively exploit small errors in your opponent's opening play, and equally important, how to not make them yourself.

This is especially true of your favorite openings as well as those you love to hate. Most books on openings just show you the "safe" moves, failing to explain what happens if you our your opponent steps off the path of "book" line of play.

The same is true studying the games of the grandmasters. For example, in Capablanca's 100 Best Games of Chess, in one encounter against Alekhine who opened with P-Q4, Capablanca adopts the Cambridge Springs Defense to Alehkine's Queen's Gambit, one of the trickiest lines of play there is. The annotation in the Capablanca book is good. But it's in Chernev's Winning Chess Traps that the reader really understands the dynamics of this exciting, high stakes defense.

Also, many of the examples in this book are traps set by the side playing the black pieces, which is rare in the literature. So an intermediate player can learn just a few basic lines of play that will stand them in good stead against strong players, in just about any known opening. Memorization is minimal. Really getting a grip on all major openings, quickly, is this book's strong suit.

This is a five star book. You will agree after you study it for awhile and start thrashing opponents you have been lucky to achieve drawn games against!

This is not a book you have to read cover-to-cover to gain from it. It's more like a compressed encyclopedia you pick up when you need to learn something fast.

I would rank Winning Chess Traps with Lasker's Manual of Chess, Ruben Fine's Basic Chess Endings or Capablanca's Chess Fundamentals. This is not a book for 1,800+ rated players, although experienced masters frequently get caught in these traps. For the player aged 16 or less it's a! powerhouse primer on nailing opponents in the first ten moves. It's the sort of stuff that can cause a young beginner to get hooked for life on an activity that won't put them in jail and will help them understand Economic Game Theory in graduate school.

This book is a winner.

Rating:
Summary: A great collection of Classic Chess Traps.
Review: This book follows the format of its subject so I don't think anyone should gripe about there being better chess books to read.
Anyway, this book is to be studied with a board, not just read.
It obviously came out of that 1930-1945 era when the French,
Caro-Kann, Sicilian, and Queen's Gambit dominated play. So don't
be looking for all sort of traps for the Pirc if you can find any. But what't the problem? The Indian stopped dominating in the late 1960's and the King's Gambit made a comeback! This is
a good selection of traps in classic chess that should be in every serious players library.

Rating:
Summary: How to really use this book.
Review: This book will help you avoid common opening erros that ruin your game, if you use it properly.

1) Take any game out of the book, and play over the moves in your head.

2) Get out a chess board, and see if your mental image of the position matches the actual diagram in the book.

3) Find the winning moves from the board/diagram.

For most beginners, this is a good way to learn some basic openings, without the reams of theory.

Rating:
Summary: How to really use this book.
Review: This book will help you avoid common opening erros that ruin your game, if you use it properly.

1) Take any game out of the book, and play over the moves in your head.

2) Get out a chess board, and see if your mental image of the position matches the actual diagram in the book.

3) Find the winning moves from the board/diagram.

For most beginners, this is a good way to learn some basic openings, without the reams of theory.

Rating:
Summary: Essential book for studying any opening.
Review: This is a great book, with 300 traps, mostly 10-15 move games, though likely continuations are sometimes given beyond 20 moves.

You can use this book in several different ways.

A) Play through the games. They are much easier to understand than modern grandmaster games. In this way, it's similar to Reinfeld's Great Short Games of the Chess Masters, another great book. You'll see tactics in motion, and you can learn as if by osmosis.

B) Use the diagrams as tactics drills. Each diagram represents the state of the game immediately following a blunder (marked in the game by "?"). Look for the refutation. Great practice! In this way, it is similar to the Pandolfini trap books, but Chernev's traps are typically a bit more subtle.

C) When learning a new opening variation, look it up in this book first to see the simplest traps. Then to see deeper traps, look it up in Burgess's Quickest Chess Victories of All Time, another great book. The two books have very little overlap, surprisingly. I sometimes copy a line from one to the other.

Strengths:
* Well-indexed (similar to Burgess above). Table of contents lists major openings. Alphabetical index lists openings and a fair number of variations. Move index allows you to look up games based on the first 2-3 moves.
* Correspondence between diagram and moves is obvious. (Some books make you scratch your head to figure out which move was just played.)
* Wide audience. Advanced-beginner level, but even a master must be prepared for the traps in his own openings.
* Text explanation next to diagrams.
* One trap per page.
* Excellent use of fonts for different types of info.
* Footnoted light annotation, rather than in-line clutter.
* Broad coverage, not just king-pawn openings. Pandolfini covers only a handful of queen-pawn openings in The Winning Way. Here, Chernev has 89, plus a few other tries.
* Blunders for both sides of the board. Some authors concentrate on White's point-of-view. Here, Black wins about a third of the games.

Weaknesses:
* Diagrams are old-style, but at least they are dark enough. (Some old re-prints are way too light.)
* Usually, the diagram is at a logical location, either following the blunder, or one move later when the blunder was really tough to notice. But sometimes the diagram precedes the blunder, which can be annoying when you're just doing tactical drills.
* Descriptive notation, a minor weakness for this sort of book.

Overall, it's hard to improve. A really great book.

Rating:
Summary: Don't bother
Review: This is a very instructive book, as are most of Chernev's other works. It will show you what other books usually do not- How to take advantage of inferior play by your opponent. While most books reel off 7 or 8 moves of the opening with only logical alternatives given, Chernev points out the common blunders and shows how to punish them. Almost all standard openings are surveyed, but the concentration is on King Pawn openings. A previous reviewer claimed this book would teach you to play the opening improperly, but this isnt the case at all! I agree some opening traps are bad if your opponent knows how to refute them. For example 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nd4 is known as the Blackburne Shilling Gambit, a trap that is essentially a weak play by Black if White simply avoids 4.Nxe5 But these types of traps are not covered in this book at all. Chernev is a top-notch chess author and only covers sound play in sound openings. After demonstrating the mistake, he then shows how one should play the opening. A great tool for all players rated 1200-1900.