Customer Reviews

Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The word is WOW! Gigantic collection of chess puzzles. So many I have only just gotten started after a month!!! Question is which ones are going to help me improve my results in actual play. There are so many, and so many don't seem to be from real games and are filler. [...] But you get a lot of problems in this book and if you want everything probably ever made into a problem this is the book!

This has got to have more chess problems than any other single chess book ever written. If you want want is lots and lots then this book cannot be beat.

But the very fact that this book is so massive creates problems of it's own. A simple question to start with: Do you have almost unlimited time (years and years) to go over about every problem, instructive and not so instructive? Or are you more interested in having well selected problems that are instructive and focus on the most common patterns you are going to come across in actual play?

This book, is loaded with what I call a lot of "filler" problems and a lot of material that is quickly tossed in without much thought toward making this book logically progress from one pattern to another. Simple grouping of "general" types of tactics and ideas is not going to make it.

This book deserves some credit just for being jamm packed. But I would rather suggest tactics/problem books with a more well thought out direction. For a beginner or just beyond that level Bruce Pandolfini's, "Beginning Chess: Over 300 Elementary Problems" and for an intermediate player, Emms "Ultimate Chess Puzzle Book" have condensed plenty of problems into what is more practical to learn.

I am a scholastic chess coach, teaching kids from how the pieces move all the way up to about 1500-rated. I now require every student to have his or her own copy of this book! This school year, my students (cumulatively) completed more than 5000 of these puzzles, some more than 500 individually.

Polgar doesn't have a lot of text here to read, just tons of puzzles, most of which are game-likely situations. One of the hardest things to teach students is often board vision and cooperation of pieces into attacks and mating attacks. Through repetition, this book helps players learn the patterns that will present them opportunities in their tournament games. My players that are serious about their improvement have, without exception, found that this book has bumped their ratings at least 200 points (some 400 points!) in less than a year!

As a coach, I have found that offering internal club recognition for completing puzzles such as these also improved club-wide interest. Additionally, many of the puzzles you find elsewhere, whether in a book or on-line, will have escape possibilities from the stated "mate-in-two" or other move numbers. Of the 5334 puzzles in this book, my students and I have only found ONE with such a problem!

I would not hesitate to give this book the highest possible review rating as a teaching manual - you don't need to re-write the book when Lazlo has already done it for you

To become a virtuoso in anything, the key is practice. Scarlatti wrote piano studies that were challenging, taught the basics of music theory through the composition, and sounded beautiful at the same time. Not all of the puzzles in this book are beautiful, but then neither are the positions I sometimes seem to find myself in when playing a 1300+ player. The thing I noticed about these puzzles is that they are very carefully organized, showing you every way a particular piece can mate with just a pawn companion, for example. In other words, variations. I have found myself beginning to understand the power and limitations of the pieces and pawns in a much deeper way. My latest tournament games were 30 minute games lost only because my opponents were able to avoid the inevitable mate by playing for time instead of any real equality. I need to speed up my calculation a bit, but my tactics are sound. This book will remain within reach as long as I am playing competitve chess.

I own this book and like many that do I have only scratched the surface. I have done the ~300 mates in one, working on the mates in two from the combo section, and have played through about 20 of the miniatures toward the back. I am a tournament player currently rated about 1050 so my review reflects this. I am also a professional educator finishing my Masters degree so I also know good instruction when I see it.

So why should you buy this book, and if you are rated below 1600 you probably should. Mr. Polgar had three children and all three reached the top level of chess. Susan Polgar is the highest rated women's chess player in the US. Judit Polgar is the highest rated women's player in the world and a candidate for the World Championship cycle. So we know that Mr. Polgar knows how to create great chess players. The excellent number of varied problems is also fabulous. In what other book can you find hundreds of mates in one, mates in two for both colors, miniatures that focus on specific squares for mating, and endgame problems? The answer is of course: none.

This is a book were you find a theme to work on, like mates in two or attacks against the f7 square and work on it for a few months [because there are that many problems] then move onto something else. You pull out this book every night and do 12 - 24 mates in one and try to know them instead of calculate them. You set up a won position on Fritz and try to keep the advantage one afternoon. In other words you live with this book because the material helps keep you tactically sharp on every level.

One gripe about the book would be about the solutions. Having one ply [1/2 a move] for an answer is fine for mates in one and adequate for mates in two, but I find myself using software to see complete solutions to some of the problems because I still get stuck [remember I am rated 1050]. This has really not been much of an issue and the book is already so large I can barely imagine what it would look like with lots of variations in the solution section.

So buy this book, tag the different sections, work on something interesting or a weakness, and keep your homework fun. You may not need to buy another tactics book for several years.

Patterns are the Brick of Chess - you must instantly be able to recognize these mating patterns automatically to succeed tactically in chess.

Practice, Practice, Practice. This book POUNDS into you the mating patterns you need to know in a way that is actually palatable to most. At times it may seem tiring, but if you were to complete this book you'd be much the better player tactically if for no other reason than you'd be more aware of the vast number of maitng and tactical patterns that exist in chess, exist in your games to be played, and will find existed in your games of the past.

As a tactical resource, this is one of the best chess pattern practice books out there, bar none.

This thing is awesome. I bought it just to put my order over the free shipping limit, and it's huge! Guess I should have guessed that of a book with 5334 chess problems. Unlike many books of this sort, I have not yet found a single error after working many problems, which totally undermines the value of the books that harbor them. It has a great variety of problems for all levels and moods. Sometimes I just want a quick-paced workout, going from one tactical problem to the next. The mate in one and mate in two problems are wonderful for that. When I feel particularly well-focused, I can attempt the games. Should I ever actually complete all the puzzles in this book - which I seriously doubt - by that time I'm sure I can start over and they'll all be perfectly fresh again. A book of truly inexhaustible value.

This is a useful book that can be enjoyed anywhere you go. It's enormous though, at 3 inches thick and 1000+ pages. Polgar's "Chess" is almost entirely diagrammatic, which is its strength. No board necessary unless you play through the brief section of 600 miniatures at the end, which are themselves grouped by focal points (h2/h7, g2/g7, etc), ala Vukovic.

This book is simple. The great bulk of it shows pictures of positions, 6 per page, and it's up to you to figure them out - almost entirely 1, 2, and 3-move checkmate problems, a small section of these at the end dealing with positions from the Polgar sisters' games. If you love puzzles, this has about 5000 of them. There is just enough space at the top and bottom of each page to pencil in your answers and all variations (if any) in the margins. Most are 2-move mates. (You move, opponent moves, you move and mate on the move). The 1-move mates section is very brief, meant for abject beginners, along with a tiny section on game rules and a description of how to read chess notation.

Some of the puzzles can get tricky, at least for this reviewer. Most are in sparse, atomized endgame positions with lots of variation possibilities to keep track of. I've agonized over a few of them to make them work in all variations with the move limit.

There are a very small few positions that are hokey, for lack of a better word. I was transfixed on one for hours, convinced it was faulty, until I finally realized my king and rook were still in pre-castling position. This problem (#1558) was in one of those endgames where nearly everything is obliterated save 5 pieces between both players, and you castling figures into the solution. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but that kind of problem is a little less than useful, as it seems gimmicky - in this case almost like a test of whether one is aware that castling is still possible in a sparse endgame you just wandered up to as a spectator but not as a player. The eureka moment of solving this wasn't entirely satisfying! Likewise, watch out for the en passant puzzles. There are a couple of those too, where the position is right at that moment when the opponent's pawn just moved two ranks and bypassed one of yours the move before - not that you know this going into your evaluation - and this fact figures into the solution because the key move is the e.p. capture on the 3rd rank. OK! Fortunately, again, very few of these. There are also plenty of "underpromotion" puzzles, which are indeed useful and neat, and actually much more obvious and real.

In general, though, the book improved my tactical ability to see the board. I still haven't solved every problem and likely won't for years.

A huge volume of the positions deal with set-ups for swallowtail and dovetail mates and mates that utilize that basic shape, where the queen is mating on a square directly horizontally/vertically adjacent or diagonally adjacent to the king, and the two squares behind him that she can't cover are inaccessible to the enemy king either by two of the opponent's pieces or the scope of check by one or more of your pieces. I now recognize this pattern almost instinctively, but it doesn't seem to come up in my games quite as much as in the book.

My big criticism is mostly about the fact that if you know you have 2 moves to get mate, you can search for any possibility where after your move your opponent can check your own king, which would cause you (in most cases) to lose a tempo getting out of it if you allowed that. If your opponent can indeed check your king - even with a stupid spite sac - then the candidate moves you most immediately look at are going to be checks, and you can pretty much toss out any idea of a waiting move or a set up move as the correct answer. This makes the solution much easier as it narrows candidate moves, often significantly and even sometimes reducing the solution to having only one piece on the board that even *can* check the other king right away. This point isn't etched in granite or anything, but for the most part it's a fundamental dictum of the easy way to get through a problem, and while the simple answer is not to think about it quite that way, the temptation can be daunting once you are aware of this dynamic at all. In a real game, you don't always have the luxury to know ahead of time "X moves to mate" and often it is irrelevant as mate is clearly X+Y moves away anyway or a harmless check doesn't change anything. In such situations you don't need the most efficient solution, and so the "2 moves to win" thing doesn't apply unless you happen to see it yourself right off, but that's none of it the fault of the puzzle-maker; it's the fault of "mate in X" chess puzzles by their very nature. Still, the most efficient solution *is* the point; it's where the brain exercise happens. And it does clean up your tactical prowess by virtue of finding the very most forcing continuation, so ho hum. I did fly through a bunch of them because of this, though.

Anyway, a great book. Just in terms of sheer volume of exercise, this is just as beneficial as playing your scales and etudes in music. Plenty of other fish in the sea for tactics problems and pattern recognition, some I think a little more thematic and practical, though none with this much material at this price. Good tool for keeping sharp.

I am relatively new to tournament chess (rating about 1300), and I have been working with many different puzzle books trying to improve my tactics. I picked up Polgar's book on chess because it includes simply so much material.

This book is good quality -- that is to say, the puzzles clearly have one solution, there seems to be no dispute. You get what you pay for: a LOT of problems. It also includes miniature games of 25 moves or less which, for me, were fantastic to see some exceptional tactics. On a mere practical stand-point, the book is BIG. That means, for one thing, you have thousands of problems and exercises. On the other hand, it means the book is BIG. It's hefty. It takes up a lot of space in a bag, so you can't always carry it with you.

As far as the book being organized, the first 306 problems are white to play, mate in 1, the next few thousand problems (literally) are mate in 2 -- both black and white to play in their respective sections, and then about three hundred problems of white to move, mate in three. There is also a section of miniature games (less than 25 moves), where you see a real game that was played and see if you can find the appropriate continuation (this description is very brief; technically you play out the game up to a certain move. You're given the hint only as to the key square, and there is a combination based on that square that mates. It's an excellent tactical exercise), along with a few basic end-game sections.

I have found this book to be much better for me at helping my end-game than at my tactics. Tactics are extremely useful, but most of the diagrams in the book end in mate so you are really looking to see how to kill the king again and again. The drills by rote are excellent practice, however, in that you can see some fundamental piece interaction and fundamental check mates (for example, how rooks + bishop can hem in a king, what kind of pattern to look for when you want to mate with a queen, etc).

In terms of difficulty the first 306 problems are very VERY easy. First, it's because it's mate in 1. Second, because you KNOW it's mate in one. This kind of mental prompting is not something you'd see in a real game. Third, some of the diagrams are simple enough that there's only one piece that can put the king in check, ergo the solution is pretty apparent. That said, they are useful for drilling the basics.
One you move past it, the diagrams become more difficult, but they still have this sort of artificial air about them. This kind of artificial-ness comes about because you know what's side it is to play, and you know in exactly how many moves there is mate. This prompting is again, not something you would receive in a real game, but even so Polgar's book is excellent practice none-the-less. If you're new in particular, this kind of prompting can help you build yourself up for the more advanced tactics books (like Winning Chess Tactics for Juniors, another book I've used and reviewed).


I recommend Polgar, but understand what you are getting. You are getting a big fat book that drills you repeatedly on the basics. That's NOT a bad thing. You are not going to get mind-numbingly difficult tactical problems, nor are you getting a realistic game simulation. You are going to get rote practice on fundamental combination, piece interactions, and basic end-games. You DO get realistic game simulation later in the book during the "miniature games" section, though that is not your standard problems where you can simply breeze through them, you really need a board to play through the game to see how it comes about. This is a very useful section for me, and a section most other reviewers have neglected to mention.

It's rote. It's basic. But everyone needs their fundamentals at one point or another. It also makes a very good test of your competence -- these problems ARE fairly easy, given all the prompting, so if you're having difficulty with the "mate in 2 problems" then it's a good sign to see you need to keep practicing. So again, it's not necessarily the best book on tactics out there, but this is a solid drill book that helps you improve your game.

I use this book for teaching chess concepts to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students. If you're a chess enthusiast like me, you probably already have access to many of these problems, but here I have literally thousands of them in a single volume. Great resource for teaching a great game.