Customer Reviews

200 Classic Chess Puzzles

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4 star:		(2)
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I recently purchased a chess set on Amazon.com. I wanted to re-learn the game and its different nuances. What a better way than trying to solve these puzzles! These puzzles focus primarily on the end-game, and you have to make the moves for both white and black. If you want to improve your chess game, I would recommend that this be one of the first places you stop.

I have a moderately sized chess library (100+ books), and this work is one of my least favorites. Besides having descriptive (i.e., old, non-algebraic) notation, the puzzle collection suffers from numerous other problems. The positions often appear composed rather than naturally occurring, and no credit is given regarding who created the puzzles to be solved. Further, the print quality of the diagrams is sub par, which means that solving the problems straight from the book isn't as easy as it should be. Overall, this book is quite a disappointment. I recommend that you pick up another tactics book for middlegame or endgame practice.

I just can't recommend this book -- I have not found it useful for myself and certainly would not use it to get problems for my students. The problem I see is that all of the positions are contrived and unnatural -- they aren't positions that would occur naturally -- so it doesn't improve your pattern-recognition ability. I don't believe that what you learn here translates to real games.

I don't know what to do with my copy of the book. I can't use it, but I don't want to resell it or give it away since I believe it's so unhelpful.

book arrived on time and in the condition described. i recommend the seller and book for anyone who likes chess puzzles.