Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

Gaprindashvili's examples are exceedingly difficult (I wouldn't recommend this to players under USCF/FIDE 1800), but it's an extremely well-done collection of critical positions ORGANIZED BY THE THOUGHT PROCESS NECESSARY TO SOLVE THEM EFFICIENTLY.

In many cases, the obvious move doesn't work, but the obvious move suggests a move that wasn't one of the original candidates.

We are not computers--we can't possibly look at every move three moves deep. Gaprindashvili's method is to drill the student in a METHOD of finding critical moves and analyzing them in an efficient fashion.

Valeri Beim's How to Calculate Chess Tactics teaches a similar approach, somewhat more accessibly.

Serious players should read both books (Beim first). Both books demand serious effort--both books will make you a much stronger tactician.

This book is a collection of chess problems. "Imagination in Chess" is for the chess player who has worked through Reinfeld, Combination Challenge!, and the other problem books by Emms, Nunn, and Archangelsky. The problems in here are very difficult. The only reason that this book fails to get five stars is because of the inaccurate title. This book has very little about imagination and thinking creatively--it is almost all chess problems.

This is an excellent source of study that breaks down thinking ideas into groups, such as "Reciprocal Thinking" (or reversing the move order). The diagrams in each section actually follow the recommended thinking strategy of the section which is good. Most positions are from recent (the last 20-30 years) GM/IM games. The study material is original and not "re-hashed" from earlier study guides, as least not as far as I can tell. Let me put up a BIG warning, however. I am a solid Class B player in the USCF and this book is torturously difficult. The problems are rated level 0-5, of which the first 8 in the book are all "Level 0". I believe I solved one of the 8 correctly, and this was by no rushed analysis. I would highly recommend that you do not buy this book unless you are:

A. At least Class A USCF. (Yes I am Class B but have a penchant for self-torture I suppose)
B. Very talented and progressing at chess REALLY fast.
C. VERY serious about this game.
D. All of the above.

"Good luck in the black and white jungle" (Kasparov).

This is not the book for the person new to chess, or those still learning the basics. As mentioned in another review, it is almost entirely composed of page after page of diagrams (positions usually taken from master-level games) with the solutions at the end - no explanations of what to look for (bank-rank mate, skewer, etc), and only a short introduction to each section, providing a very abstract theme that ties all the problems in that section together.

But assuming you are a competent chess player, the effort you put into this very dense book will be rewarded and your results will improve in over-the-board chess. At least that is what happened to me. After a long period away from tournament chess I came across this book and started working on a couple problems a night (over a period of six months). I gained over 200 USCF rating points (to Class A) in my first year back. Now I won't claim that improvement is solely due to this book, but it certainly helped my tactical vision and ability to read a board for potential combinations.

This book will give you years of study material (if you do two problems a night, every day, it will take you almost a year - and of course once you finish you should start over to see what you have retained and how much you have improved). While the average chess player library contains a plethora of opening books, with lines and lines of theory that never seem to come in handy when your opponent plays something unexpected on move 4, every chess player can benefit from a book like this, which does not give you any lines to memorize or even explicit tactical themes to remember, just problem after problem to hone your overall tactical vision. If an opening book is like handing you a fish, this book will teach you how to fish.

One recommendation is to set up each problem on a board. Don't move the pieces (unless you are stuck), but just view the position as you would when playing an opponent in real life. Give yourself 10-15 minutes to solve the position; if unable to see the way, check the solution and play through it to convince yourself it is correct. Finally, if you find the 'multi-starred' problems too much for you, just skip them on your first pass through the book.

I agree with the previous reviews but I wanted to emphasize(unnecessarily? perhaps) their point that this interesting and worthwhile collection of problems does not have much in the way of actual text demonstrating "how to think creatively and avoid foolish mistakes" - this is primarily a tactics collection. Solving the tactics exercises would require you to apply your creativity and probably learn to avoid mistakes by not allowing these situations to go unexploited, but honestly, if you have a tactics book already, then you have the basic idea already: practice, practice, practice.

I'm glad I have the book nonetheless because these problems do require imagination to solve and are not "composed" problems, they're from actual games.

Four stars for the reasons other people have given: the instructions are rather sparse and the book doesn't indicate beforehand that these problems are for intermediate players or better.

Imagination in Chess presents over 700 really tricky puzzles. These are difficult and not for the beginner. i believe that they are worth the effort, allowing an improvement in chess calculations. It is an excellent book. My only complaint is that the main line is shown in BOLD with multiple interruptions. This is an unusual presentation that sometimes makes it hard to follow.

This is an advanced puzzle book with some interesting articles on the thinking process in chess.

Good for regular "sharpening" of your chess mind. Too difficult for beginners!

"Only" four stars because the title is not accurate (I wish I could really learn how to avoid foolish mistakes, and by the way, I would like to avoid intelligent mistakes as well).

I love to solve problems, so I bought a lot of books on combinations, tactics etc. For some classics, like " combinative motifs ", I even bought two. One use as exercises ( I think most reader would do the same, after finishing one question, one would take it ). The second book for collection. Today I receive with thrill to this book, but on seeing those questions, I only manage to solve one or two without *!!! I have already finished John Nunn's Learn chess tactics, about two third of those two stars questions of " Sharpen your tactics". I think the name of this book should be called, "tactics, stretgy or puzzles for advanced players!!! But I still give it 5 stars for author's enthusiasm.
Also, I think I should work harder!!!

Gaprindashvili is currently chess rated 2253 Fide. after turning all 151 pages of the exercises, I believe this knowledge is very well the routine thinking of the "advanced" players in the chess world (only a few exercises are instructive compositions, the rest are actual games played by competitors). my research discovered the author's latest tournament participation in april 2003; where he placed 8th out of 16 with players rated at least 2200 fide.This gave me motivation in reading the book seriously, for the book contains material which has been accumulated by the author over many years as a trainer. The book will be of great benifit to competitive players seeking to improve their methods of thinking.