Customer Reviews

Killer Chess Tactics : World Champion Tactics and Combinations

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The bird's eye view of this book was very promising, but beyond the initial 15 minutes of enchantment in the bookstore, this book turned out to be very disappointing. I exchanged it a day later for Lev Albert's "Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player."

I have just begun playing in a club against real people and am looking to elevate my game but am ranked around 1450-1500 on yahoo (probably less in "real life") The first book I read, Purdy's "Guide to Good Chess" contained a good overview of tactics, introducing concepts such as Pin, Fork, Skewer, Discovered Attack, etc. which I have been using in my games.

Looking at the table of contents, this book looks to be a treasure trove of tactics, at 400+ pages and introducing such tactics as the "windmill" and "alkeins cross", looks very promising.

The reader quickly realizes that each of these tactics is just an "extension" or sub-class of the primary tactics in everyone's vocabulary. The windmill is just a succession of discovered attacks (usually the result of a blunder.) wow.

I was hoping that the book would be instructive on tactics, but the examples only help to define this new vocabulary by showing the last few moves of some master's game where he used the tactic to good effect. In fact that is all this book is. For each tactic, it shows a few moves from a master's game where the tactic was used. Well duh, I have used them in my own games. At least now I know cool sub-names for them. I wonder if schiller invented these names?

I believe it would be much more instructive to view the series of moves leading up to the illustrated tactics, because being able to identify and set up the situation is much more useful than seeing the trap that is about to be sprung. I recently purchased a chess program (fritz 8) that has a database of games which can be sorted by tactic. So you can view entire master games based around use of a particular tactic. Why spend $25 on a book that is just selective regurgitation of master level games (with very little annotation), when for $10 more you can have a world-class chess engine with a database that sorts entire games by tactic? Maybe I'm missing the point.

The book does have a nice cover and a promising title. I have appreciated some of the Cardoza books written by Robertie including "Basic Endgame Strategy, Kings Pawns, and minor pieces", but this book does not have the same instructive feel. I am not biased against non-mainstream books or Schiller, its just that this book does not seem useful.

I appreciate that it is difficult to make a career out of playing chess, but dont write a book when there is nothing new to say.

While I would not say outright that "almost anything written by Eric Schiller is rubbish," that statement is probably much closer to the truth than its opposite. Those I have seen are so sloppy that they almost seem to be deliberately mutilated. Missing moves, illegal moves, faulty diagrams, invalid assessments, suspect analysis, and ignorance of recent (or even old) ideas and discoveries, are all too frequent. Grammatically, Schiller fails in such simple tasks as subject-verb agreement and spelling of common words; apparently he does not even bother to use the automatic spell-check today's word processors offer. His work is thick with historical error and dogged by questions of fabrication, plagiarism, and other ethical issues.

Schiller may have written some worthwhile books, but on the whole he does a disservice to the chess public, keeping better books off the shelves by the sheer volume of his hackwork. Being a club level player I rely on the reviews of others I trust when I purchase a chess book. The lure of a quick buck is strong and I fear it is a temptation Mr. Schiller cannot resist.

I like this book. I'm not done with it yet because it's huge and with tactics books I like to flip around a lot. It has the major tactical themes that can come up in your chess games, combined with a little bio of the great players whose tactics they illustrate. They make the book fun because they set the stage for each tactic with dramatic/colorful dialogue, and then ask you to step into the footsteps of the legends of the game and find the solution. The book also provides little tidbits of information like why the opponent's move was good or bad during a particular game and little idiosyncracies about the game and/or players. The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars was because sometimes they put the solutions in a non-user friendly place so it sometimes became a laborious chore to find the answers. Overall, an entertaining and educational chess book.