Customer Reviews

Learn Chess Tactics

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It is a truism that most chess games are won through tactics, whether those tactics occur on the board or in the notes.

And yet what player hasn't had this experience: you have entered upon what you believe is the final stage of a long and skillfully played game of chess. Not only have you handled the opening well, gaining an advantage, but you have nursed this advantage to the point where victory is surely in reach. You sit back in your chair, you smile, and as you start to consider how you might celebrate this victory later on... suddenly your queen is forked.

End of game.

Which is to say that tactics are both the wonder and the terror of chess. Long after we have forgotten our tournament results, how many of us can remember that game where, through a brilliant deflection, we won a rook? Or the rook we dropped through a discovered attack on our king? For many of us, our fondest and worst chess memories are these tactical blows.

It is these blows that fill the pages of John Nunn's book, Learn Chess Tactics, a work that is more than a puzzle book along the lines of Reinfeld's, 1,001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate or Wilson and Alberston's 303 Tricky Chess Tactics. These have their place and are fine as far as they go. My advice for the novice is -- start with Nunn.

In Learn Chess Tactics, each tactical idea has a chapter, and each chapter starts with a clear and incisive analysis of the tactical idea - something most other books on the subject ignore. Along the way, each idea is illustrated by recent tournament games, and then the chapter ends with a score of exercises. These become progressively harder to solve, and the solutions to some struck me as truly revelatory - a permanent addition to my chess knowledge.

Aside from the tactical challenge of such a work, the text is peppered with more general observations about its theme, some of them insightful. For example, Nunn asks on page 90, "How does one spot the winning [tactical] idea?" And answers, "Very often the key is to focus on a potential weakness, and see what is necessary to exploit it." It follows therefore that the ability to spot tactics is the ability to identify weak points in a position and to know how to turn these to your advantage. Elsewhere he says that "although study of familiar patterns will undoubtedly improve one's playing strength, it is important not to lose the ability to think independently." Much has been made lately of pattern-recognition in chess, but as Jonathan Rowson and others have stressed, it is not a cure-all. It cannot, for instance, take the place of an alert, inventive mind. But nothing can.

Almost any tactical puzzle book will help you think independently and to exploit weakness, and the two I mentioned earlier are good. What distinguishes Nunn's work, however, is his analysis of each tactical element, such as the pin, fork, and skewer. After explaining the basic mechanism of each, he shows us how complicated the mechanism can become in a real game, the many variations that can spring from each tactical theme. As Rowson and others have noted, chess is hard - and beautiful. Nunn's prose throughout is as clean and workmanlike as a Capablanca endgame.

Who is this book for? I've been playing chess for over thirty years and consider myself a solid, intermediate player. And though I could easily solve the first half of the exercises in each chapter, there were always a few in the second half that stumped me. Nunn wrote the book as a sort of primer on tactics, but don't let that fool you: it will challenge the non-beginner as well. At the very least, in its clear labeling and discussion of the basic tactical tools, it will provide the more advanced player a healthy refresher course on that part of the game that is, for many of us, the hardest to fully master.

The best advice I ever received as a new player was to make myself into "a tactical monster," and that's still good advice. As a new player set on moving up the ranks quickly, there is no surer path to victory than a good eye for the tactical stroke, and there are few books that discuss this theme more clearly than Nunn's.

"Learn Chess Tactics" is a great first tactics book for someone who has learned to play chess to get.
Each chess tactic is broken down by it's type. The name is given and what the tactic is is explained. There are then examples to work on making the book fun. This is one of three types of books on tactics. This being more of an introduction with some examples. Then there are workbooks that contain hundreds of tactics puzzles to try and solve and then there are books that cover chess traps that help with tactics in the opening. Getting a variety of tactics books will be one of the best ways to improve the part of your knowledge on chess that will make you a better player.

I own both this book and Understanding Chess Move by Move by the same author. I am absolutely in love with both books! My rating is over 1200 on the USCF scale, and I have found that these books provide first-rate instruction without talking down to the reader.
What I like about Learn Chess Tactics is how it explains all the most important tactical concepts at a level that is perfect for the intermediate level player like myself. I will outline some of these concepts here:
1 Fork
2 Discovered Attack
3 Pin
4 Skewer
5 Deflection
6 Trapped Piece
7 Removing the Guard
8 Opening and Closing Lines
9 Bank-Rank mate
10 Pawn Promotion
11 In-between Moves
12 Defensive Tactics
13 Combinations

Because John Nunn is a grandmaster he really understands these themes, and I like the way he is able to select the most relevant way to illustrate them. I especially like the section on Opening and Closing Lines, as I had never seen this idea covered before in a book.
I highly recommend this book if you are an intermediate level player who wants to improve.

I have quite a few books on tactics and if I had to start all over again I would start by this book. Not that this book presents a huge collection of problems, which it does not, but because it explains the concepts behind tactic motifs very well.
Each chapter starts with a clear explanation of what the tactic motif is. Quoting: "Like the fork, the discovered attack is a way of creating 2 threats at the same time. Unlike the fork, the discovered attack involves 2 attacking pieces".
After the explanation there are a series of real life examples, mostly taken from GM games, all of them very instructive. Diagrams start very simple with chessbase-style threat arrows, clearly showing the combination principles, and then going into harder and harder to find combinations in diagrams without arrows. Solutions are given with nice verbose explanations, leaving nothing behind if you didn't find the complete solution at the diagram.
The chapter introduction is followed by 50 exercises about the tactical motif. Again, diagrams start VERY simple (I would say beginners level) and slowly migrate toward VERY difficult positions (I would say over ELO 1800). Each problem was picked from real life and has an interesting call (example taken from a Fork exercise: Should Black regain the sacrificed piece with 11...f6 or 11...h6?). Unlike most tactic books, sometimes the combination goal in the harder exercises is only a positional plus or a pawn and I found this particularly interesting. The solution to each exercise is also very instructive for instead a short line Nunn takes time to explain what should white or black have played (sine lines included when the solutions allows it) and the what happened in the tragedy of real life (pretty funny sometimes... just like my ICC games).
Finally, a scramble chapter (66 diagrams with side to move) where you are in the dark and have to found the correct tactical motif(s) and/or combination of them in the correct order.
The book itself is of high quality, as all other GAMBIT books around. So far I could not find a typo or analysis error, the diagrams are of excellent quality and the book biding lets it open easily without leaving pages on the floor. Not the cheapest book around but the book material worths the price.
I give 5 stars for the didactics and quality of the contents. 5 stars for the book itself. 4 stars for the problem collection (as all greedy chess readers, I would love to have a bigger problem collection, specially so well explained as the ones already presented).

If you never studied tactics, pick this book first, then go elsewhere find other problem collections.

As a 1400ish player, I figured "yeah, I know what a fork, pin, skewer, etc are but I guess I'll try this book out anyway". Well, needless to say I was way off base.

My one-level deep thinking really just scratched the surface of what you can set up with these simple building blocks. This book has been key to helping me see the deeper tactics which has already proved invaluable in play.

The book is broken down into short chapters on each tactic, followed by many, many exercises. The exercises are all from recent (since the 90s) games, so you're seeing guys like Anand, etc instead of a bunch of 19th century players.

One other thing that I like about this book is that its one of the few chess books I own that I can read without having a board or computer handy to follow along the positions.

This is one of the best books on tactics. What makes it such a standout is a very good collection of excercises all of which come from recent GM games. The difficulty of excercises varies nicely starting from very simple one-move ones and all the way up to hard core combinations with a couple of subtle moves in the main line. Players of all levels of strength should benefit from this book.

I'm around 1600 and I can tell you this book (together with another one - read on) helped me a lot to improve my tactical (and perhaps also combinative) vision. I can feel it during the games. The themes just pop up immediately, like they never did in the past. The way things look now, I'll be around 1700+ in a year from now. At least I hope so.

A good thing about this book, that as afar as I know is an attribute other books don't have, is that all the exercises and examples are real games situations. I mean real games that actually happened. What this means is that you will have to find the main variation of each exercise, but you will also need to find other possible continuations for the rival player, for many times this is actually how the game proceeded. So bear this in mind when solving the exercises. I guess that in the beginning you will only note the main variations, but as you go further in the book you will have more awareness to the other possibilities.

But you have to put in some effort. Read it all and solve all the exercises. After a month or two, go over *all of it* again. This is what I did, and after the second time I began to feel the improvement.

After that (or during that, for the sake of variety), grab Susan Polgar's "Chess Tactics for Champions". It contains many more exercises than Nunn's book, albeit of much less quality. Many of Susan's exercises are somewhat sterile, in the sense that they don't really simulate the real life positions that you can reach during a game. But I would still recommend her book anyway. Real games or not, going over the exercises simply sharpens your tactical vision.

This book is just perfect.
In the first part of the book the puzzles are introduced with some words that can give you an idea of what's going on. I usually don't like these kind of things, but ok, this is "Learn Chess Tactics", not "Test your tactic level" or something like that.
All the puzzles are from recent games, all the solutions are correct, every solution is analyzed in depth.

Stuck in Detroit waiting for my delayed plane I had lots of time to delve into this book of problems. and although I had great feelings for it, I did want to report one thing... It was an excellent set of problems with more originality and diversity than normal but only average instructional content.

This is ok! Tactics seem to more something you learn on your own, anyway. You've got to slowly and tedious calculate out all the candidates before your intuition matures and alerts you to some major possibilities of the position.

so my advice is to take each problem and write down everything you notice about the position till you either solved it, or wrote down everything you could see in the position and go into the back and compare your lowly analysis with Nunn's incomparable analysis. If you missed it, you've at least tried really hard and can figure out what to do to not miss similar positions in the future.

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I would highly recommend it, although I'm not sure there's that much difference between it and its competitors.

Other brief comments
PROS:
* good tough book (binding)
* Not all just white to win (or even white to gain at least a peice)
* Pictures with arrows
* Tentalizing hints why some tactics weren't spotted by the masters who fell for them (presuming that you might miss them for similar reasons)
* Some problems are tough buggers although they all seem solid
* Nunn is clear, succinct and is an excellent analyst
CONS:
* Placement of the answers (awkwardly put at the end of the book)
* Sometimes too many hints
* Sometimes not enough explanation of the context
* Always always these kind of books could use more problems that exploit our expectations

In Nunn's Learn Chess Tactics the exercises are organized by theme. Each section has an introduction where the theme is explained, a few examples are given, and then a series of tactical puzzles organized in order of increasing difficulty is provided.
Most sections, and certainly the most relevant ones (like the ones on pins and forks), provide a wide array of puzzles that ranges from beginner level to challenging (for me at least - a class C player). The solutions are clear and as far as I could see with no omission of major lines. The last section is a very good collection of puzzles of every theme, excellent for training your tactical vision.
The breadth of the themes that are presented not only strengthened my overall tactical vision (and my rating), but helped me pinpoint my blind-spots (for example, troubles spotting possibilities of trapping pieces, or tactical moves that are defensive in nature) and work on them.
I recommend this book without hesitation.