Customer Reviews

Play Chess Combinations and Sacrifices

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I actually like this book -- I paid for my copy while in London in 1992. I was going to be on a plane for several hours and was looking for some puzzles to solve on the way home. Published in 1980, the most recent games and positions are from the late seventies so players new to chess may not be familiar with the more famous shots illustrated here, but veteran readers will recall many from the pages of Chess Life & Review and the Informator series. After a too brief introductory chapter, the author divides tactics into themes like "Decoying Combinations" and "Line-opening Combinations". Later chapters include, "Sacrifices associated with specific openings" and "The psychological aspects of sacrifices." The latter is somewhat interesting but the former tries to cover way to much ground in 25 pages. My guess is that there are about 250 positions in the instructional chapters. Additionally there is a 30 question quiz and 10 sacrificial games including the wildly entertaining game, Portisch-Kavalek, Wijk aan Zee, 1975. For the price, I'd buy DuMont's, The Basis of Combination in Chess and still have enough cash to pick up Evans', New Ideas in Chess and Renaud & Kahn's, The Art of the Checkmate.

I bought this book almost a decade ago and thoroughly enjoy the storytelling and examples Levy uses to instruct.

When Levy has you play through the Russian North Pole vs. South Pole game (played by radio), he not only teaches you about chess, he allows you to relive a piece of its history. This storytelling doesn't interfere with his instruction however, but instead provides a much richer learning experience that will stick. When I play now I think.. "yeah.. just like the queen sacrifice from that 1850 opera house game." Not, "oh yeah, like example #935."

I've purchased several other books on sacrifices and combinations; most with a dizzying number of contrived postions littering each page. Every time I buy one of these I hope for the experience I had reading this book for the first time. I am always disappointed.

There is some decent info in here but like many chess books written before PCs rose to prominence, there are just so many calculation mistakes that it becomes distracting. I would have a hard time recommending this book unless someone takes it upon themselves to update it and publish a new edition.