Customer Reviews

Sharpen Your Tactics: 1125 Brilliant Sacrifices, Combinations, and Studies

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have all these tactics books and the question is: which one? Well, it essentially comes down to this book or Fred Reinfeld's combo book. Hays' Combination Challenge is just Fred's book in algebraic notation (but useless if you already have Fred's book, unless you hate descriptive notation), and the other book in this genre, 303 Tactical Chess Problems, is for absolute beginner's (1100-1400). I'm personally 1650-1700 USCF (1750 ICC) and would like to tell the differences between these books in my opinion. Lein's book, above, has the following good points : 1) scrambled themes (like a real chess game, no hints as to what you're looking for), 2) the last 200 puzzles (the 4 stars) are harder than anything in Fred's book by a factor of 5!, 3) far more accurate, only found 1 error, so far, by my looking with Fritz/craty18, 4) algebraic notation, 5) many puzzles feature pins+skewers+double attacks+ . . . like REAL combos, not one ISOLATED amateurish tactic. Negatives: 1) overemphasis on mate and stalemate it feels like 75% of problems involve mating threat (in some ways, therefore, oriented to beginning players, and ruining the quality of better players by encouraging you to attack always, even if the position doesn't warrant it . . . so play becomes weak and trappy with overuse), 2) if you find a weakness in your play, like double attacks were weak for me with a Chessbase quiz, you can't get a 100 problems of that theme in one place with which to train (no thematic grouping), 3) the focus on combos of complexity versus single themes makes it hard to implement this stuff in your play -- e.g. you usually plan discovered checks, so having that motif in your head helps you plan. Lein's technique just sharpens tactical OBSERVATION not tactical PLANNING, and 4) some of the problems esp number 1000 and following (at least for me at 1700) are just too hard to do without a board (people who can do this whole book without a board are either not finished, lying, or over USCF expert class . . . Lein says in the introduction to use a board for 3 and 4 stars (although only the 4 stars require, the final position in my head on the 3 stars is occasionally fuzzy . . . ). In short, I prefer ol' Fred's book for actual training, and if I want to see a fancy combo I look at an Alekhine game or read the Informant combo museum piece (Anthology of Combos . . .). Also, my 6 year old son (600 rating) does the first 100 or so problems easily, and as the end problems are like 1900+, you can see the book tries to go from 400 to master, which is a little ridiculous, so that no matter who you are, only like 150 of the 1000+ problems are pitched right at your level. Fred's book is all about 1400-1900 I think, with some reservations at both ends of that range. So for me, my chess weight-lifting tool is still --- Reinfeld's book.

I really liked the format of this book. I love tactics books. The kind with no text in them, and page after page of nothing but chess diagrams. The kind that people on an airplane look at you funny when you are "reading" them.

This book is very similar to the other tactics books out there, but with some improvements that I think are nice. One improvement is that the tactics are labeled with a * symbol to show how difficult the problem is. The more stars the harder it is. This is a nice break from the Reinfeld books which will have a mate in one followed by a mate in ten, and you have no idea beforehand how hard the problem is going to be. I personally like to have some idea of what I am getting into.

Another nice feature is that the answers show where the game came from. I think that this is a nice touch, and gives credit to the people that actually played the game. A lot of books don't do this, and you see puzzles where you know where the game came from - "Oh yeah this is the opera box game", etc, but the author gives no credit where it is due.

I also like that the answers are in algebraic notation, as opposed to descriptive ("e4" versus "pawn to king 4"). Reinfeld's books still have the old school style. One note is that the notation is not really standard. Bxe3 would be Be3, which is a little odd. I got confused at least once when looking up an answer and did not see the "x". I assumed I had the wrong answer when I didn't. But once you know this is the format they use, you can adjust. But it would be nice to see the standard used in the first place.

Overall great tactics book. If you like doing tactics til your eyes bleed, and want something that could be used as part of a "400 points in 400 days" type of study program, this is a good one to add to your collection.

This book is spectacular. It doesn't just throw you in head first as the Reinfeld book does. It actually teaches you thematic combinations and how to look for them. In a deceptively simple way, this book walks you through foundational concepts and later on in to very sophisticated applications of it.

The secret to tactics training isn't that you spend hours and hours and then you finally figure out that one puzzle. You do loads and loads of EASY diagrams that have repetitive tactical themes until you begin seeing them in your sleep. Suddenly your attacking prowess doubles. You see mates that you never saw before. You get the patterns, you understand what it LOOKS like. And then you begin to apply multiple patterns in combination. And that's the beginning of high level chess.

This book does exactly that. Not only that, but you will see some amazingly simple combinations that will literally take your breath away: ridiculous combinations from Tal for example (where he sacks three heavy pieces and then mates with a pawn).

This is easily the best tactics book I've purchased (among Winning Chess, Reinfeld's, and Lev Alburt [though I like the Lev Ablurt book too]). It is certainly usable for all but very very beginner. If you are ranked anywhere above 1100 then this book is for you.

Sharpen Your Tactics! presents a diagrammed position from 1125 games and studies, each with a tactical device ready to be unleashed. Occasionally the solutions include one or two brief variations. The diagrams are rated in difficulty from one-star (easiest) to four-star (hardest). The problems are excellent, but the book has major problems and needs revision.

Many of the exercises, perhaps 70% of them, appear in the Convekta chess tactics programs: Chess Tactics for Beginners, Chess Tactics for Intermediate Players, and Chess Tactics Art 3.0. If you use those programs, this book feels redundant.

Just like the Convekta programs, this book splits many combinations into parts. First, they give you a diagram that asks for the final move of, say, a three-move combination. Then, maybe four pages later, they give you a diagram that asks for all three moves of the same combination. Your chances of getting it right are increased from your earlier experience. I like this touch.

As I was checking the solutions, something seemed amiss, and I started giving them to Fritz. Over the course of a year, I found 16 clear errors out of about 150 positions checked. It seems a likely conjecture, then, that perhaps 10% of the alleged solutions are flawed. I am talking about very serious flaws, too, where the defending side can hold against the recommended moves. Rechecking the solutions on Fritz is a ton of work. We should not have to do it. The publisher and authors should computer-check everything and issue a revised edition.

I purchased Sharpen Your Tactics! two years ago, and it is falling apart. The cover is off and many pages have come loose. I hold the book together with rubber bands. (Apparently the success of Reinfeld has given publishers the evil idea that an exercise book sells more copies if it falls apart.) The paper is cheap, the diagrams fuzzy. It is hard on the eyes.

Aside from a brief introduction, Sharpen Your Tactics! has no words. In contrast, Alburt (Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player) gives nice definitions of diversion, decoy, skewer, etc., and comments on the solutions. Moreover, John Nunn, in Nunn's Puzzle Book, gives you verbal setups, hints, and crystal-clear explanations of every solution. Regrettably, Sharpen Your Tactics! gives no verbal explanations of anything. This silence diminishes the value of the exercises. Many times I could not understand why the tactic worked until I set it up on Fritz and played through some side variations. This takes time and effort and should have been included in the price of the book.

The best thing about Sharpen Your Tactics! is its selections: these examples are remarkably similar to what we see in tournament games. This makes it different from Reinfeld, for example, who gives many "beginner positions" where one side has all his pieces developed and the other side has made only pawn moves, producing at best a patzer's wizardry useful only against the neighbor who learned how the pieces move last Tuesday. Most of the positions in Sharpen Your Tactics! are from actual tournament games between titled players. The remaining positions are well-selected studies that have obvious practical application.

Furthermore, the progression of problems is extraordinarily well thought-out. With helpful sequencing, the exercises steadily deepen your handling of the pieces, as you learn step-by-step how knights on outpost squares so easily generate forks, how rooks on the seventh rank threaten everything, how queens become monsters when they are centralized, and even how tactics help you win a variety of practical endgames. When you do such a fine sequence of problems, you feel as if you are not simply learning tactics but actually taking a chess course.

In light of how similar the selections are to the Convekta programs, one wonders if they are both borrowed from some standard work available in Russian. Although the problems have no labels by topic, you can deduce a series of topics: near the beginning you go through winning a queen, then winning a rook, winning a knight, winning a bishop, and finally winning a pawn. Then you go through knight checkmates, bishop checkmates, rook checkmates, queen checkmates, and pawn checkmates. Next you get a set of drawing combinations. Then you get a series of the best combinations of each year starting from about 1860 and continuing to the late twentieth century. Then you get a number of attacks on the uncastled king, then attacks on the queenside castled position, then attacks on the kingside castled position. The book concludes with many problems where you sacrifice material to destroy the pawn protection around the enemy king and deliver checkmate.

That same progression of topics, with many of the same positions, appears in the Convekta programs Chess Tactics for Beginners, Chess Tactics for Intermediate Players, Chess Tactics Art 3.0. Yet in Sharpen Your Tactics! these topics go unlabeled, perhaps because it is cheaper to produce the book that way. With its poor binding, its unchecked solutions, its cheap paper, etc., this book virtually screams out, "We made it on the cheap!"

In sum, Sharpen Your Tactics! has outstanding selections, but nothing is explained, the pages fall out of the book, the diagrams are unclear, the paper is cheap, the themes are unlabeled, and about 10% of the "solutions" are wrong.

To judge Sharpen Your Tactics! in perspective, we might compare it to perhaps the best tactics exercise book available in English: NUNN'S PUZZLE BOOK from Gambit, the only chess publisher run entirely by Grandmasters. It also has good selections, but every solution is clearly explained, its binding is strong and attractive, its paper is high-quality, its print and diagrams are crystal-clear, and its solutions are computer-checked. Nunn's Puzzle Book sets a high standard that Sharpen Your Tactics! fails to meet.

So may we respectfully suggest a revised edition of Sharpen Your Tactics! Let us see computer-checked solutions, a strong and attractive binding, higher-quality paper, clearer print and diagrams, and explanations of the solutions. These welcome improvements would bring Sharpen Your Tactics! up to standard, making it a truly superb tactics exercise book.

I've had this book for about six months now and finally felt compelled to write an online review - mainly because of the positive impact it has had on my play.

In researching which tactics book was right for me, I discovered that almost all books in this class can be grouped into one of two categories:
1) books with puzzles presented by theme - usually with a description of the theme preceding the similarly grouped puzzles or...
2) books with puzzles presented in a random fashion - sometimes grouped by difficulty, but not always.

For beginners, the first category book is appropriate, since the beginner may need an introduction to the family of tactical themes such as pins, skewers, double-attacks, promotion threats, etc. There are many books in this category, one good one being "Winning Chess Tactics" by Seirawan.

I found less books in the second category, but Lein and Archangelsky's book must fall near the top (I say near the top not because of a shortcoming in the book but rather because I have not thoroughly examined all of the other tactics books). After a brief introduction, the reader is given 1125 tactical puzzles presented in general increasing difficulty. The first ~600 puzzles tend to be easy with a few difficult ones mixed in while the remaining puzzles shift the balance - mostly difficult with a few easy ones. Six puzzles occupy each page and accompanying each puzzle is difficulty rating (1-4 stars with 4 being the most difficult), an indicator as to which side is to move, and an assessment of the final position (+-, -+, =). In most cases, the puzzles are taken from real games, and the author provides the player's names and tournament name along with the solution. This is a nice touch, and I found it enjoyable to solve a puzzle and then find out that the original "author" of the brilliancy was a player whom I admire. A few puzzles are of a drawing theme, a welcome addition which can have direct application to real play.

Aesthetically speaking, the book is also a success. It is comfortably sized, well-bound, and the puzzles are clear and well spaced.

After working with this book for a few months I not only saw a marked increase in my ability to quickly spot tactics in my games but also my ability to visualize and calculate positions had been improved. I believe that this is what the authors meant by "Sharpen Your Tactics" - sharpen your ability to both see tactics in a position and to calculate them out to a favorable end.

I've had this book a little over a month now and am about 20% of the way through. The book is nothing but problems, 1125 in all, with clear diagrams and highly accurate solutions in algebraic notation.

The goal of the book is to build up your recognition of tactical patterns. To achieve this, the problems are annotated not by motif, but by difficulty. The goal is to work through all the problems relatively quickly. If you get stuck, look up the answer and move on. In general the problems progress in difficulty, but the patterns built up working on the earlier problems help solve the harder ones later. Marking by difficulty allows one to decide when to "give up" and look at the solution, unlike the Reinfeld book for example, where you never know if you are simply being blind, or you've hit one of the really hard problems.

This book has no hints...no "spot the Pin", no "White has just opened the position, why was this a mistake?". So for general practice it is a little more realistic. This book does NOT explain the motifs. If you want that, try Nunn's "Learn Chess Tactics" or one of the similar books by Polgar, Littlewood etc. These books are also better if you find you have a weakness in a particular motif and want to practice just that one (my favorite here, is Muller's "ChessCafe Puzzle Book").

The key is, though they are not labelled as such, the problems are organized by motif and pattern. As you move through the problems you will come across a series of closely related positions. For example, you might get 10 back rank mates in a row, then 10 knight forks. I often find I will hit the first of these, struggle a bit (though usually the first in a series is one of the easier ones), then the second one is quicker because the pattern is starting to establish itself, and so on. So the book really does contain "hints", but my experience is that discovering the pattern yourself cements it more than having it explained and then exercising a series of examples.

For me at least, this approach seems to work better than that in the classic Reinfeld books, and "Sharpen Your Tactics" has replaced them at my bedside.

This book is the best book in it's presentation of tactics compared to all other books. I improved 400 points in 8 months with just this book and I continue to go through them everday. Within the past six months I have gone through the 1001 series to see if they might be better than sharpen your tactics and I noticed many of the patterns in sharpen your tactics are the same from 1001, but the way they are grouped in sharpen your tactics in much superior. Some positions in sharpen your tactics are the same, just earlier on in the combination. This is a brilliant method that first is simple and leads you deeper into more complex tactics, just as advertised. The only errors that I found were on 332 its black to move not white, and in the solution to 891, they forgot the 1... for black to move. There were practically no errors in tactical analysis. Truly amazing for a book of this depth. To improve at tactics it is best to choose a limited amount of positions (say 1125?) and drill them everyday over and over instead of newer positions fewer times. Study this book, master games, and play and analyse your own games and you have your own improvement course till mastery! Good luck.

This is the best chess book you can own and not use a chess board (except for Logical Chess: Move by move by Chernev). A few minutes every day keeps the chess juices flowing and my chess strength is moving up after a 11 year gap of ANY playing. Tough problems? You better believe it but when you work through them, you will find yourself seeing the chess board in a new way! I'm on a U.S. Navy ship and when I'm out to sea, this is the book that I read every night before I turn the light out in my rack. While this book is very short on words, read those words carefully! Lou Hays gives good advice. Don't see the answer after a while, look it up! Go through the book two or three times and then use it as a refresher book that sits in your reading room!

Unless you are a tactics guru, this book is pretty much a gaurentee to help out with your game. My rating plateaued around 1650 for a while and I Eventually took a week and went through the first 500 puzzles in this book (This may sound like a lot, but depending on your strength of play, the first couple hundred puzzles can be very quick to go through). I did this the week before a tournament I was playing in and I found myself almost searching exclusively for tactics in the games, and not paying as much attention to position. It payed off nicely! Within less than a year my rating jumped from 1650 to 1850+. Also I found that my wins became a lot more exciting instead of the "grind it out" and outplay them in the endgame method.

As far as negatives about this book, I can't say that there are any. Remember, this is a puzzle book, puzzle after puzzle after puzzle, with the solutions in the back.

If there is any doubt in your mind that you may need to work on your tactics, I highly recommend this book.

I own both of Reinfeld's tactical books and enjoy them very much. This book is very different. This book uses grouping by difficulty. Grouping by difficulty is not any better but it is a nice change of pace. There are far too many of the easy one star * problems in the book. Most players are not going to get much from these so it would have been better to limit the number to about 50. The very hard four star **** problems make up for the hundreds of easy problems.

The first thing I noticed as I took this book out of the box was that it is slightly larger than most puzzle books. I don't mean thicker but rather the pages are larger. That means either 8 problems per page vs the normal 6 or the diagrams must be a little bigger. Wrong! The larger pages contain just 6 standard size puzzles and allot of blank white space. I see much room for improvement!

The biggest disappointment for me was the annotations in the back of the book. The puzzles mix up the "white to move" and "black to move" problems so you really have to pay attention to this as you go. It will slow you down a little. The answers are in algebraic format ....well kind of. When a piece captures another piece it is not fully annotated. For example Bishop takes Knight is normally annotated like BxNf6 or simply BxN. In this book it will just read Bf6. There is absolutely no indication of a capture. And if you think that is annoying wait until you get slowed down because you didn't notice a discovered check. This book does not use the standard + to indicate a check. Bf6+ tells me allot more than Bf6. It is important to do puzzles as quickly as possible but the incomplete annotation will slow even an experienced player.

One the plus side this book contains very few errors. Each of Reinfeld's books cost less than 10$ and are better written. This book is hard to read and at 20$ costs more than twice as much. Tackle Reinfeld's two books first. Buy this book only if you want some more (different) puzzles to solve. And only if you have too much money in your pocket.