Customer Reviews

Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player (Comprehensive Chess Course Series)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Books on chess tactics and chess traps are very useful for improving your game. There are a lot of books on tactics and a small number on chess traps (openings tactics). When comparing CHESS TACTICS FOR THE TOURNAMENT PLAYER to my other book "Learn Chess Tactics" and "Winning Chess Traps" I can say this book is jumpy and often not very clear. It goes from a simple position to work on using one pattern, then jumps to a totally unrelated type of pattern that is very difficult. It is like getting a wild card every time. It still gets three stars because there are some good problems to work on that are helpful to improving your game.

If this book were truly representative of "the once-secret Russian method of chess training" no Soviet player would ever have become a grandmaster in the entire course of chess history. This book simply does not live up to the hype. Keep in mind as you read the following that according to the authors the alleged goal for these books is "to provide the knowledge necessary to reach expert strength." Nobody is going to reach anything remotely near expert strength using this book or its companions.

My complaints are numerous:
[1] The material oscillates between being absurdly simple for the alleged target audience to being absurdly unclear. For example, at one point they explain what a pin is. Elsewhere, they provide a complicated example from the Fischer-Spassky 1972 match with absolutely zero commentary.
[2] The examples are too many and too sparsely commented (many have no comments at all) to be of any use to a student trying to learn from them. As just one ridiculous example, page 180 contains a 19-move analysis with a single comment ("now follows a beautiful variation"); well, thanks, that was very useful. The famous game Lasker-Bauer, Amsterdam 1889, merits comment to only one move as well.
[3] Many of the examples are downright useless, consisting of a single move. We are given no indication of how the position was arrived at or how the magical move (1. Qa7!!) was arrived at or even why it merits two exclamation points.

The bottom line is if you are rated below 1700, you will not learn anything from this book, so try Jeremy Silman's or Yasser Seirawan's books instead. And if you are rated above 1700, you will not learn anything from this book either, so try Dvoretsky's well-respected series.

This book is one of the best books out there for chess tactics. The examples they present are clear and of moderate difficlty. He focuses on all tactics and even has some which other books ignore, like destructive combinations. Alburt's best commentary is in the 'How to Calculate Variations' chapter. He tells of common psychological blocks and how to actually calculate which many other tactic books ignore. I recommend this highly. Strong tactical ability is the best asset a chess player can have.

After anxiously waiting for this book, I began to study it, and was very disappointed. Chess Tactics for the Tournament player is a disappointing book.

The themes presented in the chapters are in no logical order! They are just randomly slapped there for you to study.

As another reviewer mentioned, the commentary in this book is very sparse. Sometimes they give examples to easy for the intended audiences (1 or 2 move combinations) and then give very difficult ones right after it (6 or 7 move combinations).

Thye book crams many themes, sometimes 3 or 4, in one chapter. At the end of the chapter, they only give 12 excercises! How are you suppose to learn this stuff if they give an average of 3 excercises per theme?!

Overall, I was disappointed.

I own Just the Facts!, the 7th volume in this series, which is very good. If only the authors mirrored the style in that book with this one.

I ordered the king in Jeopardy, the 4th volume of this course. Hopefully it will be better than this one.

If you are looking at this book review it's probably because you want to see if this book is worth buying. Well it is!!!
IT IS "a highly instructive" as GM Larry Evans said and it is great for improving tactical play. If you want more than just tactical puzzles but explanations as well then get this book!. Although it is part 3 in the "comprehensive chess course series" this book is great stand-alone. It may even make you want to purchase the rest of the "comprehensive chess course series"!!!. This book should be in any improving player's library and after going through it you will notice how your tactical recognition is improving, and the book is so well structured that you can go through it many times within a short period of time. Pehaps a lesson a day and with nine lessons in the book that's 9 days and you can do the whole thing over and over again improving each time. Understand tactics don't just do puzzles...get this book!

In my hamble openion is that such work should be assessted by a technique to teach you how to spot tactics. what you will get here is a list of tactical motives with a good collection of solved exercises then unsolved ones. of course the meat is the solved ones to help you understand ideas behind the subject but you will find yourelf with solution just put on front of you without any idea how to reach them.

to be honest here, the book title say for the tournament player which is not my case but also I do not believe this is the way things to be presented for a tournament player.

I love this whole series. (I ignore the first two books of the series, which are for rank beginners to learn the moves. Start with the Tactics book, then Attacking the King, then Chess Strategy, and Endgame Facts.) A simple four volume course to play chess at the expert (1700) level. Listen, I am not the most talented chess player, and was 1100 on the ICC for months, losing to my friends. I decided to study or to stop playing. I read Silman, Nimzovitch, others and none helped; it was too hard for a dummy like me. This was my last-ditch effort (I figured it worked for school kids in Russia, and I was OK at homework.) It worked. By the time I was through volume 2, I was 1600+. I am in volume 3, so the full impact should go to 1700, as promised in the ads :) A simple effective chess intro. This, and Fred Reinfeld's combo books for practice are all you need to get pretty good at chess, then move on to other skills -- leaving a good chess game in your back pocket for fun now and then :) In particular, the tactics book is the most inspired of the series. It glistens with sharp definitions of attacking motifs (e.g. distinguishing properly between an x-ray and a skewer), a nice discussion of the tactical THINKING process (1.recognizing a motif, 2. generating a combo idea, then 3. calculating the forcing variation), and featuring nice modern examples from Kasparov, Kramnik, and Anand throughout. Really I think this kind of material was the training used to generate a tactical monster like Kasparov. I sometimes wonder if the later books in the series were thrown in for the sake of completeness, not truly inspired. Or it may be that in chess, all the beauty is in the combo :)

Before deciding if a book is good or not, I always try to determine what level of player the material is aimed at. In this case, I believe that players rated below 1500 will benefit greatly from reading this book, since it provides simple examples for several of the main combination motifs. These players would have a much harder time reading other more advance books, like "Attack and Defense" by Dvoretsky, "The Art of Attack in Chess" by Vukovic, etc.

Players in the range 1500 and 1900 will not find this book as helpful, but will probably still appreciate the refresher course found through some of the examples. This is the range where I am currently at (USCF 1800), and even though I solved ninety percent of the exercises in a few seconds, it helped me as a kind of remainder of motifs to look for in my games. I also found that there are several examples that are a little more advanced and that provided reasonable challenge.

Finally, players at expert level will not get any use out of this book and will probably feel cheated, so if you are in this range do not bother with it.

Now, being clear on what the target audience for this book is, the material is pretty good and serves its purpose. The only reason why I am taking one star away from its rating is because of a few examples that do not correspond with the level of the book and are poorly explained.

For those players that are currently below 1500 and want to improve their attacking skills, I recommend to read this book and keep going over it until you fully understand the totality of concepts presented. Then you can build on it by studying "The Art of Attack in Chess", which is in my opinion the best manual of this type in the market, even though it may be outdated and some of the examples are not thoroughly accurate.

I have found this to be MUCH more effective than the Reinfeld book. I think what people don't understand is that there are two ways to improve tactical skill: do several WELL-CHOSEN tactical exercises & do those SAME exercises repeatedly. This book is excellent more for the latter as its selection is limited. However the exercises in the chapter itself as well as the exams at the end of each chapter are of very high quality and when studied repeatedly and thoughtfully yield some very surprising results.

Chess is about pattern recognition. So don't be shy about looking at the same diagrams over and over and working them through in your head repeatedly. The material is definitely basic, but it is a great introduction in to the world of tactics.

After studying this book daily for about 30min per day (on the subway, while waiting in line, etc.) for two weeks my tactical awareness and my ability to ATTACK improved sharply. I am a beginner (about 1300) so this may not happen for everyone.

As I am well on the way to master level starting out from scratch I think I can give a good overview.
Fisrtly most chess players have a tendency to jump from book to book, thats a lot of time wasted. What I like about this book is all the key info on tactics is in the book so you do not have to get tactics info from several books. Yes thats a lot of time saving and money saved. All the keys areas (Pins, Discovered check, Xray etc) are included with both classic and modern examples. There are exercises at the end of each chapter to test your and reinforoce your knowledge.
Two years ago I went all the way through this book and jumped about 200 elo points. You can do about 10 pages each day easily (Approx 1 to 1 1/2 hours). So you can finish the book in a month. Every 6 mths I revise the book and each time I understand the examples to a deeper level. When I first went through it was understanding that these ideas existed (pins for example). Now when I look at the diagram I see the motifs, how and why these tactics exist e.g. Bishop control of key diagonal, over worked piece, etc. Its amazing now on ICC I see the motifs and my opponents just seem to place the pieces where I want them to, and the combination results. So this book covers it all along with the next volume (King in Jeapody) they are all you need to reach to master level. Especially good in this book is the calculation chapter which is over 40 pages long and is the last chapter. You would need to buy Kotov's Think like a GM and Soltis's book to get this info. How do we calculate variations? Its laid out in a simple yet effective way. In a nutshell all the info is easy to understand, comprehensive, practical and can be reviewed again and again. This book should raise your Elo about 100 to 200 points. Yes there is a lot of off beat advertising in the book; However the secret Russian method is there, 1) The best most efficient examples so you maximise study time. 2) Ideas are reinforced with end of chapter questions that you can solve under time pressure. 3)There is chess culture, examples are from all chess eras, today's ideas do not originate in a vacuum they progress from the greats of old (Capablance, Alekhine, Morphy etc...). I will also be reviewing the Pirc & Just the facts books in separate reviews. Thanks, email me if you want other chess book reviews (I have over 60 books, that I use not 1000 on the shelf lol)