Customer Reviews

Training for the Tournament Player (Batsford Chess Library)

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This is a great book not only does it show you key ways to improve but also uses great examples.

The first element it describes is understanding the your weaknesses and eliminating or minimalising them. Are you too cautious, attack too much, lack positional or calculative powers?

The second element is games from the past, it explains why these can still be used, great masters of the past were able to better exploit and implement their plans (Defensive technique by the weaker player was not as developed as today) therefore you get to see the whole implementation of the plan. What are these plans? minority Attack, Attack on F2, Queen side pawn majority, isolated pawn the list goes on.

Also discussed is keeping a scrap book of key positions you come across as an aide memoir.

Finally the 3rd element is annotating your own games. By annoting your own games you see first hand where you went wrong this may indicate a weakness to work on and therefore work on your identified weakness will lead to improvement in practical playing strength.

VERY good book. Alexei Kosikov's article, "Assessing a Position and Choosing a Plan in the Middlegame", is itself worth the price of admission. If only he wrote entire books himself!

I have several of Dvoretsky's books (of course, having them is not the same as having read them), and have found this to be the best of those I have read. It is very readable, with several articles, which are inter-related, but do not require each other. That is, you can pick and choose which articles interest you.

The book is basically a manual on how to asess your own chess and begin to cover up weaknesses and promote strengths. Emphasising the need for unviversality of style (covering weaknesses) it advocates a method of analysing the individuals games to come up with ways of strengthening openings, psychology and analysis at the board.