Customer Reviews

Understanding the Sacrifice: Sacrifice Your Way to Success

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

 

 

This book is _not_ a slapped together data dump of random sacs, but a mini-course in improving your positional understanding.

While it does show the obligatory fun queen sacrifice, it also deals with concepts that intermediate players have trouble with: the importance of structure, weak color complexes, key squares, the virtues and weaknesses of minor pieces, exchange sacrifices.

(It's like a sacrifice-advocating version of the classic Simple Chess by Michael Stean, which is anything but simple as it discusses positional strategy.)

Both Jeremy Silman and John Donaldson like this book a great deal, and Silman calls it "fantastic" and "absolutely wonderful." Highly recommended to those who don't find serious chess texts on these important topics easy to slog through.

Angus Dunnington's Understanding the Sacrifice is in my opinion the best book on the middlegame since Silman and Seirawan's titles. The book is 143 pages long, but makes up for it's slight thinness by great content. The author doesn't waste space with philosophical comments or give game after game with little explanation. Rather, Dunnington manages to completely perfect the balance between annotation, analysis, and games. Speaking of the games themselves, Dunnington's choices couldn't be better. Most are games by extremely creative but not quite world champion status grandmasters, such as Akopian, Bacrot, and Shirov. The author also uses the classic games Saemisch-Nimzowitch and Alekhine-Johner but their instructiveness trumps their well-known status.

There are 10 chapters.

1 The Importance of Structure
2 The Colour Complex
3 Pieces for Pawns
4 Rampant Knights
5 Bishops at work
6 Exploiting Key Squares
7 The Exchange Sacrifice
8 The Vulnerable King
9 The Restrictive Sacrifice
10 The Queen Sacrifice

My favorite is probably The Importance of Structure as Dunnington makes positional concepts interesting and explains pawn structure with flair. Every game seems well thought out, and Dunnington's creative examples deal with less standard sacrifices and provide more original and exciting ideas.

This book is understandable to weak players and yet is still instructive to better ones. Yet another balance this book does well! My favorite thing about this book is it's beautiful complexity. While other authors shy away from complex situations for fear they will make a mistake in analysis or evaluation, Dunnington's book shows the most interesting part of chess. And I haven't found a mistake anywhere.

This book has a good collection of instructive sacrificial themes, especially positional ones such as the exchange sacrifice and the structurally motivated sacrifice. But it is rather thin, and I would have liked more material included. Dunnington's books are usually above average.