Sharpen Your Tactics

Nice collection of chess puzzles, which is exactly what I was looking for. I don't play in tournaments nor do I have a rating. I just like to play casually. Still, I want to improve my game.The book is just a large collection of chess puzzles with 6 printed per page. Solutions are provided in the back of the book. The only problem with this set up is that it's easy to accidentally see the solution to the next puzzle. You really have to make a conscious effort not to look. The moves are given using standard chess notation. If you're familiar with that, you're good. Otherwise you'll need to learn it before you can use the book. There is a handy symbol key given in the beginning of the book to explain the meanings of such things as [0-1], #, +-, etc. As the majority of the puzzles are taken from actual games, the solutions also include the names of the players, and the place and year in which the game took place. Those that are not based on an actual game are noted as a theoretical position or composed position. Each puzzle is rated in difficulty from one to four stars. The book is organized so that the problems progress from easy to difficult, although in the middle of the book you will have 1 star puzzles interspersed with 2 and 3 star puzzles. There is no narrative of any kind to explain any of the tactics being used. It's all about learning to recognize certain recurring patterns. It's also important to note that not all of the solutions result in a checkmate. While there are some mate in one or mate in two type puzzles, there are others where you need to find the best moves to gain an advantage. Again, none of this is outright explained in the book. You need to just play through the moves and study the positions yourself.The chess diagrams themselves are pretty crude looking. They are just plain, low res, black and white diagrams much like you would find printed in a newspaper. But they serve their purpose. In any case, I prefer to set up the positions on my analysis chess set and work out the problems using real chess pieces on a real board. As I mentioned earlier, you really need to play through the moves and the best way to do that is on a real chess set. But, I do like that the book is not overly thick, so it is not a big burden to carry around everywhere.I've only begun using this book but I feel that it has already helped sharpened my tactics as the title of the book promises. And besides that, it's a good and fun way to keep my mind active in my free time.

I do love this book! I always wanted to get better at tactics but reading about it conceptually did nothing to improve my skills. What I needed to do was to "practice" tactics. This book has only chess problems and it helped me immensely to recognize mating patterns, and other combination patterns.It is a lot of fun and I recommend it for adults.For children, I would recommend the book "Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games". Although this alternative book is much bigger and intimidating, it starts with very simple chess problems and gradually grows in difficulty.

I'm rated about 1400. The first 160 problems were easy but informative. Well, 1/3 were quite educational. There were several patterns I had not seen before, but I solved them. 12 were not easy, and I had to look 4 up in the back. 90% of the first 160 problems are checkmates, starting in 1 move and working up to 3-4 moves, though still easy by 160. There are places where the same theme is repeated 12 times, but mostly it just cycles through themes and you get the theme again 10 problems later.Even though there are 1, 2, 3 and 4 stars, that does not mean 4 discrete levels of difficulty. As you move on, the 1 stars get move involved. Smother mates start having vacant squares that the knight attacks in addition to the king. The two star problems sprinkled in are much harder than the 1 stars, but still doable. They are just the ones I have to work for. I even solved a 3 star. Some 2 stars are as easy as 1 stars, and some one stars are as hard as 2 stars, but that often is because I'm seeing a new pattern.It seems like a lot of problems, but it takes me about 10 minutes to do 2 pages totally 12, with most of that time being spent on a two star problem. It is addicting and easy to do several pages in a sitting. Any time I don't want to get my work done, I go pick up this book and waste lots of time. I play online blitz chess, but I can't say I've seen a noticeable increase in strength yet. So far I'm just more familiar with certain types of positions.

Best tactics book ever? Quite possibly. The puzzles are thematic, but the themes are not given to you. Challenging, but rewarding for me (1400 player).

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.