Product Description

'Chess is 99 per cent tactics' is an old saying. This may be an exaggeration, but even the remaining 1 per cent still depends on tactics. When Martin Weteschnik started working as a trainer in his local chess club, he quickly realised that even the stronger club players had great weaknesses in their tactical play. He also discovered that simply asking them to solve a huge number of puzzles did not fix the problem. These players clearly needed a good book, but when Weteschnik looked for it he found nothing suitable, so he decided to write it himself. But Weteschnik was not completely satisfied with the book and decided to restructure and rewrite it completely.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #214459 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 235 pages

Customer Reviews

A great guide to finding and calculating tactical ideas
There are many books on the market giving examples of chess tactics, but this is the first I have seen to give a structured course on how to find them and how to work out whether the tactic is sound in a particular position.

There are examples of course, but the meat of the book is devoted to identifying tactical motifs and showing how they can be used. This is a structured course in tactics from which chess players of almost any level will benefit.

It is worth saying that the production standards are great with good use of sidebars and diagrams just where my tactical vision is getting stretched.

Tnis is an English translation of the German original and is I'm sure destined to become a modern classic.

If you are serious about improving your tactical play, buy this book!

An outstanding book
An outstanding book which richly deserves five stars, despite some dreadful presentation, which you can fix yourself by annotating the diagrams.

The back cover says that the club players the author was coaching had great weaknesses in the tactical play, which were not fixed solving a huge number of puzzles. Inside the book, he says that with his coaching the players improved by an average of 100-200 rating points and promoted to higher leagues twice in three years, using the forerunner of the material in the book. Clearly, this was not a scientific test of his methods, and the improvement programme was not a short term endeavour. Nonetheless, the book has a good motivational story - and is a good read as well - so full points for motivation.

The main theme of the book is how to find clues for tactics by studying the characteristics of the position, before you start to analyse moves. The book makes a much better job of this than any other I have seen - and clearly this is very important - you will waste a lot of time if you start analysing before you have taken the trouble to understand the position properly! In addition, you will not learn very effectively, if you do not fully understand what made the tactics work.

So what is the presentational problem? None of the diagrams say who it is to move! You often have to read quite a long way through the text to find out, and by doing so be told the solution, before you have even had a chance to look at the position! Very annoying. In addition, a fair proportion of the diagrams are not really puzzle positions - in some cases a mistake has to be made before the puzzle position arises - or the example is a speculative Tal sacrifice, which does not actually win against the (very hard to find) best defence. Furthermore, it is very clear from the text that the author expects that you have been studying the positions, before being told the answers. All the diagrams need an indicator to say whose move it is, and a caption to tell us whether we can profitably study them before reading on. Fortunately, you can add this information yourself with a couple of hours work.

As others have said, there are only four exercises per chapter, but if you annotate the book as I suggest, the main text provides many more per chapter. You can apply what you have learned in this book to the positions in puzzle books. Nonetheless, like in a maths exam, it is important not only that you find the right answer, but that you find it in the right way, so the author's solutions are more helpful than you usually find in most puzzle books. Perhaps there is an opportunity for a follow up book here?

Despite the problems, this is still a five star book. What really matters is how effective the book is likely to be in improving your chess. A few hours annotating the book is a relatively small overhead, compared with the work necessary to fully digest the contents of this book, and fully incorporate the ideas into the habitual (and largely automatic) thought processes that you use when sitting at the board. This book really can improve you chess - if you work hard enough at it!

THE REAL DEAL
After spending time on countless tactics and learning how to spot the tactic in a puzzle but not being able to create it over the board Martin Weteschnik has struck gold in teaching you how to create and generate tactics on the board. After one reading my internet play improved markedly(currently not playing OTB due to end of season) and i picked up over three hundred points. Okay the grading is skewiff but there was definate improvement.

I am currently reading through the book a second time - up to 2000 elo it's all tactics.