Sharpen Your Tactics

Rating:
Summary: Great tactics - improvements of 1001 tactics format
Review: I really liked the format of this book. I love tactics books. The kind with no text in them, and page after page of nothing but chess diagrams. The kind that people on an airplane look at you funny when you are "reading" them.

This book is very similar to the other tactics books out there, but with some improvements that I think are nice. One improvement is that the tactics are labeled with a * symbol to show how difficult the problem is. The more stars the harder it is. This is a nice break from the Reinfeld books which will have a mate in one followed by a mate in ten, and you have no idea beforehand how hard the problem is going to be. I personally like to have some idea of what I am getting into.

Another nice feature is that the answers show where the game came from. I think that this is a nice touch, and gives credit to the people that actually played the game. A lot of books don't do this, and you see puzzles where you know where the game came from - "Oh yeah this is the opera box game", etc, but the author gives no credit where it is due.

I also like that the answers are in algebraic notation, as opposed to descriptive ("e4" versus "pawn to king 4"). Reinfeld's books still have the old school style. One note is that the notation is not really standard. Bxe3 would be Be3, which is a little odd. I got confused at least once when looking up an answer and did not see the "x". I assumed I had the wrong answer when I didn't. But once you know this is the format they use, you can adjust. But it would be nice to see the standard used in the first place.

Overall great tactics book. If you like doing tactics til your eyes bleed, and want something that could be used as part of a "400 points in 400 days" type of study program, this is a good one to add to your collection.

Rating:
Summary: best tactical exercises
Review: I think this is the best chess problems book ever devised becaus: 1). Format. It uses stars, *, **, ***, ****, to tell you how difficult the problem is--maybe a mate in two, or winning a piece after four moves, you don't know the theme or the number of moves, so it's very realistic. 2). Material. These are important, fantastic, yet realistic, positions that, through repetition, will become a pattern in your mind that will help you win OTB. 3. Flexibility. The four-star problems, the most difficult, are not forcing, but are ultra-rich in ideas. When first facing them, I reccomend a Dvoretsky exercise: look at the four-star problem for about ten seconds, then go on instinct and look up the answer.

So far, I've gone through the book one and a half times. I was amazed at how much faster I could get through the problems the second time. My game has sky-rocketed to a level I've never been at in 5 years of study due to this book. My internet rating went from 1700 to 1900 in two months (long games 30/10).

Put away the opening manuals. Go through this book as much and as fast as possible, memorize about 15 Grand Master games, a few key end games, and I think you will go pretty far.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Tactics Book Ever?
Review: I think this is the best chess problems book ever devised becaus: 1). Format. It uses stars, *, **, ***, ****, to tell you how difficult the problem is--maybe a mate in two, or winning a piece after four moves, you don't know the theme or the number of moves, so it's very realistic. 2). Material. These are important, fantastic, yet realistic, positions that, through repetition, will become a pattern in your mind that will help you win OTB. 3. Flexibility. The four-star problems, the most difficult, are not forcing, but are ultra-rich in ideas. When first facing them, I reccomend a Dvoretsky exercise: look at the four-star problem for about ten seconds, then go on instinct and look up the answer.

So far, I've gone through the book one and a half times. I was amazed at how much faster I could get through the problems the second time. My game has sky-rocketed to a level I've never been at in 5 years of study due to this book. My internet rating went from 1700 to 1900 in two months (long games 30/10).

Put away the opening manuals. Go through this book as much and as fast as possible, memorize about 15 Grand Master games, a few key end games, and I think you will go pretty far.

Rating:
Summary: you've heard it before
Review: I'm sure by now you have heard many times the best/fastest way to improve your Chess is to study tactics, and what better book to get than this one for tactics training? This is such a wonderful book and great for traveling and study anywhere anytime (nice book to study while at school just don't let your english teacher catch you!) great book on tactics

Rating:
Summary: Late beginner / early intermediates must have this book
Review: I've had this book for about 2 months and think that it's an absolutely fantastic book. It's odd in that it has no text, just puzzle after puzzle. The puzzles are arranged thematically to guide the player through different tactical subjects -- discovered attacks, drawing techniques, forks, mating attacks, etc. I find this to be very effective. One plus compared to my other tactics book is the large number of puzzles. This allows the author to include many puzzles for a specific theme, therefore helping pattern recognition. My other puzzle book includes about 4x fewer puzzles, excluding the easier ones. Sharpen Your Tactics includes easier puzzles also. I think that this really helps beat the pattern into the player's brain.

This book is especially fantastic for good kid players, although an absolute beginner probably wouldn't get much out of it. I'd say that a kid with 6 months of experience could really benefit. My son is 8 and is really good for an 8 year old. The book has really improved his tactics. There are enough easier puzzles up front to build his confidence and interest. My other tactics book just smashed his confidence when he could barely do the first 4-5 puzzles. Sharpen Your Tactics includes a very large number of puzzles, so I'm sure the later ones will be really tough.

I have only two gripes. First, the puzzles are too small, with 6 on each page. They are easily legible, but I think 4 per page would've been better. The book is small, so it would be only medium-sized if it had 4 per page. There's a lot of white space between puzzles, so they could've made them a lot bigger without adding pages at all. Secondly, the binding is mediocre, but typical of most of my chess books. One of the front pages is starting to come out already. All of my other chess books are similarly put together, except for Pirc Alert, which is of outstanding physical quality. My new Accelerated Dragons book appears to be pretty good too, but the jury is still out.

Rating:
Summary: Very nice book of chess puzzles.
Review: It is a very challenging book of chess puzzles. However, I gave it only 4 stars because there seems to be an overemphasis on the checkmating techniques, i.e., in the end either white or black checkmates the opponent's king. This means that a player gets a good "workout" on how to deliver a final blow when ready. For all other types of tactics I would recommend Lev Alburt's "300 most important positions..." or Reinfeld's "1000 combinations..."

Rating:
Summary: A Chess Course Disguised as a Tactics Exercise Book
Review: More than a tactics exercise book, I have found SHARPEN YOUR TACTICS! to be an extremely well thought-out series of tutorials on a wide range of chess principles. Why, for example, should you put your rooks on open files? After doing dozens of exercises where your rooks slaughter the opponent on an open file, your understanding of it will rise to a higher level than any Jeremy Silman-like explanation can bring you. The same goes for why you should centralize the Queen in a major piece endgame; why passed pawns get so dangerous on the sixth and seventh ranks; why bishops need open diagonals; why it's so good to get a knight on an outpost on the sixth rank; how rooks on the seventh rank create mating threats all over the place; how a pair of passed pawns sweep away opposition; how to keep a king in the center during the opening and destroy it with major pieces; why Queens are so powerful for double attacks; how to smash away your opponents' kings' defenses with sacrifices; and much more.

A little bit of context about where I am coming from. I reached a 2106 rating as a high schooler 18 years ago, but then gave up competitive chess for good. Until I saw this book. After looking at the sample pages online, I knew it was something special. Now that I have owned the book a year and a half, my high expectations have been exceeded.

As much fun as it may be to read chess text from Tal or Silman or Botvinnik or Pandolfini, chessplaying is fundamentally a skill or ability that you learn much more through DOING than listening or reading. Hence exercises, not text, in this book.

It is obvious that Archangelsky, an honored coach of chess from the old Soviet Union, is an extremely intelligent man who devoted many years of his life to developing a fine chess course. He is offering it to the US in this relatively cheap form. This book is a fine part of the highly-developed Soviet chess culture. That chess culture did not come from top-down commandments from the Politburo. It was a real enthusiasm from the grass roots, as David Bronstein has emphasized many times.

As I have cycled through these exercises several times--that is exactly what you are to do with such a book, to develop pattern recognition--I can see that the sequence and selection of exercises have been lovingly refined and developed over many years. I suspect Archangelsky is the real brains behind this book--it is his course--and Lein co-authored just to get a GM's name on it to help sell it in the United States and Britain. However that may be, this is a book by people who really care about chess. It can take your game to an incredibly high level; it can tap into a great deal of the chess potential you have within you; it's that good.

Time and again you will see positions just like the ones you actually get in your games--this is just one of many ways in which this book is head and shoulders above tactics books by Reinfeld or Hays or Wilson, to name a few--where you never really quite felt that you knew what you were doing. After you read through this book several times, you will know what to do. This book shows you where to put your pieces, which lines to open, which diagonals need closing, where to post your knights, where to get your bishops, what your goals should be. Desirable middlegame positions from all major openings are represented. The result: you learn a ton about chess, and your POSITIONAL judgment soars. This is a truly beautiful and remarkable book.

This book brought me back to competitive chess, both in OTB tournaments and on the internet, after an absense of almost two decades. Working with this book has been the primary reason why I am playing the best chess of my life, head and shoulders above what I was as a high schooler. This book has also been the principal means of teaching chess to my three sons, and, after just one year of competitive chess at the grade school level, they already own over ten trophies apiece.

Yes, the book gets difficult toward the end. But if you go through the earlier exercises, you will see an increase in your ability, and you will be able to begin meeting the tougher challenges near the end of the book. And chess is a tough game! Love it and enjoy the challenge.

This chess course will help you. I cannot recommend it too highly. Buy this book; go through the exercises every day for the rest of your chess career, cycling through them again and again, and you will see a fast improvement in your competitive results and a greatly enhanced understanding of all other chess literature.

This is a secret of every good player: Everyone I know with a USCF rating over 2000 studies tactics exercises books just like this one. If you refuse to study tactics, you are doomed to remain a second-rate player; if you do study tactics, you have a chance to realize your true chess potential. One side of me hopes to keep this a secret so that I can more easily defeat those who miss out on such a book; the other side of me, my better side, hopes that the secret gets out, because as the level of chess competition rises in the USA, so will my chances to perform at a higher level against better opponents.

My thanks to Lein and Archangelsky for making the beauty and challenge and art of chess alive to me again.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent chess practice material
Review: One of the most frequent comments one hears before a tournament is to go over some chess problems. This books offers over a 1000 of beautiful combinations that not only sharpen your general tactics but are likely to help you realize in the middle of the game that you have already seen this position before and know exactly what to do! Only after a few pages of this book you'll notice a drastic change on how you evaluate your game. This book is a must if you are a serious chess player.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding collection of Tactics
Review: Simply outstanding collection of tactics. One of the first books an aspiring player should get once they aspire to intermediate or higher levels. More convenient size than Polgar and binding has held up to my dragging it around everywhere over the last three years.

Rating:
Summary: Tactics: 99% Tactics, 1% Text
Review: Tactics, nothing but tactics! No classification into themes, no hints, figure it out for yourself. The first 450 problems are simple to moderate in difficulty but after that they start becoming increasingly challenging (although the mix of problems continues). They all are practical examples, most from games, and their complexity level seems accurately gauged (4 stars= extremely difficult, 1 star = simple). A great book to keep with you in the car, or subway, at lunch, etc., to solve at your leisure. Probably the simplest, most efficient, easiest way to improve your chess. You can't benefit from your brilliant opening repertoire, display your middlegame acumen, or endgame skills, if you can't see tactically. Tactics, ultimately, underly everything.