<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Eureka!
Review: After my first ever tournament, I submitted my games to a grandmaster for advise on how I can improve my games. One thing he told me is that I am wanting in calculation skill. ...The author is not a grandmaster but why would I care. He is a master and much much stronger than me. There are a lot of grandmaster authors out there but none of them, as far as I know, revealed the method of calculation as much as this author. No, not even in Soltis's "The Inner Game of Chess" and Kotov's "Think Like a Grandmaster". These grandmasters will always tell you to improve your calculation skills (Soltis also suggested playing games in the books without the chess set). But how many among them tells exactly how to improve this skill. For example, do these grandmaster authors tell you that the very first thing to do is to memorize the chessboard? how to do this? that you should memorize the name of each square like c5 is a dark square and then you know that it is in c-file and 5th rank? At last after a long search, I found it!
Rating:
Summary: Practical indeed
Review: Like the other reviewers, I thought this was an excellent book. The author's goal is to pass on practical methods for developing the ability to calculate several moves ahead and to do so accurately, minimizing unpleasant surprises. The methods worked well for me; I am much more able to calculate now than I was. Many of the techniques in this book appear nowhere else in the chess literature, but here they are all assembled into a single book, along with the best methods from other sources. If you are serious about chess but find yourself getting lost in calculation or unable to see far enough ahead, this book is the best of the lot -- better than Soltis, better than Kotov, better than "Improve your chess now."
Rating:
Summary: remarkable
Review: This book by Buckley is the reason I own 400 chess books--I keep looking for gems like this, and sometimes you just hvae to go through many chess books to find one that really shines for you (kind of like finding a wife). Well, this is such a chess book. It instructs you in a practical method of how to analyze positions. It is full of incredibly good advice, and with each suggestion, it forces you through difficult examples; not difficult because of a difficults situation on the board, but just in terms of analysing several moves ahead. Buckley doesn't let you off easy (and he shouldn't, because there is no way around the fact that calculation in chess is a difficult intellectual exercise), but his methods keep you interested, and implcitly he knows that we all can do it. The book warrants a long review, and I am not prepared to do that, but I will say that this is the first book on calculation that I have really stuck with and worked through, and that is because the author has written such a brilliant book. FOr instance, I can not seem to get throuhg Think Like a Grandmaster by Kotov, The Inner Game of Chess by Soltis, Improve Your Chess Now by Tisdall, or any of the major works by Dvoretsky. I honestly feel that now I have a chance to approach those books with the straightforward teaching and method that I have received here. This book is truly amazing, and beautifully produced too.
<< 1 >>
| 
