Storming the Barricades

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: American Grandmaster Christiansen is one of the most dangerous and respected attacking players of the last 30 years. In this book he explains the positional themes necessary to launch an attack. He teaches how not to attack, too. Last chapter presents Christiansen's favourite attacking games of the 1990s. It's an entertaining and instructive book.

Rating:
Summary: The (!) Modern Manual for Attack.
Review: Before I start you should know I am a Chess Master. And that I teach chess for a living.

The author, GM Larry Christiansen is, and has been one of the U.S.'s top players since the late 70's. He is a [former] U.S. Champion and is a feared competitor and attacker.

This is one of the better books written on this subject. The best way to go about learning HOW to attack, is to study some of the best attacks at the Master level and have a great player explain the game in thorough detail.

I purchased this book several months ago, and I have spent a great deal of time studying it BEFORE I wrote this review. (I spent 4 hours on one example alone!)

There are sections for each different kind of attack. The Chapters are illuminating in and of themselves. 1.) Evolution of an Attacking Player. 2.) Attack: General Considerations. 3.) Ripping apart the King position. 4.) King Hunting. 5.) How NOT to Attack. {Common ways to botch an attack.) 6.) Seizing Opportunities. 7.) Creating and Exploiting weaknesses. 8.) L.C.'s 11 Favorite attacking games of the 1990's. (Plus 1 last Tal game.) This last Chapter alone makes the book worth the amount you will pay for it!

The following discussion is found on page 29: "The early examples illustrate mainly garden variety, standard attacking themes. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of quick development and efficient mobilization of the attacking forces. Time is of the essence! Rapid mobilization of overwhelming force against a weakness in the enemy camp, whether it be an exposed King or series of weak squares; is a KEY factor in basic successful attacking play." Well written, and words that any beginner should be able to grasp.

I might offer a few minor criticisms of this book. It could have been better organized. The emphasis on modern games ignores some of the more classic games that illustrate the same points as well as the modern games. But all these points are trivial. This book is destined to become one of the all-time great books on tactics and attack.

I would complement the study of this book with solving a few problems per day of tactical puzzles. (See my web page for more details.)

If you enjoy this book, (and as a complement to your study); I would also recommend: "The (62) Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played," by Irving Chernev. And "The King Hunt," (In Chess) By Cozens and Nunn.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Chess Books: Barricades and Ramparts
Review: I am a tournament player (USCF 2136) seriously interested in improving my results. For that purpose the two latest books by Christiansen--STORMING THE BARRICADES and ROCKING THE RAMPARTS--are the best that I have found.

Christiansen's great strength as a world-class GM is tactics and attack. That is what he teaches in this book. His main theme is maneuvering your pieces to their optimum attacking squares. He wants your queen to be more active than your opponent's queen; your rooks to be in more threatening positions than your opponent's rooks; and so forth. Once you have activated your entire army, effective sacrifices, combinations, and tactical devices start falling into your lap. Your opponent finds it difficult to make a move without hanging something--like his king, for instance.

Have you ever played an IM or GM and found that his every move seemed pregnant with deadly threats? Did you feel as if you were under pressure throughout the game? Well, Christiansen makes it crystal-clear how you can start putting your opponents under great pressure.

Christiansen is a gifted writer who uses crisp, clear sentence constructions with lively verbs and memorable nouns. "That bishop dreams about reaching f6" and "the knight is itching to get into the game on g7" and so forth. His lively, concrete language makes this book clear as a bell and a real pleasure to read. Three cheers for a native English speaker who knows how to use the language!

Sadly most attacking books on the market repeat the same material. Once again, Lasker's double-bishop sacrifice. Once again, Zukertort-Blackburne. You can find the exact same set of games in Vukovic, Averbakh, Silman, etc. A great strength of Christiansen's book is that you have probably never seen most of this material before. He has selected his own material. Bravo!

This book is filled with powerful attacking principles, beautifully explained and illustrated, that are unavailable anywhere else. I have already won two tournament games simply by following Christiansen's principle that every sacrifice that draws out the enemy king should be calculated as deeply as possible, because they work surprisingly often. His principle that it is easily worth a pawn to get your rook lifted to the third rank and in front of the enemy king is also worth its weight in gold. There's more, much more. Buy the book and see them.

To my mind Christiansen ranks higher as a chess author than Silman or Aagaard, Bronstein or Euwe. Silman and Aagaard cannot hold a candle to Christiansen's chess understanding. Bronstein and Euwe characteristically directed their comments to intermediate players, while Christiansen respects his readers enough to assume that they can handle any variation that he can explain clearly. You can always see his point if you are patient. He also never seems to hesitate reporting when his thinking during the game was poor. In short, this book is teeming with extraordinarily valuable, uncensored material.

Finally, this book is suffused with a true love and enthusiasm for chess. It reminds a person of David Bronstein's infectious love for chess. The book is refreshing and inspirational.

Larry Christiansen's two latest books are the best chess books that I have ever seen, Period. I give them my highest recommendation to chessplayers of any level.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Classic of Attack and Defense
Review: I am a USCF chess expert who loves good chess books. This is one of the great books on attack and defense. I purchased it after I discovered the more recent title by Christiansen, Rocking the Ramparts. My results have improved immensely from studying these two books.

Christiansen teaches both attack and defense in the greatest detail. He dishes up heaping portions of juicy, delightful, brilliantly-selected games. His commentary is the highest quality. It is rare to find such a book from one of the most active and strongest Grandmasters in the world, who won his third U. S. Championship in 2002. His great practical playing strength shines brightly through the pages of this book. As one plays through the games and commentary, one is treated to a steady stream of positions that define high-class, interesting, attacking chess.

Before long you start to understand how Christiansen keeps getting his pieces to super-active positions. Then you, too, begin to centralize your queen more often, lift your rooks habitually, marshal your forces in the face of the enemy king. This wins games delightfully.

One must agree with other reviewers who contend that nobody teaches chess attack and defense as well as Christiansen. For the love of the game. Christiansen manifestly loves chess, as Bach loved music, as Rembrandt loved painting, and his infectious love for the game taps into the deep wellsprings of beauty and pleasure that can be found at the chessboard.

I could add to my description of the virtues of this book, but then I would quickly begin to repeat my comments on Christiansen's other recent work, Rocking the Ramparts. That is no accident. They are two peas in a pod: taken together, Storming the Barricades and Rocking the Ramparts comprise a very fine two-volume manual of attack and defense. So for more details on Christiansen's two volumes, just click above on "see all my reviews" and read the comments on Rocking the Ramparts. Purchase them both and study them well if you wish to become much better at chess and enjoy it more than ever.

Postscript: If you join the Internet Chess Club (ICC), then you can play chess against Christiansen twice a week. Every week he gives a simultaneous exhibition against 40 opponents with a 45-minute time control. Every week he also plays an exhibition where he gives the opponent odds, or, if you prefer, a normal game, 3-minute Blitz. If you log on reasonably early and put your name on the list, then you, too, can do battle with the distinguished author of this book.

Rating:
Summary: Save your money--totally unnecessary
Review: I am not saying that this book does not have some strengths; I am saying there is nothing unique about it and that it is totally unnecssary for your collection. Stick to books like "The Art of Attack" or "Attacking Technique" by Crouch, and go through games by Kasparov (his books "New World Chess Champion," "London-Leningrad" and "The Test of Time" are ten times more valuable than this book). This book by Christiansen will not stand the test of time, as there is nothing unique or noteworthy about it.

Rating:
Summary: Great Attacking Manual
Review: I think that a player's appreciation of this book depends on what he seeks in the first place and how he views chess. Some people view chess as more a science than a sport in which complexity is superceded or controlled by principle and in which the human side of chess play is not as important as the position on the board. Others relish the struggle and the complexity of certain battles and look more to the realistic and practical view of chess as a sport.

I, as a player, have found that I improved the most after making a concerted effort to understand some of the CANDID thought processes of strongers players, not the flowery language used to make chess look simple or one-sided. This explains why the books I like are usually books that aim at the methods of improvement and the approach to analysis of stronger players, especially when the books present the psychological problems the players faced in improving. This is why books like "Improve Your Chess Now" by Jon Tisdall, "Zurich 1953" by Bronstein and "Secrets of Modern Strategy" by John Watson, "Inner Game of Chess" by Andy Soltis and "The Amateur's Mind" by Jeremy Silman are great books - they give you an insight into the thought processes of better players.

Here, we have one of America's strongest homegrown talents and a player, who in his prime, was considered one of the World's finest tacticians writing a book on how to attack. But how does he go about it?

He first of all says that his primary goal is to inspire the upcoming chess player and instil within that player, the spirit of the attacker. This is done by showing a large number of high quality games and sacrificial concepts. I think this works becos a starting out player is bound to much by materialism - seeing examples in which material is freely tossed for other advnatages can be liberating.

He often explains the thought process that pointed the attacker in the direction of looking for an attack. Speculative attacks, of the type for which Tal and Shirov and even the author is famous, abound in this book and the seeds of those attack are explained, which explains why even if the attack wasn't sound, it wasn't sound for a specific reason, but elements for the idea did exist in the position.

He even solves a position which he didn't play to explain how an attacker would go about looking at a position. He explains the foundation(TACTICS) for how to become an attacking player and gives a short autobiographical chaper on his development.

There is a chapter on badly played attacks. The author features some of his losses and even tosses in some of his badly played attacks.

He ends the book with a list of the top 10 attacking games of the 90s. Most of the games are popular, but a look at Serper-Nikoliadis, is to my mind, almost worth the cost of the book. Such a game should be more famous (maybe the fact that the loser was an IM had something to do with that?)

The valuable advice in this book is in between the lines, but if you look you shall find - calculate all forcing moves, leads in development should be explioted by the opening of lines(even at the cost of material), attacks naturally appear with material advantages in sectors of the board. The book is even humorous in presenting many ideas and has a realistic side to it as LArry relates his experiences.

Criticism: well, at times, when annotating the games of other players, he might have at times overestimates the depth to which the attacker calculated. He cannot be totally faulted for this becos these were not his games, but I know one example (Wohl-Gipslis) where Wohl only knew he had at least a draw in the critical position and found the winning move in that position when it appeared on the board. There was another example, but I Cannot remember it as I write.

Many players will pick up this books looking for a catalogue of attacking themes. This is not the book for you - "The Art of Attack" by Vukovic does that. However, that is an old book that does not totally reflect the concrete nature of modern chess and the unclear nature of many sharp ideas played by GMs.

If you love beautiful attacking chess, this is a great book - almost every game has a beautiful tactic in it. This is a good enuff reason to buy the book.

If you want to understudy an attacking player, this is probably the best book to buy - the sharpness of my OTB games went up considerably after studying this book. To study this book is to see how chess in the spirit of Tal can be played. Your defensive skills will improve too becos you will see that both attack and defence strain the resources of both players.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: One of the strongest American GMs alive writes books, too. This is his most recent and best ever. Not for the beginner, most of the games are GMs dueling it out. If you don't know how a knight moves, this book is not for you. However, if you have the time to play the games out, you will learn from Christiansen's clear advice to greatly increase play.

He is clearly an attacking type, and shows the best attacking games he's seen. However, this book talks little about defense, so get another book for that.

From this book, one will learn to sacrifice appropriately, wait for perfect moments, and destroy the king's cover. The amazing thing is that it's done within 160 pages. Intertwined with the actual chess is the story of how Larry increased in skill in chess.

You can't go wrong spending a few bucks on this treasure. This raised my rating 300 points in two weeks! (990-1320) and I'm still going on strong. Thanks Larry.

Rating:
Summary: Worthwhile book
Review: The book is loosely organised in 8 chapters, the last of which covers some of the most scintillating games of the nineties. There are good examples of attacking play throughout the book, many of them exemplifying the dynamic style prevailing today. Games of Kasparov, Anand, Ivanchuk, Shirov and Kramnik are well-represented here. The book should be enjoyed for these examples of sparkling play. While it doesn't pretend to be a treatise, there are nuggets of wisdom interspersed in the notes.

A word of caution: some readers may already have seen many of the games in Informant or New In Chess magazine.

Other books on attack that can strongly be recommended are 1) The Art of Attack in Chess, Vukovic 2) Attack with Mikhail Tal, Tal and Damsky and 3) Attacking Technique, Crouch

One can also recommend the books on sacrifice by Spielmann, Vukovic, Shamkovich and McDonald.

Rating:
Summary: Inspiration for your attacks
Review: This book will whet your appetite for king attacks. Basically it is two books in one: a games collection of Christiansen's and other GM's attacking efforts, and also a chess autobiography of the author.

The games are grouped into chapters with a theme and an introduction. The intros are not very deep, and the lessons are mostly to be found inside the game annotations. But the annotations contain hundreds of tidbits that are useful for general purposes.

Together with a book like "Art of Attack" this is all you need on the topic for starters (then get Tal's Life and Games). This book is pretty close to 5 stars, but the lack of Averbach/Vukovic type of methodologically organised theoretical content made me only give it 4 out of five.