Nonetheless, I did not find them difficult to use.
The diagrams in this book are large and clear but a little non-standard. You need to be able to spot most simple tactics (including the uncommon ones) and most common tactical possibilities (including the complicated ones) on sight. Sooner or later, you are going to have conduct your own investigations.
Reading explanations can be helpful, but working things out for yourself is better, and the examples in this book are only a subset of those that a strong player needs to know. Nonetheless, as sportsmen say: “practice does not make perfect - perfect practice makes perfect.” Practicing finding tactics badly is not a promising approach. You need to practice until your thought processes become automatic. Understanding tactics is an important part of the learning process, but that it is not enough in itself. The book addresses this topic better than any other that I have seen. The main theme of Weteschnik’s book is what he calls “status analysis,” by which he means studying the position to find clues for possible tactics. Weteschnik says “do not exercise what you do not understand.” Nonetheless, he fully accepts that you need to practice once you do understand, see: The main emphasis of the book is on understanding chess tactics, rather than just solving problems. Nonetheless, its a good inspirational story! An exacting critic would say that his students might have improved by as much or more if Weteschnik had used different training methods or might not be impressed by an improvement of 100-200 points over three years.
Nonetheless, with his coaching, they improved by an average of 100-200 rating points, and were promoted to higher leagues twice in three years. If you are 2300 or higher, go buy stronger puzzle books, as you have nothing to do here.Weteschnik says that the club players he was coaching had great weaknesses in their tactical play, and that this was not fixed asking them to solve a huge number of problems. If you are stronger, maybe you don't need it as much, and there are a lot of other good tactical books, but it will be a good purchase nevertheless. If you have <1800 elo points, I recommend this book to you wholeheartedly. I went through the 300 exercises in about a month and usually the solutions where spot on (there are some problems when the proposed solution is not clear cut, but the computer agrees with Weteschnik, so what can I say?), which for me is important, with some older books you never know if the exercise is flawed and when you don't agree with the solution you usually have a nagging doubt in the back of your mind.Īll in all I like this book a lot, I now use it to start training sessions, solving as much exercises as possible in 15 minutes. The solutions have little diagrams if there is an interesting position long in the variations, so you don't really need a board to follow it. To my surprise, although the books is aimed at novice audiences, it had some challenging problems and it took me a lot of effort to solve the difficult problems (if I was able to do so at all). However as it was a gift and it seemed wrong to not give it another try, I browsed through the exercises expecting them to be easily solvable. I started reading it but soon found that my level was considerably higher than the material exposed, hence I was tempted to leave the book alone. I have not much to say from the first 2/3rds of the book. The edition is on par with other Quality Chess books, excellent, and the length in the second edition is as I have come to expect with more than 300 pages, so you are getting a lot of pages for your money. As far as I know, the last chapter (and hence 1/3 of the book) is a new addition of the 2nd edition, while the rest of the book has been heavily revised. The books is divided in chapters each one explaining a tactical theme, and a final chapter with a collection of exercises (which comprises one third of the book) on those themes. Maybe lower levels do need this explanatory prose. My gut feeling tells me that tactical themes are best trained by solving hundreds of exercises on that theme, but I must confess that as a 2200 player I am not the primary target of the book. The author has make a great effort in presenting the root of many tactical themes in a very pedagogical way in the hope that with such a study the theme will be fixed in the readers mind.įor me it is difficult to judge if this is the right approach. The book's aim is to present tactics to novice audience. There is not much to say in the presentation of this book that is not said in its tittle. Title: Chess Tactics from Scratch - Understanding Chess Tactics 2nd Edition.