How to Beat Your Dad at Chess (Gambit Chess)
by Murray Chandler
|
List Price: Our Price: $8.90 You Save: $8.05 (47%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $7.46 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of How to Beat Your Dad at Chess (Gambit Chess)
Book Review: Excellent Primer (or review!) on Mating Tactics
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a USCF Class C player and great enjoyed this book -- even though I already have worked through similar mating combination exercises. The reason I picked this up was because the title made me laugh, but surprisingly I bought it once I looked inside. The key is the format: each of the 50 mating (or drawing) patterns is presented with a nice, clear diagram, often including arrows to show lines of attack.
These pictures do help the mating pattern sink in for quick recall later, just as the author claims. I read through the first 5 or 10 or the 50 patterns, and then played a game of blitz chess on the internet. I had a winning position and avoided losing when I saw my opponent setting up one of the mates from the book in a last-ditch effort to save the game. I didn't even have to calculate to avoid the mate; I recognized the pattern almost instantly and won the game.
I find that it's especially helpful for tactical ability when concepts are cataloged and named as they are in this book. Spotting the basic mates might be pretty easy, but when you're in a complex position it's a great advantage to have these burned into your memory so that you'll spot the possibilities when looking several moves ahead.
Finally, to address other reviewers' concerns about the soundness of the example combinations: while many of these are not forced mates, they generally result in overwhelming advantages if the oppponent gives optimal defense. I found it useful to practice my calculation ability when solving the exercises. On problem 41, for instance, the author does make a misleading statement that Black is unable to prevent a killer check from White on move 3. In fact, black can give up a bunch of material to avoid immediate mate... the king is driven into the open, though, and I kept trying to find a mate. I gave up around 8 moves in, but using Crafty I found I missed a simple final move, giving a forced mate in 8 or 9. (Also, to address another review's comment about problem 11 in particular, if white avoids mate then he is simply down by one piece while black still has a strong attack. Other problems in the book use the mating threat to gain a single pawn, and it is certainly desirable to be able to use mating threats to gain material.)
I find these subtleties of the problems to be an advantage, rather than a weakness (although I think the authors should have pointed this out in the introduction). Working out the variations improves tactical ability -- it's nice that the examples aren't completely trivial, and that they all come from real games (many of these are classic combinations from historic world-class games).
Book Review: Excellent Primer (or review!) on Mating Tactics
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a USCF Class C player and great enjoyed this book -- even though I already have worked through similar mating combination exercises. The reason I picked this up was because the title made me laugh, but surprisingly I bought it once I looked inside. The key is the format: each of the 50 mating (or drawing) patterns is presented with a nice, clear diagram, often including arrows to show lines of attack.
These pictures do help the mating pattern sink in for quick recall later, just as the author claims. I read through the first 5 or 10 or the 50 patterns, and then played a game of blitz chess on the internet. I had a winning position and avoided losing when I saw my opponent setting up one of the mates from the book in a last-ditch effort to save the game. I didn't even have to calculate to avoid the mate; I recognized the pattern almost instantly and won the game.
I find that it's especially helpful for tactical ability when concepts are cataloged and named as they are in this book. Spotting the basic mates might be pretty easy, but when you're in a complex position it's a great advantage to have these burned into your memory so that you'll spot the possibilities when looking several moves ahead.
Finally, to address other reviewers' concerns about the soundness of the example combinations: while many of these are not forced mates, they generally result in overwhelming advantages if the oppponent gives optimal defense. I found it useful to practice my calculation ability when solving the exercises. On problem 41, for instance, the author does make a misleading statement that Black is unable to prevent a killer check from White on move 3. In fact, black can give up a bunch of material to avoid immediate mate... the king is driven into the open, though, and I kept trying to find a mate. I gave up around 8 moves in, but using Crafty I found I missed a simple final move, giving a forced mate in 8 or 9. (Also, to address another review's comment about problem 11 in particular, if white avoids mate then he is simply down by one piece while black still has a strong attack. Other problems in the book use the mating threat to gain a single pawn, and it is certainly desirable to be able to use mating threats to gain material.)
I find these subtleties of the problems to be an advantage, rather than a weakness (although I think the authors should have pointed this out in the introduction). Working out the variations improves tactical ability -- it's nice that the examples aren't completely trivial, and that they all come from real games (many of these are classic combinations from historic world-class games).
Book Review: 50 Deadly Checkmates!
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a USCF Class C player and great enjoyed this book -- even though I already have worked through similar mating combination exercises. The reason I picked this up was because the title made me laugh, but surprisingly I bought it once I looked inside. The key is the format: each of the 50 mating (or drawing) patterns is presented with a nice, clear diagram, often including arrows to show lines of attack.
These pictures do help the mating pattern sink in for quick recall later, just as the author claims. I read through the first 5 or 10 or the 50 patterns, and then played a game of blitz chess on the internet. I had a winning position and avoided losing when I saw my opponent setting up one of the mates from the book in a last-ditch effort to save the game. I didn't even have to calculate to avoid the mate; I recognized the pattern almost instantly and won the game.
I find that it's especially helpful for tactical ability when concepts are cataloged and named as they are in this book. Spotting the basic mates might be pretty easy, but when you're in a complex position it's a great advantage to have these burned into your memory so that you'll spot the possibilities when looking several moves ahead.
Finally, to address other reviewers' concerns about the soundness of the example combinations: while many of these are not forced mates, they generally result in overwhelming advantages if the oppponent gives optimal defense. I found it useful to practice my calculation ability when solving the exercises. On problem 41, for instance, the author does make a misleading statement that Black is unable to prevent a killer check from White on move 3. In fact, black can give up a bunch of material to avoid immediate mate... the king is driven into the open, though, and I kept trying to find a mate. I gave up around 8 moves in, but using Crafty I found I missed a simple final move, giving a forced mate in 8 or 9. (Also, to address another review's comment about problem 11 in particular, if white avoids mate then he is simply down by one piece while black still has a strong attack. Other problems in the book use the mating threat to gain a single pawn, and it is certainly desirable to be able to use mating threats to gain material.)
I find these subtleties of the problems to be an advantage, rather than a weakness (although I think the authors should have pointed this out in the introduction). Working out the variations improves tactical ability -- it's nice that the examples aren't completely trivial, and that they all come from real games (many of these are classic combinations from historic world-class games).
Book Review: Excellent Primer (or review!) on Mating Tactics
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a USCF Class C player and great enjoyed this book -- even though I already have worked through similar mating combination exercises. The reason I picked this up was because the title made me laugh, but surprisingly I bought it once I looked inside. The key is the format: each of the 50 mating (or drawing) patterns is presented with a nice, clear diagram, often including arrows to show lines of attack.
These pictures do help the mating pattern sink in for quick recall later, just as the author claims. I read through the first 5 or 10 or the 50 patterns, and then played a game of blitz chess on the internet. I had a winning position and avoided losing when I saw my opponent setting up one of the mates from the book in a last-ditch effort to save the game. I didn't even have to calculate to avoid the mate; I recognized the pattern almost instantly and won the game.
I find that it's especially helpful for tactical ability when concepts are cataloged and named as they are in this book. Spotting the basic mates might be pretty easy, but when you're in a complex position it's a great advantage to have these burned into your memory so that you'll spot the possibilities when looking several moves ahead.
Finally, to address other reviewers' concerns about the soundness of the example combinations: while many of these are not forced mates, they generally result in overwhelming advantages if the oppponent gives optimal defense. I found it useful to practice my calculation ability when solving the exercises. On problem 41, for instance, the author does make a misleading statement that Black is unable to prevent a killer check from White on move 3. In fact, black can give up a bunch of material to avoid immediate mate... the king is driven into the open, though, and I kept trying to find a mate. I gave up around 8 moves in, but using Crafty I found I missed a simple final move, giving a forced mate in 8 or 9. (Also, to address another review's comment about problem 11 in particular, if white avoids mate then he is simply down by one piece while black still has a strong attack. Other problems in the book use the mating threat to gain a single pawn, and it is certainly desirable to be able to use mating threats to gain material.)
I find these subtleties of the problems to be an advantage, rather than a weakness (although I think the authors should have pointed this out in the introduction). Working out the variations improves tactical ability -- it's nice that the examples aren't completely trivial, and that they all come from real games (many of these are classic combinations from historic world-class games).
Book Review: Chess Nuts Boasting
Summary: 4 Stars
Great book. I love the premise- and the careful way the Mr. Chandler explains it- which is that pattern recognition is a more powerful tool than in-depth computation analysis. It serves as a nice illustration of Gladwell's "Blink" theory, that less information can be more when the brain is finely tuned in to the right information. Chandler points out that a human chess pro is better than a computer because our brains can quickly filter out the irrelevant info and just recognize the broad pattern, such as a set-up for a standard mate possibility. The computer is inferior, per the author, because while it might come to the same conclusion, it has to do it by generating every single possible move with every single piece on the board, following out hundreds of thousands of possible subsequent sequences to arrive at the checkmate. Of course, I would suggest that the computer is actually superior in this respect because, even though it has to analyze hundreds of thousands of possibilities, it really doesn't mind. It doesn't get bored, fatigued, or seduced by a bold capture. But, still, I appreciate his point.
The author gives examples of fifty standard checkmate motifs, and uses good illustrations to help recognize the pattern when it is there and understand the sequence of events. My only beef with the book, for which I've docked a star, is the sexist title. I can't help but comment on this in this post-Imus era. The author tells us from the start that it is really a book on how to beat anyone in chess so the title is just an eye-catcher. But I don't want to reinforce the many messages that young girls get about what they should or shouldn't be good at. Okay, to be truthful, in all the chess playing families that I can think of off the top of my head, it is in fact the fathers who are the chess nuts, who hand the game down to the next generation. But lets not reinforce the not uncommon notion that men are naturally superior chess players. I've even read the likes of Camille Paglia, in one of her faux-academic pieces, use the fact that chess champions are all men as evidence for a male superiority in spatial and mathematical reasoning. Without going too far into what is a complicated and emotionally loaded argument, I would just direct people to do a little internet search on Judit Polgar if you are not already familiar.
Still, overall, thumbs up. A good book, really for beginning to intermediate chess fans of any age, which will increase your arsenal of offensive tricks and improve your defensive vigilance.