Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great 'little' book....., 8 Jun 1998
By A Customer
Beginning to play chess as a grade schooler, I owned neither chess set nor chess book and I was a regular victim of the more 'experienced' players around my age. Sensing my frustration, my mother bought an inexpensive set (in fact, the one pictured on the present cover) and this Reinfeld, presented them to me one summer afternoon and invited me to do something about my discontent. With a bit of work and this text, I went from minnow to young neighborhood shark. There probably isn't a text which better illustrates the maxim that "tactics is the soul of chess" and as a beginner needing as much tactical instruction as possible, this book seemed ideal even then. For the first time, chess became fun because its mechanics suddenly came into focus. This book 'hooked me on' Chess over thirty plus years ago. I no longer have the little medieval pieces, but I do own a replacement copy of this 'ancient' Reinfeld which was such a help. It's as honest a book of chess instruction as anyone could wish and it remains a real value at the price.....
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very good pool of tactical problems., 14 Oct 2004
This is an excellent book. It is obviously important to learn to find combinations or to develop skill so that tactics stare out at you where before you might have missed them. This book is a great opportunity to become very strong at spotting winning combinations, (ie, combinations that result in an advantage, and in this book this means material or the game, and not positional as far as I can tell). There are 1001 problems and they are in no particular order in terms of difficulty. They are grouped into chapters covering all the tactics; revealed attacks, pins, forks, the overworked piece, etc etc, (there are 20 such chapters), and for each chapter there are a lot of problems where white is to move first and then a similar number of problems where black is to move first. The reason that it is good that there are both white and black problems is that you practice finding combinations to use yourself, and also practice spotting your opponent's possible combinations. These problems are often very challenging, and there is no warning when a challenging one is coming up, (most are challenging in my opinion though, but some obviously very challenging), and this makes it more of a simulation of a real game. Also, one thing that massively impressed me is that every problem looks like it was taken from a real game. The pieces aren't in bizarre places; most of the problems are from games that look extremely familiar if you have played a lot. This means that the problems are highly applicable, and by practicing looking for combinations in these problems, ability at the board should automatically improve by a lot. The one downside in some peoples' opinions, as with any chess book, is that the notation is not algebraic, but I would argue that for this book that is a trivial point. All you have to interpret are a few different possible courses at most because a lot of the combinations are forced. I admit that reading a chess book such as one that annotates openings or entire games in depth would be a major annoyance with classical notation, but for this problems book I don't think it makes any difference. The difficulty of reading the notation is nothing to the difficulty of the problems, so in the time that you take trying to work them out it wouldn't be difficult to 'translate' the classical notation into algebraic if it makes things easier, for the particular problem that you are attempting. Most of the pages of the book just consist of six board diagrams.
I have only positive things to say about this book. I think that it is an excellent aid to improvement of tactical ability in chess, and particularly because the problems are clearly taken from typical games. If classic notation really is a problem, don't worry because there is an explanation/key to it in the front pages of the book.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Useful little book., 4 Aug 2003
By A Customer
There is not too much one can say about this book.There are 1001 tactical positions arranged according to tactical theme. Reinfeld gives a few words explaining what the tactical theme is, and then you see how many you can solve by yourself. This method of tactical training, although simple, is very effective. These are great excersizes to improve your depth of vision, and chess intuition. Some of the variations which need to be calculated are fairly long (there are a few 10 move ones) , so this book can go a long way into helping even fairly advanced chess players. I don't give this book five stars as I feel the author must do something special to deserve five stars.
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