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Chessville
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Chess Tactics for Kids Reviewed by Stuart Solomon
This is a sequel to the book How to beat your Dad at Chess and once again Murray Chandler gives us an overlooked work of genius. This book is not just for kids, it’s for all beginners to intermediate players who want to get ahead in the middlegame. This time instead of giving tactics leading to checkmate it allows you to gain material- from a pawn to a queen- or save a game by forcing stalemate. I think it should have been called Using Tactics to beat your Dad in chess. The sub-title of this book is 50 Tricky Tactics to Outwit your Opponents, and it contains 50 tricky tactics that can get you out of a tough situation. While the beginning tactics teach the more basic tricks, like forks and pins, when you get deeper into the book, you’ll find tricks that even grandmasters could miss. In the introduction, there is a great page that explains the algebraic notation which can help all chess players to read moves made in the book and enable them to write down moves in their own chess games. This isn’t new information, but I like the concise way its explained and the symbols used throughout the book. How to beat your Dad at Chess was all about pattern recognition and this one is about motifs. Each tactic merits its own chapter. He breaks studying tactics into three steps. Step one is learn what the basic tactical motifs are and how they operate. He says there are 12 basic tactical motifs, which are: forks, pins, skewers, decoys, deflections, overloads, discovered attacks, discovered checks, double checks, desperado sacrifices, stalemates, zwischenzugs (in-between moves), perpetual checks, and breaking the pin. In the first chapters he teaches you what every one of those tactics are and how you can use them to crush your opponent’s defenses. Step two is recognizing typical patterns by seeing where piece formations make it possible to execute different tactics. Chandler gives three examples. I find this part the most difficult to identify because the tactic is often hidden from both yourself and opponent. When using tactics, you need to look ahead more than one move, and be intentional in your choices of strategy. You always have to look ahead. Once you see patterns often enough, it becomes easier to recognize. That’s why you have to play a lot and study different games to be able to “site read” the formations and recognize patterns quickly. In Step three, he combines tactics to out-calculate the opponent. This is also a very difficult step because instead of just having to recognize where one tactic can be used, you have to recognize other tactics to set up one ahead of time. An example is sacrificing a knight to pin the opponent’s queen. I knew this before, however, Chandler gave me new distinctions by telling how to recognize that the sacrifice will gain material. Near the end of the book, he shows you how to use step three. A great example of combining tactics is Tricky Tactic #13, The Rook-c8 and the Knight-e7 check Trick. Some hints to show you when you can use this tactic, or when your opponent can use it on you, are:
I have fallen victim to this tactic several times before reading this book. What happens is the White rook comes down to the c8 square, using itself as a decoy sacrifice. The Black queen then takes that White rook putting herself in position for a knight fork. Then the knight on d5 jumps to the e7 square. This forks the Black king and queen and wins the Black queen for the White rook. Once again, at the end of the book, there is a wonderful test to determine how much you’ve learned about tactics. First, you’re tested on identifying the tactics, then on how well you can find and executive tactics. I think that people should read Chess
Tactics for Kids before reading How to beat your Dad at Chess
because Chess Tactics for Kids helps you get to the middlegame and
endgame positions where you can use the checkmates shown in How to beat
your Dad at Chess. So even though Chandler may have written this
second, I think it should read first. I recommend this book to beginner and
intermediate players of all ages because it will help you defeat any
opponent that comes at you or maybe even your poor old suffering Dad. It
might even help your Dad if you let him read it!
Also by 12-yeard old Stuart Solomon: Chess Similes |
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