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Find the Winning Move Reviewed by Mike Rosensaft
Gary Lane has come out with another tome to add to this mass, Find the Winning Move. Because the field of books on tactics is so dense, a new volume has only one chance to survive: to provide something that the others lack. Lev Alburt tried to highlight his extremely useful Training Chess Pocket Book by placing a striking model on the front. Gary Lane, though, has opted for a more tame strategy and has just made his book more fun to read. More fun, however, doesn’t always translate into more helpful. Playing chess while skydiving may be fun, but I doubt it will help your game. This book is different than most in two respects. First, it has incorporated a scoring system whereby you can rate how you did on the problems and see what level of tactical strength you possess. For each problem you get right in the chapter, you get 10 points. If you have to use a hint, then you get only 5. At then end you are scored on a scale whose bottom category often derides the reader with such taunts as: “If at first you don’t succeed, take a hint and give up chess” or the not so punny “After such a low score you will have knightmares!” The higher scores give you a FIDE rating from 1000 to “World Champion standard -- Garry Kasparov” in the final chapter. Obviously, this is just meant as a fun way to score yourself and doesn’t really say anything about what your rating should be. I’m a USCF Class B player and yet I scored International Master on almost all the chapters. I was disappointed at the hints, which are basically give-aways. It would be rare for a player with any tactical ability to look at the hint and not be able to solve the puzzle immediately. For instance, the following puzzle appears in Chapter 2 with White to play and mate.
The title of Chapter 2 is “More Two Move Wins,” so before we even get to the hint, we know that white can win in two moves. This makes these problems even easier. And if you can’t see it off the bat, the hint reads: “A queen check is required.” Well, there are only two queen checks, and so it becomes fairly clear what the solution is (Qb8+ Kd7 Rc7 mate). That’s not to say that there aren’t some challenging puzzles in the book, but I think that anyone with a little tactical expertise will be able to reach International Master level in most chapters quite easily. This makes the book a breeze to work through as it doesn’t take much concentration, but I’m not sure that it is the most helpful way to learn tactics. Another fun aspect of the book that I really enjoyed is the variety of the chapters. Most tactics books are arranged either by difficulty, by tactic (forks, skewers, etc), or randomly so as to make it more like a real game where you don’t know what tactical trick will work. This book’s chapters, though, are organized by varying themes that really fly out of the normal categories. In addition to the expected chapters on sacrificing your queen or moving your knight, there are numerous other interestingly-themed chapters. One of my favorites - “White to Play and Lose” - features problems where white has just blundered and it is your job as black to find out how to punish him. Lane also includes a chapter on tactics from classic games, which is quite interesting. My favorite chapter is entitled “The Hall of Fame” and includes games in which a celebrity is one of the players (such as the Kasparov-Sting game) or positions that were featured in movies. One of my favorite puzzles has to be the inclusion of the chess puzzle composed by Jeremy Silman for a scene at the end of the first Harry Potter Movie featuring Harry Potter and his two friends Hermione and Ron:
Hermione is the rook on f8, Ron is the knight on g5, and Harry Potter is the bishop on a3. The reader is given the task of forcing checkmate. Anyone who has seen the movie will remember Ron’s exasperated cries to Harry that a piece must be sacrificed. The solution is to sacrifice poor Ron (who still makes it out alive somehow): 1...Nh3+ 2.Qxh3 Bc5+ 3.Qe3 Bxe3 mate. If you are particularly astute, you might see that there is a shorter mate with 1...Bc5+ 2.Qxc5 Nh3 mate, but, as noted at the end of the chapter, you get no credit for this and must, in fact, “take away 10 points because you have just allowed Harry Potter to die!” This book doesn’t
try to be a student’s main resource for chess tactics improvement. It
doesn’t claim to be an accurate test of your tactical skill. It is, though,
a rather fun tactics book, whose varied chapters promise an interesting
read. If you only buy one tactics book, don’t buy this book. However, if
you want a fun book to bring to the beach that will also help sharpen your
tactical skills a bit, this book comes highly recommended.
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