|
|||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
Chessville
Advertise to Single insert:
|
Winning Chess Combinations Reviewed by Rick Kennedy
If your chess has been improving as you worked your way through those half-dozen earlier titles – and Yaz suspects it has – then that’s a good thing, because he’s going to step up the pace a bit in some places in Winning Chess Combinations. He offers a basic recommendation: start with using a loose-leaf binder as your working chess notebook. (Seirawan says he consulted 32 of his own notebooks in preparing this book!) Then, whenever you see an interesting game, or one that features a tactical idea that you’re studying, copy it or paste it into your notebook. (Writing by hand, the author urges, may help you remember better than typing.) You’ll soon have whole sections of games which feature “back-rank mates”, “Queen and pawn mates”, “Rook and Bishop mates”, “Bishop and Knight mates,” “Two Bishop mates”, “double Rook mates” and “Queen and Bishop mates” – to name some of the patterns covered in Winning Chess Combinations. Sound like work? It is. Productive work for the improving player. Speaking of work, there is a chapter of “Test Positions” near the end of the book that requires you to assess what advantage each side has, if any. You then must discover if there is a combination that is playable in the position, and if so, analyze the combination (and write down your work). How different this is from book collections of tactical problems where each chapter is helpfully labeled according to theme, so you know what to look for – and when. As if Yaz were ever going to be able to watch your games and announce, at the proper time, “Perry, be sharp: you now can win a piece using an ‘x-ray attack’!” But how similar it is to our own experiences at the board: we must find and play the moves – if they are there. (The “Solutions” chapter is, as always, well written and is a good collection of examples of how a position should be assessed.) So, as an over-arching framework, Seirawan delineates three kinds of combinations – checkmating combinations, material combinations, and defensive or strategic combinations. Of course, they can also be divided into sound and unsound combinations, the latter of which holds court in the “Blunders and Boomerangs” chapter. And where do sound combinations come from?
In the meantime, there is a chapter on the “Classic Bishop Sacrifice” and one on Rook “lifts” (“The Case of the Clumsy Rook”). In the “Inspiring Combinations,” Seirawan takes us inside the mind of Greg Serper (Serper – Nikolaidis, St. Petersburg 1993) when he sacrifices all of his pieces; and into the mind of Gary Kasparov (Kasparov – Topalov, Wijk aan Zee, 1999) as he produces the game proclaimed “The Pearl of Wijk aan Zee.” Without Seirawan’s “map” as to what was going on, I’d have been permanently lost. But it’s all there in the analysis: the lines examined and rejected, the ideas picked up and tossed aside, the thread of moves that runs through the game and brings success. It’s amazing what it takes to play top grandmaster chess! So:
It’s in there, as they say:
Introduction Winning Chess Combinations is a fitting finish to the Winning Chess series. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if reader demand built up enough that one day in the future GM Seirawan again found himself putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard…
|
The
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
