"This book is a training and improvement program for amateur chess players"--Introduction.

The best advice for chess players who want to improve quickly is: get better at tactics! Simply because the vast majority of amateur games is decided through tactics you will immediately start beating more opponents when you improve your tactical skills. Experienced Russian Grandmaster Jakov Neishtadt has selected those examples from the games of masters that have the biggest instructional value for club players. In the first part of the book Neishstadt teaches a systematic course on the most important tactical themes. The second part consist of an exam with hundreds of tests from real-life chess, in random order so as not to give unwelcome hints on how to solve them. The solutions are not just lists of moves, but include instructive prose.

Chess is 99% tactics. If this celebrated observation is true for the master, how much more so for beginners and casual players! If you want to win more games, nothing works better than training combinations. There are two types of books on tactics, those that introduce the concepts followed by some examples, and workbooks that contain numerous exercises. Chess masters and trainers Franco Masetti and Roberto Messa have done both: they explain the basic tactical ideas AND provide an enormous amount of exercises for each different theme. Masetti and Messa have created a great first tactics book. It teaches you how to: ¯ identify weak spots in the position of your opponent ¯ recognize patterns of combinations ¯ visualize tricks. 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners can also be used as a course text book, because only the most didactically productive exercises have been used.

600 Lessons from Tactics to Strategy By Ray Cheng

Chess puzzle books are undoubtedly popular – and with good reason. Solving chess puzzles helps to sharpen a player’s tactical and combinational skills. This ability is absolutely fundamental for chess development. You won’t get better at tennis until you can consistently hit the ball with accuracy and you won’t get better at chess until you improve your ability to calculate. It is that simple and there are no shortcuts. Many puzzle books take a far too simplistic approach and offer endless positions where the solution is nearly always along the lines of: queen takes something check, king takes queen, check, check and a pretty mate. Aesthetically pleasing perhaps but of minimal use for actual improvement as the patterns are so familiar. Practical Chess Puzzles avoids this pitfall. The positions chosen are far more like those that actually appear on the board during the vast majority of games. Furthermore, at all stages, the puzzles are ranked, enabling the student to gauge progress and identify and correct weaknesses. * 600 puzzles featuring instructive, typically “game-like” positions * Model games featuring important instructional points * A ranking system to assess progress.

Chess is 99% tactics. This celebrated observation is not only true for beginners, but also for club players (Elo 1500 – 2000). If you want to win more games, nothing works better than training your combination skills. There are two types of books on tactics: those that introduce the concepts followed by some examples, and workbooks that contain lots of exercises. FIDE Master Frank Erwich has done both: he explains all key tactical ideas AND provides an enormous amount of exercises for each different theme. Erwich has created a complete tactics book for ambitious club and tournament players. He teaches you how to reach the next level of identifying weak spots in the position of your opponent, recognizing patterns of combinations, visualizing tricks and calculating effectively. Erwich has also included a new and important element: tests that will improve your defensive skills. 1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players is not a collection of freewheeling puzzles. It serves as a course text book, because only the most didactically productive exercises are featured. Every chapter starts with easy examples, but no worries: the level of difficulty will steadily increase.

Books on chess exercises are usually about tactics. But in most of the positions that you think about during a game, there is no tactical solution. What you are doing most of the time is trying to find a way to improve your position or weaken your opponent's. Experienced chess trainer Emmanuel Bricard has created a practical exercise manual with carefully selected training positions. This book is for you if you want to know what to do if there is no tactical solution, improve your understanding of chess strategy, learn how to apply strategic principles in concrete positions, gain time on the clock by having to calculate fewer variations and learn how to accumulate advantages in various types of positions. The level of difficulty of the exercises varies as this manual is intended for a wide range of club players. After working with Strategic Chess Exercises you will spend less time on finding better plans, and outplay your opponents more often!