Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #140026 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 270 pages

Review
Sharpen Your Tactics! features 1125 brilliant sacrifices, combinations and studies of chess by Grandmaster Anatoly Lein. Hundreds of these examples of chess wizardry have never before been available in the west. Sharpen Your Tactics! is a unique training book that will be of immense benefit to both the novice and the experienced chess player. Indeed, every class of chess player will benefit from the insights and examples provided by Grandmaster Lein. The examples are rated by difficulty, from easy to very challenging. The problems gradually become more difficult as the reader moves through the book, leading the chess player deeper into the world of high-level chess tactics. Sharpen Your Tactics! will significantly improve the playing of any serious chess student! -- Midwest Book Review

From the Publisher
Sharpen your Tactics! is a delightful and most instructive chess combination book. The book starts with easy combinations and progresses to difficult. The unique thing about this combination book is that most of the problems come from master games played in the old Soviet Union and very few of these have been seen in the west. The authors suggest a systematic training method to get the most benefit from your study time. "Chess is 99% tactics" as Teichmann once said, and tactics will greatly strengthen your game after you have seen and studied the more than 1,000 brilliant combinations in "Sharpen your Tactics!."

About the Author
Grandmaster Anatoly Lein came to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1975 and has been among the strongest U.S. players for the past two decades. He won the World Open in 1976 and was a participant in the Soviet Championship many times before coming to the U.S. He is still a regular tournament player. Lein's co-author Boris Archangelsky is a leading chess teacher in Russia today. He is the trainer of many top Russian players.

Customer Reviews

the tactics training book race . . .
I have all these tactics books and the question is: which one? Well, it essentially comes down to this book or Fred Reinfeld's combo book. Hays' Combination Challenge is just Fred's book in algebraic notation (but useless if you already have Fred's book, unless you hate descriptive notation), and the other book in this genre, 303 Tactical Chess Problems, is for absolute beginner's (1100-1400). I'm personally 1650-1700 USCF (1750 ICC) and would like to tell the differences between these books in my opinion. Lein's book, above, has the following good points : 1) scrambled themes (like a real chess game, no hints as to what you're looking for), 2) the last 200 puzzles (the 4 stars) are harder than anything in Fred's book by a factor of 5!, 3) far more accurate, only found 1 error, so far, by my looking with Fritz/craty18, 4) algebraic notation, 5) many puzzles feature pins+skewers+double attacks+ . . . like REAL combos, not one ISOLATED amateurish tactic. Negatives: 1) overemphasis on mate and stalemate it feels like 75% of problems involve mating threat (in some ways, therefore, oriented to beginning players, and ruining the quality of better players by encouraging you to attack always, even if the position doesn't warrant it . . . so play becomes weak and trappy with overuse), 2) if you find a weakness in your play, like double attacks were weak for me with a Chessbase quiz, you can't get a 100 problems of that theme in one place with which to train (no thematic grouping), 3) the focus on combos of complexity versus single themes makes it hard to implement this stuff in your play -- e.g. you usually plan discovered checks, so having that motif in your head helps you plan. Lein's technique just sharpens tactical OBSERVATION not tactical PLANNING, and 4) some of the problems esp number 1000 and following (at least for me at 1700) are just too hard to do without a board (people who can do this whole book without a board are either not finished, lying, or over USCF expert class . . . Lein says in the introduction to use a board for 3 and 4 stars (although only the 4 stars require, the final position in my head on the 3 stars is occasionally fuzzy . . . ). In short, I prefer ol' Fred's book for actual training, and if I want to see a fancy combo I look at an Alekhine game or read the Informant combo museum piece (Anthology of Combos . . .). Also, my 6 year old son (600 rating) does the first 100 or so problems easily, and as the end problems are like 1900+, you can see the book tries to go from 400 to master, which is a little ridiculous, so that no matter who you are, only like 150 of the 1000+ problems are pitched right at your level. Fred's book is all about 1400-1900 I think, with some reservations at both ends of that range. So for me, my chess weight-lifting tool is still --- Reinfeld's book.

Great tactics - improvements of 1001 tactics format
I really liked the format of this book. I love tactics books. The kind with no text in them, and page after page of nothing but chess diagrams. The kind that people on an airplane look at you funny when you are "reading" them.

This book is very similar to the other tactics books out there, but with some improvements that I think are nice. One improvement is that the tactics are labeled with a * symbol to show how difficult the problem is. The more stars the harder it is. This is a nice break from the Reinfeld books which will have a mate in one followed by a mate in ten, and you have no idea beforehand how hard the problem is going to be. I personally like to have some idea of what I am getting into.

Another nice feature is that the answers show where the game came from. I think that this is a nice touch, and gives credit to the people that actually played the game. A lot of books don't do this, and you see puzzles where you know where the game came from - "Oh yeah this is the opera box game", etc, but the author gives no credit where it is due.

I also like that the answers are in algebraic notation, as opposed to descriptive ("e4" versus "pawn to king 4"). Reinfeld's books still have the old school style. One note is that the notation is not really standard. Bxe3 would be Be3, which is a little odd. I got confused at least once when looking up an answer and did not see the "x". I assumed I had the wrong answer when I didn't. But once you know this is the format they use, you can adjust. But it would be nice to see the standard used in the first place.

Overall great tactics book. If you like doing tactics til your eyes bleed, and want something that could be used as part of a "400 points in 400 days" type of study program, this is a good one to add to your collection.

Good Selections, But Revised Edition Needed
Sharpen Your Tactics! presents a diagrammed position from 1125 games and studies, each with a tactical device ready to be unleashed. Occasionally the solutions include one or two brief variations. The diagrams are rated in difficulty from one-star (easiest) to four-star (hardest). The problems are excellent, but the book has major problems and needs revision.

Many of the exercises, perhaps 70% of them, appear in the Convekta chess tactics programs: Chess Tactics for Beginners, Chess Tactics for Intermediate Players, and Chess Tactics Art 3.0. If you use those programs, this book feels redundant.

Just like the Convekta programs, this book splits many combinations into parts. First, they give you a diagram that asks for the final move of, say, a three-move combination. Then, maybe four pages later, they give you a diagram that asks for all three moves of the same combination. Your chances of getting it right are increased from your earlier experience. I like this touch.

As I was checking the solutions, something seemed amiss, and I started giving them to Fritz. Over the course of a year, I found 16 clear errors out of about 150 positions checked. It seems a likely conjecture, then, that perhaps 10% of the alleged solutions are flawed. I am talking about very serious flaws, too, where the defending side can hold against the recommended moves. Rechecking the solutions on Fritz is a ton of work. We should not have to do it. The publisher and authors should computer-check everything and issue a revised edition.

I purchased Sharpen Your Tactics! two years ago, and it is falling apart. The cover is off and many pages have come loose. I hold the book together with rubber bands. (Apparently the success of Reinfeld has given publishers the evil idea that an exercise book sells more copies if it falls apart.) The paper is cheap, the diagrams fuzzy. It is hard on the eyes.

Aside from a brief introduction, Sharpen Your Tactics! has no words. In contrast, Alburt (Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player) gives nice definitions of diversion, decoy, skewer, etc., and comments on the solutions. Moreover, John Nunn, in Nunn's Puzzle Book, gives you verbal setups, hints, and crystal-clear explanations of every solution. Regrettably, Sharpen Your Tactics! gives no verbal explanations of anything. This silence diminishes the value of the exercises. Many times I could not understand why the tactic worked until I set it up on Fritz and played through some side variations. This takes time and effort and should have been included in the price of the book.

The best thing about Sharpen Your Tactics! is its selections: these examples are remarkably similar to what we see in tournament games. This makes it different from Reinfeld, for example, who gives many "beginner positions" where one side has all his pieces developed and the other side has made only pawn moves, producing at best a patzer's wizardry useful only against the neighbor who learned how the pieces move last Tuesday. Most of the positions in Sharpen Your Tactics! are from actual tournament games between titled players. The remaining positions are well-selected studies that have obvious practical application.

Furthermore, the progression of problems is extraordinarily well thought-out. With helpful sequencing, the exercises steadily deepen your handling of the pieces, as you learn step-by-step how knights on outpost squares so easily generate forks, how rooks on the seventh rank threaten everything, how queens become monsters when they are centralized, and even how tactics help you win a variety of practical endgames. When you do such a fine sequence of problems, you feel as if you are not simply learning tactics but actually taking a chess course.

In light of how similar the selections are to the Convekta programs, one wonders if they are both borrowed from some standard work available in Russian. Although the problems have no labels by topic, you can deduce a series of topics: near the beginning you go through winning a queen, then winning a rook, winning a knight, winning a bishop, and finally winning a pawn. Then you go through knight checkmates, bishop checkmates, rook checkmates, queen checkmates, and pawn checkmates. Next you get a set of drawing combinations. Then you get a series of the best combinations of each year starting from about 1860 and continuing to the late twentieth century. Then you get a number of attacks on the uncastled king, then attacks on the queenside castled position, then attacks on the kingside castled position. The book concludes with many problems where you sacrifice material to destroy the pawn protection around the enemy king and deliver checkmate.

That same progression of topics, with many of the same positions, appears in the Convekta programs Chess Tactics for Beginners, Chess Tactics for Intermediate Players, Chess Tactics Art 3.0. Yet in Sharpen Your Tactics! these topics go unlabeled, perhaps because it is cheaper to produce the book that way. With its poor binding, its unchecked solutions, its cheap paper, etc., this book virtually screams out, "We made it on the cheap!"

In sum, Sharpen Your Tactics! has outstanding selections, but nothing is explained, the pages fall out of the book, the diagrams are unclear, the paper is cheap, the themes are unlabeled, and about 10% of the "solutions" are wrong.

To judge Sharpen Your Tactics! in perspective, we might compare it to perhaps the best tactics exercise book available in English: NUNN'S PUZZLE BOOK from Gambit, the only chess publisher run entirely by Grandmasters. It also has good selections, but every solution is clearly explained, its binding is strong and attractive, its paper is high-quality, its print and diagrams are crystal-clear, and its solutions are computer-checked. Nunn's Puzzle Book sets a high standard that Sharpen Your Tactics! fails to meet.

So may we respectfully suggest a revised edition of Sharpen Your Tactics! Let us see computer-checked solutions, a strong and attractive binding, higher-quality paper, clearer print and diagrams, and explanations of the solutions. These welcome improvements would bring Sharpen Your Tactics! up to standard, making it a truly superb tactics exercise book.