Product Description

This book teaches basic tactical ideas such as the fork, pin, and discovered attack, and introduces general ideas such as elimination, immobilization and compulsion. A basic knowledge of simple tactics will enable a novice to start winning games, by giving checkmate or capturing material. As the player progresses, his tactical arsenal will broaden, and he will start to play sacrifices and combinations, and develop a deeper understanding of the game. Players who fail to study tactics systematically tend to suffer from tactical blind-spots that plague them throughout their playing career, and thus they fail to realize their full potential.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71155 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781901983982
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
John Nunn is a grandmaster from England. He has won four individual gold medals and three team silver medals at Chess Olympiads. He is arguably the most highly acclaimed chess writer in the world - he has twice won the prestigious British Chess Federation Book of the Year Award. In 2004 he won the World Chess Solving Championship, and repeated the feat in October 2007 with a record winning score of 89/90. He has written numerous books for Gambit, including Learn Chess Tactics and the best-selling Understanding Chess Move by Move.

Customer Reviews

BEST chess tactics book of it's type for the non-beginner.
"Learn Chess Tactics" is a great first tactics book for someone who has learned to play chess to get.
Each chess tactic is broken down by it's type. The name is given and what the tactic is is explained. There are then examples to work on making the book fun. This is one of three types of books on tactics. This being more of an introduction with some examples. Then there are workbooks that contain hundreds of tactics puzzles to try and solve and then there are books that cover chess traps that help with tactics in the opening. Getting a variety of tactics books will be one of the best ways to improve the part of your knowledge on chess that will make you a better player.

Tactics are the lightning of chess
It is a truism that most chess games are won through tactics, whether those tactics occur on the board or in the notes.

And yet what player hasn't had this experience: you have entered upon what you believe is the final stage of a long and skillfully played game of chess. Not only have you handled the opening well, gaining an advantage, but you have nursed this advantage to the point where victory is surely in reach. You sit back in your chair, you smile, and as you start to consider how you might celebrate this victory later on... suddenly your queen is forked.

End of game.

Which is to say that tactics are both the wonder and the terror of chess. Long after we have forgotten our tournament results, how many of us can remember that game where, through a brilliant deflection, we won a rook? Or the rook we dropped through a discovered attack on our king? For many of us, our fondest and worst chess memories are these tactical blows.

It is these blows that fill the pages of John Nunn's book, Learn Chess Tactics, a work that is more than a puzzle book along the lines of Reinfeld's, 1,001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate or Wilson and Alberston's 303 Tricky Chess Tactics. These have their place and are fine as far as they go. My advice for the novice is -- start with Nunn.

In Learn Chess Tactics, each tactical idea has a chapter, and each chapter starts with a clear and incisive analysis of the tactical idea - something most other books on the subject ignore. Along the way, each idea is illustrated by recent tournament games, and then the chapter ends with a score of exercises. These become progressively harder to solve, and the solutions to some struck me as truly revelatory - a permanent addition to my chess knowledge.

Aside from the tactical challenge of such a work, the text is peppered with more general observations about its theme, some of them insightful. For example, Nunn asks on page 90, "How does one spot the winning [tactical] idea?" And answers, "Very often the key is to focus on a potential weakness, and see what is necessary to exploit it." It follows therefore that the ability to spot tactics is the ability to identify weak points in a position and to know how to turn these to your advantage. Elsewhere he says that "although study of familiar patterns will undoubtedly improve one's playing strength, it is important not to lose the ability to think independently." Much has been made lately of pattern-recognition in chess, but as Jonathan Rowson and others have stressed, it is not a cure-all. It cannot, for instance, take the place of an alert, inventive mind. But nothing can.

Almost any tactical puzzle book will help you think independently and to exploit weakness, and the two I mentioned earlier are good. What distinguishes Nunn's work, however, is his analysis of each tactical element, such as the pin, fork, and skewer. After explaining the basic mechanism of each, he shows us how complicated the mechanism can become in a real game, the many variations that can spring from each tactical theme. As Rowson and others have noted, chess is hard - and beautiful. Nunn's prose throughout is as clean and workmanlike as a Capablanca endgame.

Who is this book for? I've been playing chess for over thirty years and consider myself a solid, intermediate player. And though I could easily solve the first half of the exercises in each chapter, there were always a few in the second half that stumped me. Nunn wrote the book as a sort of primer on tactics, but don't let that fool you: it will challenge the non-beginner as well. At the very least, in its clear labeling and discussion of the basic tactical tools, it will provide the more advanced player a healthy refresher course on that part of the game that is, for many of us, the hardest to fully master.

The best advice I ever received as a new player was to make myself into "a tactical monster," and that's still good advice. As a new player set on moving up the ranks quickly, there is no surer path to victory than a good eye for the tactical stroke, and there are few books that discuss this theme more clearly than Nunn's.

All important themes explained
I own both this book and Understanding Chess Move by Move by the same author. I am absolutely in love with both books! My rating is over 1200 on the USCF scale, and I have found that these books provide first-rate instruction without talking down to the reader.
What I like about Learn Chess Tactics is how it explains all the most important tactical concepts at a level that is perfect for the intermediate level player like myself. I will outline some of these concepts here:
1 Fork
2 Discovered Attack
3 Pin
4 Skewer
5 Deflection
6 Trapped Piece
7 Removing the Guard
8 Opening and Closing Lines
9 Bank-Rank mate
10 Pawn Promotion
11 In-between Moves
12 Defensive Tactics
13 Combinations

Because John Nunn is a grandmaster he really understands these themes, and I like the way he is able to select the most relevant way to illustrate them. I especially like the section on Opening and Closing Lines, as I had never seen this idea covered before in a book.
I highly recommend this book if you are an intermediate level player who wants to improve.