Patzer's review

I suck at positional evaluation! Countless times, I have played a game in which I felt I was better only to have my ego stripped away by Stockfish. So when the book Evaluate like a Grandmaster  was announced, I immediately knew I had to read it. And I recommend that you do the same. Read on to see why. If you like these reviews, please consider supporting my work. Visit my patreon page for details. Become a Patron! What can you expect from this book? As the title suggests, Evaluate lika a Grandmaster  is a book entirely devoted to positional evaluation. It is mainly a puzzle book in which your task is to evaluate the diagram positions. There aren't many books on positional evaluation, which makes this very interesting.  The book has a few introductory chapters on how the book is structured and why positional evaluation is important. But the meat of the book is in the problem section. The problems are grouped into four categories, and each of them have their own chapters. Eva

Which is the best chess book ever? As a chess community, we repeatedly ask this kind of question, for various categories. And one of those categories is, of course, tactics. So which is the best tactics book ever? The answer to this question depends on the playing strength of the reader. But if we consider the fact that the majority of chess players are in the middle of the bell curve, the best books should logically be among the ones written for an intermediate audience. With that said, this might be the best tactics book ever written. A bold statement, perhaps. Read on to find out why I recommend this book. If you like these reviews, please consider supporting my work. Visit my patreon page for details. Become a Patron! What can you expect from this book? Chess tactics from scratch was originally published as Understanding Chess Tactics  – as indicated by the book's subtitle. This book is actually what inspired the now famous "woodpecker method". In his book Pu

Modern Chess is too much concerned with things like Pawn structure. Forget it, Checkmate ends the game. This statement by Nigel Short may trigger different reactions in the chess experts of the world. Some may argue that it oversimplifies the game, since it is not possible to play for checkmate in all positions. On the other hand, it quite correctly pinpoints a major problem for beginning players in that they simply don't know how to end the game. I've seen this in our kids classes at my local club. The kids can be up a ton of material, but they don't know how to checkmate their opponent. A common piece of advice served to beginners is "do a lot of tactics". And I agree that this is a good idea. But I think we should expand on that advice and suggest that beginners (and stronger players) "do a lot of checkmates". And what better way to do this than go through a checkmate puzzle book? If you like these reviews, please consider supporting my work. Visi

A few months ago, I was planning an endgame course at my local club. I based my course almost entirely on Silman's endgame course , but I wanted to include a bishop+knight mate, which Silman doesn't cover. And accidentally, I stumbled across a book which does  cover this endgame. So I decided to take a closer look at the rest of it as well. What I found out is that the book has many other interesting topics, but I have some quibbles about the title. Read on to see why.   If you like these reviews, please consider supporting my work. Visit my patreon page for details. Become a Patron! What can you expect from this book? The tactics bible  is not your typical tactics book. Most tactics books are very heavy on puzzles, and only contain short descriptions of tactical themes. This book is the diametrical opposite. There are no traditional puzzles in the book. Instead, the book puts emphasis on examples and explanations. In the first two chapters, Grivas presents 133 examples

I recently found a book that I once had intended to write myself. A few years ago I started exploring the world of memory techniques or mnemonics , and was curious about how this could be applied to chess. I experimented with a method to memorize chess openings, and tried it in a few games. It was surprisingly effective, and it was like having an opening book with me during the game. It almost felt like cheating. This led me to the idea of writing something to present my method to the world, but for various reasons, I never finished the project. So when I stumbled upon the book The Chess Memory Palace , I felt that this was a book I needed to read. And having done so, I think it's a book that you should read too. Read on to find out why. If you like these reviews, please consider supporting my work. Visit my patreon page for details. Become a Patron! What can you expect from this book? Now, you may be a bit skeptical about the relevance of this kind of method in chess. But

Many years ago, I concluded that I needed to work on my endgames. After searching the Internet for a while and reading various chess forums, I came to the conclusion that Silman's endgame book was the one for me. I got the book and worked through the chapters up to my level (as suggested) and then put the book away. Somewhere around last year, I concluded that I had forgotten many of the things I had learned from the book, so I decided to pick it up again. Only, I didn't actually pick it up again. So when we were planning activities this semester at our local chess club, I volunteered to hold a three part lecture on basic endgames. This was a way for me (a bit like this blog) to put some outside accountability on myself while also giving back to our local chess community. So a few weeks ago, I actually  picked up the book. Two days later, I found out that Jeremy Silman had passed away, and Noël Studer had also written about this book in his newsletter. So to my mind, this was a