Patzer's review

Have you ever missed a tactic in your games? Of course you have. We all have. Wouldn't it be good if someone wrote a book that could help you get better at spotting tactics? Well, there is such a book. Actually, there are many such books. And one example is Tune your chess tactics antenna by Emmanuel Neiman. I'd like to warn sensitive readers, as this review may contain sarcasm. You have been warned. What can you expect from this book? As you probably know, there are hundreds and hundreds of tactics books out there, and most of them are pretty similar. Usually, a tactics book is divided into themes (pins, forks, skewers etc.), and the author explains each theme and then there are a bunch of puzzles for you to solve. Sound familiar? In Tune your chess tactics antenna , you will find a similar component, but that is not all. In the first part of the book, the author presents seven signals  that a tactic might be present. Weak king position Unprotected piece(s) Alig...

In this round, I was paired up against a quite strong player, so I didn't have high expectations. I had even forgot about the game until about two hours before, and had very little time to prepare. Between feeding the children and getting them to bed, I took a brief look at a few of my opponent's games. I found that he liked to play the French, so 1. e4 was out the window. Against 1. d4, he seems to like the English defense - an opening against which I have some experience. I refreshed my memory about the opening, and especially the variation in which black keeps his knight on g8 and plays Be7-f6. And what do you know? My opponent played this very line. The first 9 moves were pure preparation from my side. After that, I was on my own. The game was quite even up to the point where I decided to push my e-pawn and realized that I had missed one of my opponent's resources, and he won the pawn by removing a defender. However, it cost him the bishop pair, so it wasn't all...