Patzer's review

The term 'average chess player' comes up every now and again. But what does that even mean? I am sure that every person who has ever used that kind of term will have different interpretations of what it means. So I figured I would take a look at some statistics from the official FIDE rating list. The official rating lists can be downloaded from the FIDE website . One problem, however, is that there are almost 350,000 players on the rating list, which makes the files so big that they are rather difficult to handle. But with some spreadsheet magic, I was able to extract the information. The diagram below shows the rating distribution of all players on the official rating list. The diagram simply shows the number of players with a certain rating. I have used a quite wide range (100 points) for each category, so the numbers will indicate the number of players with a rating between the indicated number and 100 points higher. For instance, the number at the peak (rating = 1700) i...

Have you ever played Match the masters on Chessmaster? It is a training mode that requests you to guess the moves from various master games. I played this many years ago. And while cleaning up old stuff from the chess club storage, I came across a book that is based on the same idea. So I was of course intrigued to take a closer look. Why don't you join me in doing so? What can you expect from this book? How good is your chess? first came out in 1957. The version I have read is a reprint from 1976, but apparently nothing has been changed before the 'new' release. If you have ever played Match the masters on your computer, you will know exactly what this book is about. The obvious difference is of course that the book is not interactive. There are eight sections in the book: (I) Centre control, (II) Superior development, (III) Positional play, (IV) Attacking play, (V) The art of defence, (VI) Combinations, (VII) Constriction technique and (VIII) The ending. ...

One of the finest chess books ever written. Those are tall words from the back cover of this classic book. But The art of attack in chess is one of those books that keep popping up in lists of best chess books. It is highly regarded by many players and trainers, so the initial statement is probably not all wrong. This is a book that has been on my reading list for several years, but it has taken some time for me to actually pick it up. I've been curious about what the hype is all about, and now that I've finally found out for myself, I am ready to share that insight with you. So let's dive in! What can you expect from this book? Before we begin, let me just get one detail out of the way. One thing that struck me when I picked up the book is the title, which seems to be missing a "the". When reading about the book online, it is referred to both with and without "the". When I looked up the original book (this one is a revised edition, edited by Joh...