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Chess tactics for champions

Chess is 99% tactics. At least, that’s what some people say. Whether that is correct or not does not really matter, because either way you slice it, tactics is a central aspect of chess. Especially at the patzer level, games are often decided by a missed tactic. Working through a tactics book can extend your chess vocabulary and can be great for establishing and reinforcing patterns until they become a part of your chess intuition. So for a chess player, tactics training is like going to the gym.

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What can you expect from this book?

As many readers probably know, Susan Polgar was born in Hungary and is currently living in the USA. Susan and her younger sisters Judit and Zsofia were all famously trained by their father László Polgár as an educational experiment as kids to become chess prodigies. And, the experiment was a success. Susan is the former women’s world chess champion, and was the third woman to gain the Grandmaster (GM) title. Her sisters also achieved great results, such as 'the sacking of rome’ (Zsofia) and reaching the World top 10 (Judit). So their parents must have done something right. 

Chess Tactics for Champions is written by GM Susan Polgar and her husband FM Paul Troung. It is a tactics book with a quite traditional structure; just as most tactics books, it is structured by tactical themes, such as forks, pins, skewers etc (see below). The cover design is very professional with nice fonts and pretty colors, so it looks good on the book shelf. 

The book consists of 22 chapters: 
  1. Forks and double threats
  2. Pins
  3. Deflection
  4. Discoveries
  5. Double check
  6. Skewers
  7. Trapping pieces
  8. Decoys
  9. Intermediate moves
  10. Pawn promotion
  11. The Back-Rank problem
  12. Destroying the castled king’s defences
  13. King chase
  14. Mixed checkmates in two moves
  15. Mixed checkmates in three moves
  16. Mixed checkmates in four moves
  17. Game saving combinations
  18. Perpetual check
  19. Stalemate
  20. Traps and Counter-Traps
  21. Sibling Positions
  22. Famous Combinations 
As you can see from the list above, the first 11 chapters present various tactical themes, and the remaining chapters illustrate how these can be applied in various situations. Most chapters contain 25 problems, some only 20 and the first has 50 problems. Each chapter is concluded by a presentation of solutions to the puzzles. 

There are only three puzzles per page with a lot of white space on the pages. There are no hints, just the description white/black to move. In the beginning of the chapter the tactical theme is explained with some examples. I really liked that format. 

The foreword is written by former world champion Anatoly Karpov and he states that the book is great for recognizing patterns, and I agree (who am I to argue against Karpov?). The way I read it was influenced by the woodpecker method described in Axel Smiths Pump up your rating, and later in the book The Woodpecker Method. In Pump up your rating, Smith writes about how Hans Tikkanen (IM at the time) improved a lot by solving tactics in cycles using a thematic book. My system of reading was rereading every chapter seven times before beginning the next chapter and I did not check the solution if I felt I had it right. I did not use a clock, but the time I used solving the exercises decreased tremendously during each time. 

When I started reading this book I had read some chess books, played a lot of games and was familiar with tactics patterns like forks, skewers and so on, but I had never studied tactics by themes in a structured way. Studying this book improved my tactics and pattern recognition a lot and I think it made it possible for me to play bullet.

Polgar and Troung have also written a similar book A World Champion's Guide to Chess which is a bit easier and maybe a better book if you are completely new to chess, I unfortunately read it after reading this one. 

Who should read this book? 

I really enjoyed the book and would recommend it to intermediate players that want to work on their tactical awareness and to beginners to get the vocabulary on the most important tactical patterns, which I think is important to know what is happening on the board.

About this book

Author:Susan Polgar and Paul Truong
Title:Chess tactics for champions
Type of book:Tactics
Level:Intermediate

Guest review by Boll.
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Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 11, 2022 at 12:41 PM

    Thanks for your review. I found this book to be the best basic tactics recognition book. I had done half of Masseti and Messa's 1001 chess exercises for beginners ( 90 percent correct average solving time 3-8 mins) before doing this book and what I realized was that book improved my visualization and calculation a lot. However, the problem with that book was none of the puzzles were basic patterns. When i look at any position in chess tactics for Champions the positions screams TACTICS! but masseti's books were really harder to find tactics. If i had those positions OTB, I would not stop to look actively for tactics a lot of the times.

    Masseti's books improved my analysing ability and accuracy but not my speed at all. This is because every puzzle had almost no obvious tactics and I had to crunch to find the answer.

    When i started chess tactics for Champions i was solving all problems in the first 5 chapters under 30 seconds. Some even 10 seconds. At first I thought I wasn't gaining anything but then when i repeated the book, I gained a lot of benefits from it. I felt like it sealed patterns into my mind so that things would jump out at me in future.

    That means although I wasn't finding the problems difficult( probably fair game for 1200) I appreciated this book the most. I will keep this book and do it as basic warm up for many many years to come. The Masseti Book I won't repeat because I could gain the same calculation exercises from chess tempo

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