- ISBN13: 9781901983982
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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.
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This book give numerous tactical themes and plenty of exercises. Very highly recommended.
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5
John Nunn’s style is one of those we can name moralizing and lecturing. It’s helpful in the way that it makes a man think of his / her every move. There’s a plan of the game, tactics, strategy, and your personal goal as to the game. The book provides you with lots of information about the opening, middle game and endspiel routine, but the most important is how YOU would like to move in this or that position. You and the book become a union, which then helps you to escape the possible blunders.
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5
I am a fairly new player at chess, and thought that it would be a good idea to buy this book to move beyond the point of simply knowing how to play. I was right. John Nunn explains each of the 13 lessons with detail and many, many examples. These lessons are (1) Fork (2) Discovered Attack (3) Pin (4) Skewer (5) Deflection (6) Trapped Piece (7) Removing the Guard (8) Opening and Closing Lines (9) Back-Rank Mate (10) Pawn Promotion (11) In-Between Moves (12) Defensive Tactics (13) Combinations. He also has two preliminary chapters called Introduction, and Prerequisites and Symbols. He has three sections after the 13 lessons too: Miscellaneous Exercises, Solutions, and Index of Players. Allow me to quote from his introduction: “The structure of each chapter is the same; there is a discussion of the key ideas, with examples, and then there is a set of exercises for the reader to solve. Within each chapter, the exercises are of graduated difficulty, starting with very simple examples and working on to more complex cases…The positions are from real games and all except one are from recent (since 1990) play.” Nunn also points out that the purpose of this book is not to help you win chess games directly, but to provide you with the tactics to gain a material advantage in order to increase your odds of winning. I realize that after this, I still have work to do. I must also study chess openings, chess endgame, and the chess thought process in addition to tactics in order to optimize my game. I will highly consider purchasing a book of Nunn’s if he offers books on any of those three topics. As you can see, this is more than just a book. It is a practical workbook. You do not just read it; you are tactically solving problems in every chapter. Highly recommended for any player looking to form or hone his/her skills. 5 stars!
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5
This book is one of the first chess books I bought for my son. He liked it instantly from the first pages he read, and he liked John Nunn’s style very much, so I bough him more books by John Nunn.
However this book is only for beginners, so you better check you local library instead of buying it. But if you want to buy a book on tactics, I would recommend it.
Amazon User Rating: 4 / 5
I’m around 1600 and I can tell you this book (together with another one – read on) helped me a lot to improve my tactical (and perhaps also combinative) vision. I can feel it during the games. The themes just pop up immediately, like they never did in the past. The way things look now, I’ll be around 1700+ in a year from now. At least I hope so.
A good thing about this book, that as afar as I know is an attribute other books don’t have, is that all the exercises and examples are real games situations. I mean real games that actually happened. What this means is that you will have to find the main variation of each exercise, but you will also need to find other possible continuations for the rival player, for many times this is actually how the game proceeded. So bear this in mind when solving the exercises. I guess that in the beginning you will only note the main variations, but as you go further in the book you will have more awareness to the other possibilities.
But you have to put in some effort. Read it all and solve all the exercises. After a month or two, go over *all of it* again. This is what I did, and after the second time I began to feel the improvement.
After that (or during that, for the sake of variety), grab Susan Polgar’s “Chess Tactics for Champions”. It contains many more exercises than Nunn’s book, albeit of much less quality. Many of Susan’s exercises are somewhat sterile, in the sense that they don’t really simulate the real life positions that you can reach during a game. But I would still recommend her book anyway. Real games or not, going over the exercises simply sharpens your tactical vision.
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5