You vs Bobby Fischer

You need to improve your tactical vision but how ... ? I find that the best exercise is to find some really complicated tactical positions and try and make some sense of them. This exercise book provides the perfect opportunity to study some really tricky, double edged positions! I would advise spending a maximum of 20 minutes on each position - the idea is to provide an initial evaluation of the position followed by analysis of the 4 candidate moves provided. It's worth noting that there might be more than one correct answer - you may be correct in more than one case - but you have to show how you arrived at your conclusion. It's a little like a maths exam at school, you may have arrrived at the wrong answer but if your technique and accompanying thought process was sound and you showed how you arrived at your answer then you are still awarded some marks. Khmelnitsky has devised a very novel and clever way of weighting the model answers. He awards marks according to a concensus of opinion of Grandmasters and strong players. I have found it particularly useful to see how I compared with the wider concensus - in some cases I found the correct answer and scored 1 point and a win, in others my reasoning was slightly flawed and I was only awarded half a point and a draw. In a few cases I scored 0 ... At the end of the book I can check my ELO rating based on my score in the tests.

This book is well worth it for achieving better calculation skills and improved tactical vision. Recommended for budding juniors and intermediate club players.


You vs Bobby Fischer

Who wants to improve their chess tactics?

If the answer is yes, then I have just the thing for you -

Chess Exam and Training Guide: Tactics by Igor Khmelnitsky - International Chess Master

This is a training resource written with the same ideas in mind as Ray Cheng's 600 Practical Chess Exercises ... You need to look at both the tactics for and against you to be sure that the tactic you 'think' you have is sound.

You are presented with 60 tactics problems. After completing several of these and keeping your score you are given an interim report (a bit like at school!) My tactics have consistently been around 1700-1750, but I would really like to improve on this!

On the whole - I feel I am improving - why? - because I am getting into the habit of assessing ALL candidate moves and looking at as many continuations for BOTH sides. I have experienced many 'Eureka' moments in doing this - e.g. when I was just about to discard a tactical idea because "it looked wrong" - I forced/trained myself to look a little further each time - and sure enough - the reasons/evidence popped out showing me that I COULD play the tactic afterall - the tactic was sound in fact!!

The same is true of the tactics you DON'T want to discard because they "look right" ! - I trained myself to look a little further and found out that with scrutiny, the tactic that originally looked great turned out to be completely unsound !!

This technique, I have found can be learnt and is down to self discipline and habit as much as anything ... I recommend this book to help you train!


Chess Exam - Igor Khmelnitsky