Tactics time : 1001 chess tactics from the games of everyday chess players PDF
Preview Tactics time : 1001 chess tactics from the games of everyday chess players
Tactics Time 1001 CHESS TACTICS from the Games of Everyday Chess Players By Tim Brennan and Anthea Carson http://tacticstime.com Version 1.00 October, 2012 This book is dedicated to YOU, the chess player seeking improvement in your game, wanting to win more games, and take your rating to the next level! Tim Brennan is the creator of Tactics Time, which started off as a column in the quarterly Colorado Chess Informant Magazine. Tactics Time has grown into a blog, free e-mail newsletter, and now a Kindle eBook! The focus has always been on real tactics from real player games, which Tim believes are the most instructive and useful types of tactics to study. http://twitter.com/tacticstime http://facebook.com/tacticstime [email protected] Anthea Carson is an active USCF tournament chess player, author, blogger, chess teacher, and mom. She is co-author of the children’s chess book “How to Play Chess like an Animal”, and various thrillers, such as “The Dark Lake”. http://twitter.com/chessanimal When Tim Brennan asked me to help him pick the best puzzles from his collection of thousands and thousands of tactics problems from real games I didn't realize how much I was going to gain from the experience. Tim was the editor of the Colorado Informant for several years, and has written the column called “Tactics Time” for even longer. I noticed how his rating soared after his time editing those tactics articles, and now I can see why. It's not just doing puzzles. This is better, because the games are real. This makes a huge difference. Everyone knows that the way to improve at chess is to do tactics puzzles, or if they don’t know, they should. Tactics are the essence of chess. I have memorized openings, spending hours learning variation after variation only to miss a simple two move tactic late in the game. How frustrating is that? I’ve also looked at my share of tactics books. Most tactics books have skewers and forks and discovery attacks and after a while you become familiar with the patterns. These are helpful books. What I like about the tactics puzzles in Tactics Time is that the tactics you encounter are messy, don’t look comfortable, aren’t always visually pleasing. The typical tactics book has puzzles with nice, neat tidy solutions but these are almost never what tactics look like in real games. When you are used to looking at the puzzles in most books, you are expecting tactics to look a certain way. This can cause you to miss the ones that appear in real play. The tactics that show up in a game evolve out of the position. If you want to see the actual game that the tactic came from, which can be interesting too, those are also available in the database sold at http://www.tacticstime.com. These puzzles come from games by average tournament or club players. In an average game, players make mistakes all the time. The mistakes can range from outright blunders to subtle positional errors that can be exploited if you know what you’re looking for. A tactic is often there in a position where nothing looks wrong at all. While I was looking through the puzzle collection to pick the best one I saw positions that looked like the ones I see when I play tournaments. Since I’m an average player, I am not typically playing a GM or even a master. It is less likely to encounter positions that leave open tactical opportunities in games with player of that strength, but the games of average players are like tactical goldmines. These puzzles will train you to look for tactics in games where you might otherwise have played your moves on autopilot. I found myself seeing tactics I would not otherwise have seen after working on Tactics Time. I was amazed how many mistakes players at the 1500 to 1800 level make, and even many rated 1800 and above. Studying these puzzles is something I highly recommend. I would advise looking at them for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. Do that and see what the
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