The Big Book of Chess Tactics Hardcover – 2016 by Istvan Pongo (Author)

Hardcover: 800 pages
Publisher: Modern Chesspartner Publisher Ltd; 1st edition (2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9631266842
ISBN-13: 978-9631266849
Package Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.9 x 2 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,688,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=All+Queens+Chess

2000 combinations earn +200 Elo points. If you wish, you can read this book even without having a chess board at hand. The topics of the book:

Decisive material advantage: double attack, batteries, pins, pawn promotion, problems in cooperation, mate threat
Mate combination: the weakness of the back rank, the pawn structure of the king position, defensive pieces in the king position, king got stuck in the middle
Positional sacrifice

Istvan Pongo is best known in the US by his book Tactical Targets vol 1 and 2, cited in the bibliography of the la Maza’s book rapid Chess Improvement (2002). This time the author aims to deliver a comprehensive book on tactics on one volume as an improved version of the two books mentioned above. The book is almost eight hundred pages long (but it does not feel heavy), hard cover, printed in high quality paper, has a red and yellow built in page markers and the page binding is sturdy. In other words, this book is a pleasure to hold and work with. The pages have two diagrams at the top of the page and the answer below the diagram, so the reader can solve the puzzle and cover the answer with a piece of paper or just focus on the diagram and avoid looking down the page. This format saves time because the reader does not need to flip pages back and forth to find the answers the exercise pages have six diagram per page.

The book is conceived following three principles, First that all the combination comes from previous games (Tal’s statement on tactics “It is unlikely that a new original combination occurs in the present stage of advance chess”). Second, that to be successful at chess a player needs first to identify the a tactical opportunity and third, after the opportunity a.k.a tactical target is identified the player needs skill to checkmate his opponent, gain a decisive material advantage or save a lost position by perpetual check or stale mate. Additionally, the chess player needs a simple but important understanding of the types of balances in chess in order to carry out a successful tactical operation and understand chess better as a whole. The book has short remarks about the career of several chess masters and tactical tips which make the book more entertaining and less dry than the Encyclopedia of Chess Combinations.

Tactics are grouped around twenty three motifs and explained with almost two thousand examples with solutions. The first theme is the double attack, the easier topic to master and the one that delivers the most victories at the early stages of any chess trainees. The double attack is without doubt a heavy point scorer tool at all levels of chess, from beginners to seasoned grandmasters. Pongo’s experience as a teacher can be trace back to the way the examples are presented, from just “observe and find” to systematically force your opponent’s pieces to ‘be in the right squares”. At the end of this chapter and the rest of the book the reader will enjoy masterpieces of tactical ingenuity. The combinations are instructive and pose a good challenge to the ambitious chess player.

This is so far the best book on chess tactics I came across in many years for several reasons. First, the books follows a systematic approach following the intrinsic elements of the theme at hand, instead of presenting the subject matter, as a single generic topic like “pins” or forks. Second, the book is structure in a way that can be used to teach chess tactics at a different levels of chess development. The examples are pure joy to go over them and enjoy the creativity of chess players. Finally, the book is a very high quality product, a lot of attention to detail and build to last. Source :gainesvillechesstraining and amazon.com