Sharpen Your Tactics: 1125 Brilliant Sacrifices, Combinations, and Studies

by Boris Archangelsky and Anatoly Lein

SHARPEN YOUR TACTICS is a chess tactics training book and is for every class of chess player. The examples are rated by difficulty and the problems gradually become more difficult as you move through... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880673134
• ISBN13: 9781880673133
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Hays Publishing
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

This book will help you win more games!

Unless you are a tactics guru, this book is pretty much a gaurentee to help out with your game. My rating plateaued around 1650 for a while and I Eventually took a week and went through the first 500 puzzles in this book (This may sound like a lot, but depending on your strength of play, the first couple hundred puzzles can be very quick to go through). I did this the week before a tournament I was playing in and I found myself almost searching exclusively for tactics in the games, and not paying as much attention to position. It payed off nicely! Within less than a year my rating jumped from 1650 to 1850+. Also I found that my wins became a lot more exciting instead of the "grind it out" and outplay them in the endgame method. As far as negatives about this book, I can't say that there are any. Remember, this is a puzzle book, puzzle after puzzle after puzzle, with the solutions in the back. If there is any doubt in your mind that you may need to work on your tactics, I highly recommend this book.

My favorite collection of tactical problems

I've had this book a little over a month now and am about 20% of the way through. The book is nothing but problems, 1125 in all, with clear diagrams and highly accurate solutions in algebraic notation. The goal of the book is to build up your recognition of tactical patterns. To achieve this, the problems are annotated not by motif, but by difficulty. The goal is to work through all the problems relatively quickly. If you get stuck, look up the answer and move on. In general the problems progress in difficulty, but the patterns built up working on the earlier problems help solve the harder ones later. Marking by difficulty allows one to decide when to "give up" and look at the solution, unlike the Reinfeld book for example, where you never know if you are simply being blind, or you've hit one of the really hard problems. This book has no hints...no "spot the Pin", no "White has just opened the position, why was this a mistake?". So for general practice it is a little more realistic. This book does NOT explain the motifs. If you want that, try Nunn's "Learn Chess Tactics" or one of the similar books by Polgar, Littlewood etc. These books are also better if you find you have a weakness in a particular motif and want to practice just that one (my favorite here, is Muller's "ChessCafe Puzzle Book"). The key is, though they are not labelled as such, the problems are organized by motif and pattern. As you move through the problems you will come across a series of closely related positions. For example, you might get 10 back rank mates in a row, then 10 knight forks. I often find I will hit the first of these, struggle a bit (though usually the first in a series is one of the easier ones), then the second one is quicker because the pattern is starting to establish itself, and so on. So the book really does contain "hints", but my experience is that discovering the pattern yourself cements it more than having it explained and then exercising a series of examples. For me at least, this approach seems to work better than that in the classic Reinfeld books, and "Sharpen Your Tactics" has replaced them at my bedside.

"Sharpen Your Tactics" delivers what it promises

I've had this book for about six months now and finally felt compelled to write an online review - mainly because of the positive impact it has had on my play. In researching which tactics book was right for me, I discovered that almost all books in this class can be grouped into one of two categories: 1) books with puzzles presented by theme - usually with a description of the theme preceding the similarly grouped puzzles or... 2) books with puzzles presented in a random fashion - sometimes grouped by difficulty, but not always. For beginners, the first category book is appropriate, since the beginner may need an introduction to the family of tactical themes such as pins, skewers, double-attacks, promotion threats, etc. There are many books in this category, one good one being "Winning Chess Tactics" by Seirawan. I found less books in the second category, but Lein and Archangelsky's book must fall near the top (I say near the top not because of a shortcoming in the book but rather because I have not thoroughly examined all of the other tactics books). After a brief introduction, the reader is given 1125 tactical puzzles presented in general increasing difficulty. The first ~600 puzzles tend to be easy with a few difficult ones mixed in while the remaining puzzles shift the balance - mostly difficult with a few easy ones. Six puzzles occupy each page and accompanying each puzzle is difficulty rating (1-4 stars with 4 being the most difficult), an indicator as to which side is to move, and an assessment of the final position (+-, -+, =). In most cases, the puzzles are taken from real games, and the author provides the player's names and tournament name along with the solution. This is a nice touch, and I found it enjoyable to solve a puzzle and then find out that the original "author" of the brilliancy was a player whom I admire. A few puzzles are of a drawing theme, a welcome addition which can have direct application to real play. Aesthetically speaking, the book is also a success. It is comfortably sized, well-bound, and the puzzles are clear and well spaced. After working with this book for a few months I not only saw a marked increase in my ability to quickly spot tactics in my games but also my ability to visualize and calculate positions had been improved. I believe that this is what the authors meant by "Sharpen Your Tactics" - sharpen your ability to both see tactics in a position and to calculate them out to a favorable end.

Phenominally better than the Reinfeld book

This book is spectacular. It doesn't just throw you in head first as the Reinfeld book does. It actually teaches you thematic combinations and how to look for them. In a deceptively simple way, this book walks you through foundational concepts and later on in to very sophisticated applications of it. The secret to tactics training isn't that you spend hours and hours and then you finally figure out that one puzzle. You do loads and loads of EASY diagrams that have repetitive tactical themes until you begin seeing them in your sleep. Suddenly your attacking prowess doubles. You see mates that you never saw before. You get the patterns, you understand what it LOOKS like. And then you begin to apply multiple patterns in combination. And that's the beginning of high level chess. This book does exactly that. Not only that, but you will see some amazingly simple combinations that will literally take your breath away: ridiculous combinations from Tal for example (where he sacks three heavy pieces and then mates with a pawn). This is easily the best tactics book I've purchased (among Winning Chess, Reinfeld's, and Lev Alburt [though I like the Lev Ablurt book too]). It is certainly usable for all but very very beginner. If you are ranked anywhere above 1100 then this book is for you.

Great tactics - improvements of 1001 tactics format

I really liked the format of this book. I love tactics books. The kind with no text in them, and page after page of nothing but chess diagrams. The kind that people on an airplane look at you funny when you are "reading" them.This book is very similar to the other tactics books out there, but with some improvements that I think are nice. One improvement is that the tactics are labeled with a * symbol to show how difficult the problem is. The more stars the harder it is. This is a nice break from the Reinfeld books which will have a mate in one followed by a mate in ten, and you have no idea beforehand how hard the problem is going to be. I personally like to have some idea of what I am getting into.Another nice feature is that the answers show where the game came from. I think that this is a nice touch, and gives credit to the people that actually played the game. A lot of books don't do this, and you see puzzles where you know where the game came from - "Oh yeah this is the opera box game", etc, but the author gives no credit where it is due.I also like that the answers are in algebraic notation, as opposed to descriptive ("e4" versus "pawn to king 4"). Reinfeld's books still have the old school style. One note is that the notation is not really standard. Bxe3 would be Be3, which is a little odd. I got confused at least once when looking up an answer and did not see the "x". I assumed I had the wrong answer when I didn't. But once you know this is the format they use, you can adjust. But it would be nice to see the standard used in the first place.Overall great tactics book. If you like doing tactics til your eyes bleed, and want something that could be used as part of a "400 points in 400 days" type of study program, this is a good one to add to your collection.