"Practical and concise, whether you're a student looking to improve, or a rusty highly-rated player in need of a little basic exercise" - Sean Gonsalves, www.chesscafe.com
The advice frequently given to chess-players eager to improve their results is straightforward: study tactics! But there is often little useful guidance as to how this is best done. By solving puzzle positions? Or endgame studies? By dissecting the games of great tacticians? Few books present a structured approach to tactics, so this book fills a valuable niche in the ambitious player's library. The authors present each major tactical theme in turn, explaining how it works and providing inspiring examples. They then explain how you can spot the idea in your own games and use it to your advantage. You immediately get a chance to put your knowledge to the test, as there are challenging exercises throughout the whole book, with detailed solutions. The second part of the book offers more advanced material, and takes us inside the professional's tactics laboratory. Here we see how tactical themes are combined, and employed to achieve strategic goals. We are also shown how grandmasters spot the targets for their breathtaking combinations, which we thus come to see not as sheer witchcraft, but as the product of disciplined thought and training.
"Plenty of books have been written about chess tactics but this one is really different." - Martin Eden, soloscacchi.altervista.org
Bulgarian grandmaster Dejan Bojkov is an extremely active player and writer on chess, whose reports appear on Chessbase.com and in "Chess Today", among many others. Vladimir Georgiev is also a grandmaster from Bulgaria, who now plays for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - he has won the national championship of both countries. He is the trainer of former Women's World Champion Antoaneta Stefanova.
"The two Bulgarians spend the first part of the book explaining and delineating the elements of tactics (pin, deflection, decoy, discovered attack, etc.) and then move on to some more advanced tactical themes and then top the book off with 40 pages of exercises to reinforce what has been learnt." - John Saunders, British Chess Magazine
"Not just a book on standard tactical themes ... the authors also show combinations that can arise in any game situation" - Antti Parkkinen, Suomen Shakki
"The authors give many practical examples to illustrate their points most of which will likely be unfamiliar to the reader as the majority are either from Bojkov's practice (the first part of the book) or drawn from recent practice - this is definitely not a case of the same old examples being recycled." - IM John Donaldson, USA Team Captain