Zlotnik's Treasure Trove

En innholdsrik, allsidig, kompetent og spennende ny treningsbok for "amatører med rating fra 1600 til 2200". Synes å være en liten gullgruve. Forfatteren gjennomgår også noen hele partier, i tillegg til mange nyttige oppgaver.

Et lite utdrag fra forordet:

The chess world is very varied and interesting because of the people represented in it. Although quite a lot is known about famous professional players, both men and women, information about amateur players hardly appears at all in chess magazines and books. It is for precisely this reason that I decided to begin this book with a chapter comparing these two categories of chess lovers and even include games played by amateurs in every chapter. Now I am going to comment briefly on the content of the remaining seven chapters of this book.

The essence of the second chapter is a model for choosing chess moves, which is based, on the one hand, on the usual division of chess content into two parts: tactics and positional play, and on the other hand, on the speed of thinking: fast and slow. It was a pleasure for me to encounter the book by Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, despite his being a psychologist, because of his contribution to the topic of decision-making in the financial sector. The title of his book, translated into several languages, is very striking: Thinking, Fast and Slow.

... the theme of the fourth chapter, on positional play, it is worth recalling the famous French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who claimed not to have an exceptional memory, nor to be a particularly good calculator, and therefore probably a bad chess player (!?). Poincaré attributed his scientific successes to his innate ‘filter’, which allowed him to search only where there was something worthy of investigation. It can be supposed that a player’s ‘positional sense’ is of a similar nature to the aforementioned filter. And in order to improve that filter we must study not only the games of great players but also various positional themes in relation to what has taken place in our own games. And in this chapter, among other things, one of the themes of positional play is discussed: exchanging bishop for knight

Innholdsfortegnelsen:

007 Preface

011 Chapter 1) Professionals and amateurs

024 Chapter 2) Factors which determine success in chess

044 Chapter 3) Training in tactical play

076 Chapter 4) Training in positional play

106 Chapter 5) Creativity in chess

129 Chapter 6) Maximum resistance in practical situations

162 Chapter 7) Studying the opening

184 Chapter 8) Studying the endgame

205 Chapter 9) Solutions to exercises

243 Index of names

247 Bibliography

248 Explanation of symbols