Blitz Book Review: 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners
Blitz Book Review: 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners
One of many good basic chess tactics books, but a cut above due to sheer volume of puzzles.
Note: I am basing this review on the Chessable course format of the book, and there may be some differences between this and e-book or physical copies of the book, but I am very confident that these differences are rather small consider the nature of the book’s subject. YMMV.
1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners is a collection of tactics organized by theme. By “Beginners”, probably what is intended is the player making their first steps into their local club. If we are talking online chess ratings (I’ll be using chess.com’s ratings), I think these puzzles would be reasonably challenging for players rated 1000-1600. Below 1000, they represent a significant challenge. Above 1600 these are closer to being a snack or warm-up.
The introduction to the book summarizes the importance of tactics:
By far and away, the quickest and most effective way to improve your chess performance is to increase your tactical skill so that at a glance you are able to see the typical mating patterns and material-winning tactical motifs that so often decide a game. There is no doubt that the best way to acquire good tactical vision is to do exercises that teach you to recognize the tactical building blocks that make up every combination. This book focuses on the crucial positions that every chess player must know. It cannot be stressed enough that a knowledge of strategy is of little use if you have not first mastered the fundamentals of tactics.
In other words, this book is made with the idea of increasing the reader’s pattern recognition, which can only be beneficial for one’s chess ability. Whether or not all the patterns contained in the book are equally helpful is another question.
In general, I find that modern chess tactics books are all good, with many classic positions and puzzles, and compositions that are relatively famous, and a few that may have made a personal impression on the author(s) and are less well-known. This book is no exception. The volume of content is high, and so the value of this book goes up in my opinion. But ultimately, any collection of tactics organized by basic themes will do well. Since they’re all good, it’s hard to say that any of them are must-haves, and 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners is no different. Going in-depth here is probably a waste of time. Instead, I will provide a quick summary of each chapter and my thoughts, in the hope that it helps you decide whether it fills a spot missing in your training routine.
Mate in One (57 puzzles)
There are some genuinely useful patterns in here that beginner players may not be aware of. Since the positions are stripped down to almost the bare basics of the pattern, it’s easy to see the “trick” that makes the mate work.
Mate in Two (129 puzzles)
Also generally useful and simple tactics. Many of these contain sacrificial tactics, some of which give me conflicted feelings — not because the tactics are not useful, but because they are sometimes so spectacular that they are unlikely to show up in a club player’s games. Nevertheless, these concepts are useful to have and just knowing that the pattern exists is key to finding these rare moments in your own games. Note that the tactics for these mate-in-two puzzles are generally pretty simple — some mate-in-twos in other books can be headachingly hard, but not here. Once the reader gets the feel for parting ways with a piece to procure mate, the habit builds and these become much more “obvious” and quick to solve.
The Missing Piece (30 puzzles)
These aren’t traditional chess puzzles, and this highlights the limited nature of Chessable’s MoveTrainer, since the solutions are not moves but rather the square to which you would drop a piece in order to create a checkmate. This could be good visualization practice.
Double Attack (36 puzzles)
A very nice set of basic tactics that show how to use the double attack motif to win material. Tactics like these are very common at the 1000-1600 level, and since the general strategy at this level is to take free stuff when you can until you can overwhelm with sheer numerical superiority, I find this to be one of the more useful chapters in the book.
Discovered Attack (24 puzzles)
This probably ratches up the difficulty a little bit. These moves are very difficult for beginners to find at first, but they are also extremely powerful and very useful to know about. This also teaches the player about how pieces can exert pressure from behind another piece. Like the previous chapter, very helpful.
Discovered Check (24 puzzles)
Like the previous chapter, these can be very powerful, and a lot of checkmating patterns use this motif to good effect.
Double Check (24 puzzles)
The pinnacle of the prior three chapters. Double checks are extremely powerful because the king absolutely must move out of the way. Learning how to use these to good effect is part and parcel of becoming a better player.
Pin (36 puzzles)
A useful motif in a lot of tactics, and one that will win many pieces and subsequently games. Seeing how the pin works (and learning the importance of maintaining the pin and using another piece to take advantage of the new weakness. You can win the exchange if you take the rook with your bishop — but if you learn to push a pawn to attack the trapped piece, then you win the whole rook. This skill is extremely important to grow to become a strong player, and the puzzles make a great impression.
Skewer (24 puzzles)
Say the authors: “On closer examination a skewer is also a double attack.” I like to think of a skewer as a reversed pin. In any case the examples here are very useful, especially in the endgame.
Deflection (24 puzzles)
These tactics can be rather difficult to see at first, but they are very aesthetically pleasing and useful to see, because they are often very unexpected — players learn how to place a piece on a square where it can be taken for free, in order to gain access to more important square that the deflected piece has lost sight of. It’s another good toolkit to have in the bag, and the examples given here work well.
Decoy Sacrifice (24 puzzles)
A sort of inverse of deflection, and even more aesthetically pleasing, but probably also inversely not as useful. Still, learning how to do this can help a player pull out some surprise wins from an otherwise-lost position, and at the 1000-1600 level, blunders like this will occur in high-pressure, low-time games.
Promotion (36 puzzles)
This is all about sacrificing in order to promote a pawn. While most beginner’s games probably will not head into an endgame where this becomes a concern, I think these will be useful for players especially 1200 and up. The importance of pawn promotion in endgame positions should be impressed upon the reader as they go through all the puzzles here.
Drawing Tactics (24 puzzles)
This is probably the least practical chapter of them all, but some of the tricks come in handy when players start finding themselves in queen endgames. These puzzles are more entertaining and shocking than educational.
Mixed Motifs: White (198 puzzles) and Black (174 puzzles)
This is more of a “tests” chapter that combines the above. I guess the idea behind splitting these by color is to avoid confusion or frustration on the reader’s part. This is where the reader is expected to show what they’ve learned over the course of the book. Not knowing the theme gives you a chance to ensure that your tactical vision and pattern recognition are sharper, and for that reason I particularly appreciate these two chapters.
Mate in Three (81 puzzles)
At first, much of these feel like the Mate-in-Two chapter, but the difficulty increases as the player goes on. There are some mating motifs in here that should not be discounted, but this is one of the more difficult chapters.
Mate in Four (33 puzzles)
Like Mates in Three, but two ply deeper.
Curiosities
This focuses on the weird geometries of the chessboard — often mating with minimal material. These may be the most entertaining puzzles in the book, but they also probably do the best for stretching a player’s imaginations once they’ve plumbed the depths of the previous chapters.
Overall, this is a great tactics book — especially if you don’t already have one for beginner to intermediate club players. It’s not quite a must-have, but it’s also one of the better books out there, and so I definitely recommend trying it out if you’re looking for a new set of exercises to go through, or if you’re just looking for a different set of puzzles to work with and don’t want to use an online tactics trainer.