Chess Tactics for Champions: A step-by-step guide to using tactics and combinations the Polgar way Paperback – Illustrated, April 11, 2006

Chess Tactics for Champions is a great book for anyone who wants to improve their chess skills. Susan Polgar is a former world chess champion and she knows what she's talking about. The book is well-written and easy to understand for young and old alike, and it covers a wide range of tactics.The book is divided into 10 chapters, each of which focuses on a different tactic type. Polgar explains each type of tactic in detail, and she provides plenty of examples to help you understand the concepts. She also includes a number of exercises at the end of each chapter to help you practice what you've learned.I found the book to be very helpful. I've been playing chess for many years, but I still learned a lot from this book as well and making it easy to teach my grandson advanced tactics. Polgar's explanations are clear and concise, and the exercises are challenging but not too difficult. If you're serious about improving your chess skills, I highly recommend this book.Here are some of the things I liked about the book:The book is well-written and easy to understand.Polgar covers a wide range of tactics.The book includes plenty of examples to help you understand the concepts.The book includes exercises to help you practice what you've learned.If you're looking for a book to help you improve your chess skills, I highly recommend Chess Tactics for Champions by Susan Polgar.

Whenever you want to get better at chess, there are so many guides out there, it's hard to know where to start. Does one start with the opening? Does one start with "positional play" or "strategy"? With studying classic games? I wish I had not fumbled around so long before I realized that the place to start is with tactics and with the end game. When you study tactics or small combinations, you learn to view each chess board like a snapshot, a world of its own, with its own particular problems (pins, skewers, forks, etc.). It is more like a puzzle to be solved and less like a "story". This is how the greatest players view the game. Anyone who wants to get serious about chess would do well to buy this fine book on tactics written by Grandmaster Susan Polgar. After buying it and studying the puzzles for a while, my rating has steadily increased, and I now find that I have a greater capacity to understand what's happening when I watch high level games. I have applied principles learned in this book to all elements of my game, from the opening to the end-game, and I haven't even gotten through the whole book yet. It is also important to study the end-game because no one wants to get to a winning position but be "unsure" of whether or not it is a winning position. I've found that my ability to deal with openings has come of its own accord.On a related note, if you're enjoy chess but you are at a crunch for time like I am, look into the Internet Chess Club (ICC). I joined one day when I got sick of Yahoo chess. They offer a free trial membership. You can play against real people 24/7, and I've found their ratings to be reliable as well. It opens up to a whole world of internet chess with great people, and Grandmasters regulary play there. One of the best perks is that they offer tutorials by Grandmasters annotating games, and these tutorials are included in the reasonably priced membership (7 bucks a month?). I am part of a "league" that operates in connection with the ICC. The league is totally free to members and a lot of fun.A last bit of advice: Don't play speed chess!

This is the first time I purchased a book by this grandmaster author and teacher and just received the book today. The book was packed very well with no physical damages. However the publisher did only a fair job with the bonding. The bend perforations on the front and back covers was only 1/16 of an inch from the bonding edge. Book bend perforations should be formed by us on both the front and back of all paperback books when we first receive the book as well as the pages so the book does not come apart. The thicker the book, the more likely the bonding will fall apart if the above is not properly done. This book was about 1 inch thick and in my opinion the perforated front and rear covers should be at least 1/8 of an inch from the edge and a better design would be 1/4 of an inch from the binding edge, so be careful bending the covers and the following pages. My chess library is more than 60 books and workbooks from mainly the older grandmasters. I prepared my book based on the above procedure, but am only giving 4 stars at this time because of the poor bonding that the average person not familiar with buying a lot of paperback books would have a problem with the bonding on this book remaining in tact. I will update my review after reading the book.

I got this book after I finished “Everyone’s First Tactics Workbook” by P. Giannatos, which I highly recommend for players under 1000 ELO online, and I must say it’s perfect for those trying to get close to 1200. Polgar gets you thinking from the beginning since even the easiest exercise involves a setup. Most problems are a 2-4 combination to win material taken from middle game, but also some end game and a few opening positions. I tried “Improve your Chess Tactics” by Y.Neishtadt, but I found myself struggling to solve half of the problems so I decided to take a step back and work on my foundations. I’d say the next step for novice/intermediate level is to work on small combinations and build your pattern recognition from there and this book will help learners to do just that.