There are many different opinions on how to improve at chess. Some advocate studying the openings intensely while others suggest endgame mastery is the key, but all agree that studying puzzles is excellent training. Why? Because it not only improves the student’s knowledge of tactical patterns but also provides excellent analytical training. All this taken into account it is no wonder that so many puzzle books have been published. The number must run in the dozens and Gambit Publishing itself has published works by Emms, Nunn, Speelman and Kongsted on the subject.
Paraguayan GM Zenon Franco, a former trainer of Spanish 2700 Paco Vallejo, is an established member of the Gambit stable of writers and his present work matches the high standards of his earlier efforts. Franco groups his 1001 puzzles, carefully chosen to avoid duplication with those used in earlier puzzle works, as follows:
The Most Important Tactical Themes
Elementary Puzzles
On the Attack
Defense and Counterattack
Mundo Latino
The World of Endgames
The Ultimate Challenge
Structurally this book is similar to THE ULTIMATE CHESS PUZZLE BOOK by John Emms. Both books start easy with puzzles suitable for solving by novices or as warm-up exercises for those more advanced, but things soon become progressively more difficult. Both books use a format where each chapter presents puzzles to solve and then offers solutions negating the need to go back and forth between the front and back of the book. This also avoids the problem of inadvertently seeing the solution at the bottom of the page.
One of the ways that Franco has been able to present fresh examples, not used in other puzzle books, has been by mining games from South American events, particularly those from Argentina. His selection features the likes of Najdorf, Panno and Bolbochan, the Argentine “Big Three” that made that nation one of the top five chess countries in the world in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Solving chess puzzles from a CD or DVD has certain advantages to a book, but one area where the latter is still superior is the depth and explanation of the solutions. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case but this reviewer can think of no software presently on the market that offers the in depth explanations similar to what Franco provides.
Those who have puzzle books sitting unread on their shelves should start there first but for other players, ranging from 1600 to 2400 looking for fresh examples, THE GIANT CHESS PUZZLE BOOK will definitely improve their tactical ability.
