Learn Chess the Right Way: Book 4 Sacrifice to win

by Susan Polgar, Paul Truong (Contributor)

The Polgar Way to Better Chess! Learn Chess the Right Way is a five-volume chess puzzle book series aimed at the novice, beginner and intermediate level player, using the unique methods of the award-winning coach and former world champion Susan Polgar. It introduces the most important checkmate and material-winning tactics, as well as defensive techniques to the new chess player. Each of the five volumes will consist of over 500 puzzles. Volume 4 is all about exercises where you have to make a "sacrifice" for a material gain or even checkmate. In each of the first five chapters, a certain piece is being sacrificed to checkmate the enemy King (in chapter 1 --The Queen, in chapter 2 -- The Rook, and so on). In chapters 6-10, you will get no hint about which piece should be sacrificed. However, you will know what the target is, to win a Queen, or Rook etc. In chapter 11, there will be no hints whatsoever. The goal is sacrifice one of your pieces to either checkmate or gain material. Many of the examples are built on skills (such as forks, discoveries or pins) learned in volumes 1 and 2 of this series. In most of the puzzles, you will need to think 2-3 pairs of moves ahead in order to find the correct solution. With over 40 years of experience as a world-class player and coach, international grandmaster Susan Polgar has developed the most effective way to help young players and beginners "Learn Chess the Right Way. Let her show you the way to understanding the most common and critical patterns and let her show you the way to becoming a better player. SUSAN POLGAR is a winner of four Women's World Championships and the top-ranked woman chess player in the United States. She became the #1 woman player in the world at 15 and remained in the top 3 for over 20 years. In 2013, she received the U.S. Coach of the Year Award and the following year, she was named the Chess Trainer of the Year by the International Chess Federation (FIDE). She thus became the first person in history to be accorded both honors. Under her guidance, SPICE chess teams at both Texas Tech University and Webster University have won a combined six consecutive National Division I Collegiate Chess Championships.

Genres: Chess

168 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 5, 2017

Reviews

[George Stenger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on chess sacrifices. I have read her first 4 books in the series and will read the fifth book.

I coach a grade school chess team and have read many chess books the past few months to enhance the class. This book is probably beyond most grade school chess players (or at least the ones on my team).

[Haraldohoo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent training for vision and learning the early discipline of combinations.

[John Of Oxshott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I avoided buying any of Susan Polgar's chess books for many years because they are relatively expensive and I thought they were too basic for me. They are quite basic but I think they are still very beneficial. The best chess ideas are non-verbal and this book contains a lot of ideas and very few words. You don't really read a Susan Polgar book, you do it. This is the second one I've done. I started with no. 3 in the series, which deals with defensive moves and I'll be doing the 5th one next. This one presents a series of positions in which the winning idea involves some sort of sacrifice.

You might think that knowing that the solution starts with a sacrifice makes the positions far too easy to be of interest. A lot of books on tactics have this problem. They present each position to you in such a way that you can guess the first move and work out the rest without doing any meaningful calculations. But these positions are not all that straightforward. Sometimes the most obvious move is not correct. You have to calculate the line to the end and look carefully along the way.

They are by no means difficult. All these positions can be solved by looking in turn at all checks, captures and threats, and calculating two or three moves ahead.

The book's strength is in the variety of its sacrificial ideas. It doesn't hammer home any single theme but makes you look for new ones. Sometimes you need to look a bit broader rather than deeper. This is something that books on tactics don't do very well at the beginner level.

This is still a beginner level book but it's one that benefits all players because of its range of ideas and the quality of the positions. Quality is something that's hard to define in books on chess tactics but I think of it in terms of how satisfying it is to solve the positions in the book. You have to feel you have achieved a decisive advantage, that the opponent's moves were forced and clear-cut but needed to be calculated carefully and that the winning line was the only clearly good one. The winning idea should also be common and useful but not immediately obvious. These features are all present in this book and it was therefore very satisfying and enjoyable.