1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players: The Tactics Workbook that Also Explains All Key Concepts

by Frank Erwich

Chess is 99% tactics. This celebrated observation is not only true for beginners, but also for club players (Elo 1500 – 2000). If you want to win more games, nothing works better than training your combination skills. There are two types of books on those that introduce the concepts followed by some examples, and workbooks that contain lots of exercises. FIDE Master Frank Erwich has done he explains all key tactical ideas AND provides an enormous amount of exercises for each different theme. Erwich has created a complete tactics book for ambitious club and tournament players. He teaches you how to reach the next level of identifying weak spots in the position of your opponent, recognizing patterns of combinations, visualizing tricks and calculating effectively. Erwich has also included a new and important tests that will improve your defensive skills. 1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players is not a collection of freewheeling puzzles. It serves as a course text book, because only the most didactically productive exercises are featured. Every chapter starts with easy examples, but no the level of difficulty will steadily increase.

Genres: Chess

160 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2019

Reviews

[Neil Limbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book for club players similar to "Combination Challenge" but better in many respects. I aimed for 15 tests for day but sometimes did more, sometimes less. The final Chapter "Mix" was difficult! At least it was to me...
As most of the tests were taken from actual play (even the very highest level), some of the solutions were beyond me: I may see (if lucky) the first couple of moves but rarely much beyond that. I probably averaged 50-60% throughout the book.
Overall, it is very good. All players should train to look for combinations and working your way through such a book is a very good way of doing that. I plan to re-read in the future, work through them again, and see if I have improved!

[Sharad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great tactics book for intermediate players!
I would say for people in the 1500-1800 range. The last few chapters are more difficult but not impossible. It was interesting to see a chapter dedicated to defensive tactics. It was challenging too!
Also I'm a big fan of the author using recent games for some of the tactics. Makes it more interesting to see what Carlsen missed, or what tactic Shirov came up with. The fact that it's separated by themes makes it good for cyclical reviews too.

[JerryDeanHalleck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good. Exercises are mostly taken from real chess games and were hard to solve. Will probably buy.