The Complete Chess Workout: Train your brain with 1200 puzzles! (Everyman Chess)

List Price: $29.95 Discount Price: $17.46

Customer Reviews:

A comprehensive course of chess instruction under one cover [Posted on 2008-01-05]
A skilled and prolific chess writer, Richard Palliser is also an International Master with numerous tournament successes and in 2006 became the Join British Rapidplay Champion. Clearly, he brings his many years of experience and expertise to bear in writing "The Complete Chess Workout", a comprehensive training manual for chess tactics that will prove invaluable for aspiring chess players from the novice to the expert. Special note should be made that all of the featured 1200 chess puzzles designed to built chess playing skills have been checked by computer engines. Thoroughly 'player friendly', "The Complete Chess Workout is nicely organized into eight distinct chapters: Warming Up!; Attack!; Opening Tricks and Traps; Skill in the Endgame; Loose Pieces and Overloading; Fiendish Calculation; Test Yourself; and Solutions. A comprehensive course of chess instruction under one cover, "The Complete Chess Workout" truly lives up to its title and will prove to be a welcome addition to personal, academic, and community library chess instruction reference collections.

Something New in Puzzle Books [Posted on 2008-01-13]
Two things make this book a bit unusual among books of this sort. 1) Most of the positions are from very recent tournaments and 2) Most of the players are not household names. Both of these features make it harder for me to just remember the games.
I don't think there's anything more instructive or entertaining in chess than working through books like this one.

Like joining a "Chess Fitness Gym" [Posted on 2008-06-24]
As the other reviewers have noted this is a huge collection of tactical chess problems designed to help you strengthen your chess muscles. But just like joining a "24 Hour Fitness" center, that's just the BEGINNING! You have to use the book, work the problems, understand the ones you didn't get, go back and try them again, and then when you've done all that: DO IT SOME MORE! Find more tactical situations, analyze your games, your friend's games, get more books, buy a tactics disc and so on. Chess Fitness is just like physical fitness: It's not a mountain to scale and then you're done, it's a "health habit" you build into your life-style. The pay off comes when you play a game of chess you can be proud of. THAT is what all your hard work was aiming at. And this book is the ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER of tactical problem collections.

Mainly for players rated 1200-1600 [Posted on 2008-10-30]
If you are rated over 1800 then "Forcing Chess Moves" is a better choice. The first 100 puzzles in The Complete Chess Workout are for players rated 1200-1400, mostly one move deflection tactics, the remaining 1100 puzzles become progressively more difficult. I enjoy reading chess books and would rather lay on my back in bed and read a chess book than start a family and pop out three kids and send them to college and go into debt and pay off a mortgage and a car loan and credit cards and work like a slave or indentured servant in order to fulfill someone else's idea of the American dream, the American dream being to become enslaved to debt and work all your life and die a pauper with no savings. Yes, chess has saved my life!

The best chess problem book for intermediate players. [Posted on 2008-11-19]
With 1200 problems in its collection, this book looks like another quantity-over-quality compilation at first. Not so. From the first page on, I was immensely impressed by the author's careful selection and ordering of these puzzles. Not only are they challenging, but they are also all from actual competitive games, most of which occurred in tournaments of the last decade. Basically, the author condensed these tournaments to their most exciting moments and presented these highlights for the readers to enjoy, one after another. As a bonus, the year, the tournament and the players are all listed, so it is quite straightforward to look them up in a database and find out how any game ended up in the particular situation.

I think this book will be enjoyable to anyone between 1200 and 2000. I do not agree with the previous reviewer, however, on the claim that chess and family are mutually exclusive. In fact, I am reading this book so as to delay falling behind my son in chess. Oh, the joy of rearing a child!

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