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Chessville
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Beat the Grandmasters Reviewed by Michael Jeffreys
On February 17, 2002 the phone rang, and when I picked it up a female voice said, “Is this Michael Jeffreys, president of the Wilshire Chess Society?” After I replied in the affirmative, she said, “This is Mayor Richard Riordon’s office. The mayor is opening a new school in downtown Los Angeles, and Garry Kasparov, who is a friend of the mayor’s, will be there giving a simul. Do you think you could bring down some children for him to play against?” And before I could answer she casually threw in, “And you’re welcome to play against him as well.” Say what!? Needless to say, I was more than a little taken by surprise as (a) this isn’t the kind of phone call you get everyday, (b) there had been no publicity announcing that Garry was even in town, and (c) like most chess players, I had always wanted to meet him. “When is this happening?” I inquired, doing my best not to sound overly excited. “Tomorrow afternoon.” Well, Christmas may have been more than 10 months away on the calendar, but for me it had just arrived! Trying my best to continue breathing normally, I said, “Ah, no problem, sounds great... I know a couple of kids I can call.” After getting the directions to the school, I hung up and then quickly called the best chess playing kids I knew, Max and Julian Landaw. They were 15 and 13 years old respectively, and both were experts. Their father answered the phone, and I said, “Hi Elliot, this is Michael. I am not making this up, but are Max and Julian available to play Kasparov tomorrow afternoon?” Suddenly, the phone went quiet, and then I heard Elliot turn to his wife and say, “It’s Michael... and he wants to know if the kids are available to play Kasparov tomorrow!?” Well, all of sudden I hear this burst of laugher from his wife, who then, while still laughing, shouts out, “Yeah, and is the Queen of England going to be there too!?” And now the both of them are cackling like a couple of banshees! I mean, they were having quite a laugh. “Hey, this is no joke! I’m totally serious,” I said, understanding their skepticism, but still slightly annoyed at not being believed. “Okay, but when you read about it in the paper tomorrow, don’t blame me that you had the opportunity to have your kids play Kasparov, but passed it up!” Eventually, after hearing about the phone call from the mayor’s office, Elliot believed me and said he would bring down Max (as Julian was in bed sick). Well, the next day sure enough Garry showed up, and after giving a 20 minute speech on the merits of chess in schools, began his simul against Max, myself, and four little kids who were brought over from a nearby elementary school who barely knew how the pieces moved! Garry was White against all of us, and let me tell you, I was more than a little bit nervous (As you can see from the photo below, I was anything but thrilled with my position. And FM Carsten Hansen, who is sitting to my left, seems to concur with my assessment!) I mean, it’s one thing to dream of facing Kasparov, but when he’s actually standing there two feet in front of you, looking at you with his famous piercing stare, waiting for you to move, it’s quite another story.
Kasparov vs. Jeffreys - Simul - February 18, 2002 To make matters worse, since there were only six of us, he would come around to your board awfully quick. Thus, you really didn’t have much time to come up with a good move. All I remember thinking was, “I’m playing Kasparov. I’m playing Kasparov. Oh-my-god, I’m playing the world chess champion!” (Yes, Kramnik beat him in one match, but he’s still a world champion and the highest rated player of all time!) Anyway, I got so nervous that I mixed up the move order in my Slav defense and ended up blundering a pawn straight out of the opening. I tried my best to put up resistance, but when things started to get pretty ugly I decided not to waste his time and tipped my king while extending my hand on move 24. However, it wasn’t all bad news, as he was kind enough to sign his autobiography (Unlimited Challenge) for me. So, what’s the point of my little story? That it’s a heck of a lot different finding a winning move in a diagram in a chess book to “beat a GM,” then it is when you’re actually sitting across from one! I mean, the pressure and nervousness you feel during an actual game is simply not there when you’re sitting our living room, sipping a cup of coffee, and casually going through each position. However, be that as it may, what does Gambit’s new book, Beat the Grandmasters by Christian Kongsted, have to offer? Basically, you’re presented with 351 different chess puzzles to solve. These are broken up into five chapters. Let’s take a look at each one. Chapter One: Beat the Masters
Kongsted starts you off with 25 warm up positions against players rated
between 2200-2500 Elo (most are IM’s). To make it easier, he gives you
a hint under each diagram. For example, here is position #7:
Black to
play and win Kongsted’s hint is a little weak here: How should the Black attack continue? But the answer is a nice, if not straightforward, combination that utilizes several tactical themes. * I’ll give the solution to all the puzzles at the end of the review.
These puzzles are followed by 26 more, without the hints. But as you
can see, the hints don’t really add much, so to me they were just a
continuation of the first batch. However, Kongsted claims that these
are slightly harder. Here is position # 45:
Black to play and win Chapter Two: The Master Challenge
This is the first “test” of the book, and involves working your way through
12 positions. Kongsted says that one or two hours seems appropriate
for this section. What’s more, he not only gives you points for
finding the right moves, but takes away points for finding moves that look
right, but actually fail to a tactic. While I’m not big on these,
“27-29 points means you’re of master strength, 21-23 right and you’re an
expert, etc,” for those that like this sort of thing this book offers such a
way to measure your results. Chapter Three: Beat the Grandmasters Finally we get to the meat of the book. Here you are served up 140 positions from GM games, 42 of which contain hints, and 98 where you are completely left on your own. Again, the comments are pretty superfluous, and so really don’t add much. The positions vary greatly in difficulty, and here is my one small “beef” with the book. Since Kongsted says in the introduction that the puzzles vary in difficulty from 1 (being the easiest) to 5 (being the most difficult), it would have been very helpful had he listed those numbers next to the solutions. In other words, give someone just picking the book up a quick way to identify which problems are easy, which are medium in difficulty, and which are the real killers. Now, obviously you don’t want to list these ratings with the puzzles themselves, as this would give away too much information. But having them next to the solution in the back of the book would allow, for instance, a chess teacher to pull a puzzle with exactly the right level of difficulty depending on the strength of his students.
While my suggestion is admittedly minor, it simply would have made a good
book even better! Chapter Four: The Grandmaster Challenge
This chapter contains nine tests with 12 puzzles in each. Again, you
are given points for those answers you get right and lose points for
mistakes. To give you a taste of the level of difficulty in this
section, here is the first puzzle of test two (# 204):
White to play and win Chapter Five: The Final Challenge
This last chapter contains the books final 40 puzzles, which according to
Kongsted are the most difficult. Here is one that my friends and I
tussled with for quite a while before finally figuring it out (#333):
Black to play and win The Bottom Line This is a first class puzzle book and anyone looking to improve their combination skills will certainly find a goldmine of material here. Most of the problems are fresh (and not the old Capablanca back rank stuff we’ve seen in dozens of tactic books) since the majority were taken from Megabase 2004 and T.W.I.C., according to Kongsted. I have only two small suggestions to improve the book. First, as I mentioned above, to include the “difficulty level” along with the solutions to aid those of us who teach so that we may quickly find appropriate problems for our students. Secondly, either put better “hints” in those problems that you wish to help the reader (Saying, “How does Black continue the attack” really doesn’t help those that truly need a hint. More helpful would be something like, “Black can remove one of the king’s primary defenders thus setting up the opportunity for a devastating fork.”), or leave them out all together. Better players would probably prefer no hints, and weaker ones probably like getting some help. I think a book that gets it just right is John Nunn’s Chess Puzzle Book. In it Nunn gives a quick breakdown of each position, pointing out the key features, but doesn’t give away too much. If you still need a hint he refers you to another page for this. And if you simply can’t figure it out even after reading the hint, he refers you to another page where the solution can be found. So
the question is, will you be able to defeat a Grandmaster after reading
Kongsted’s new book? Probably not, but there’s no doubt that your
tactics and combinational ability will improve. And that, after all,
is really all you could ask from a puzzle book. Since the problems
aren’t really for beginners (many are deeper than they look, i.e., the first
piece sac is obvious, but the correct follow up is often tricky) I would
recommend this book for those rated 1400-2200 Elo. * Here are the solutions to the puzzles:
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