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Chessville
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Chess Puzzles for the Casual Player Volume 1 Reviewed by Rick Kennedy
Fortunately, Kevin Houston feels your pain. His Chess Puzzles for the Casual Player Volume 1 was written just for that chess friend of yours, and he’s even anticipated a few immediate objections that might get tossed out. Puzzle book? Charlie doesn’t know a mate-in-three from a two-base hit! And don’t even try to give him those Novotnys and Grimshaws… Not a problem. Houston has taken 50 positions from games played by ordinary chess players. Consider them each a short chess lesson. Charlie can’t keep that stuff in his head! Bishop goes here, pawn goes here, Knight goes here – and his head goes kapow! He’s not going to want to be dragging a chess set around with him on the bus or at lunchtime, either. Not a problem. Each puzzle starts with a diagram. Then there is a verbal setup, like “Black sees an opportunity to develop a piece and attack a the same time” followed by a move that is a blunder. Sounds like Charlie. What’s the point? Ever read Soltis’ Catalog of Chess Mistakes? “The winner is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake” – that kind of thing? In casual chess play, the goal is to be aware of your opponent’s mistakes – and punish them. I’ve run a few of Charlie’s games through Fritz10 – it ain’t a pretty sight. Blunders aplenty on both sides. Anyhow, for the solution of the puzzle, turn the page and there’s a diagram for every move, step-by-step, taking you through the refutation of the blunder. No board needed. No board needed. When the refutation is played through, Houston then asks you to go back to the beginning of the puzzle and figure out what would have been the best move for Black or White. Of course, if you flip the page you’ll get the answer to that question, plus an explanation that slips in a bit of chess strategy, e.g. “Black moves the Knight out of harm’s way and reinforces the Rook on d8.” Sounds just like what Charlie needs... With thirty years of experience studying chess, Houston has a pretty good idea what he wants to focus on, and who he wants to reach. He told me:
Although Chess Puzzles for the Casual Player Volume 1 has almost 300 6-inch-by-9-inch pages (quite a lot for a cover price of under $22) the author is not trying to choke the reader with mountains of content:
The quantity will come over time: Houston’s goal is to publish a dozen volumes of Chess Puzzles for the Casual Player, producing a couple each year. What’s nice about the book is how one puzzle will build on what’s been taught in earlier puzzles. Imagine if you sat down with a chess Master and looked at some chess positions together for a few hours. Even if you only heard “mumble mumble mumble pin mumble mumble double attack mumble mumble mumble fork mumble mumble sacrifice…”, if you watched the pieces and tried to keep up, a good bit of essential chess knowledge would sink in. Now imagine if you actually made sense out of all that mumbling – that’s what it was like for me, working my way through 50 puzzles. As a technical point, some puzzles have solutions that mention sidelines. In those cases Houston gives the sideline moves in figurine algebraic notation, but the diagrams for those sidelines can be found in the back of the book in the “Diagrams of Lines from the Puzzles” chapter. It’s worth mentioning that Chess Puzzles for the Casual Player Volume 1 is a self-published effort, using the print-on-demand services of Lulu, where the book can be purchased or the PDF file (at 1/3 the cost) downloaded. The book is well-designed and laid out, from an attractive glossy cover showing pieces from a glass chess set to diagrams are that are readable (2 inches by 2 inches) and text that doesn’t wear the eyes out. It’s great to see an author who has so much faith in his book that he’s willing to put in the hours that it takes to get it just right – and then invest his own money to back it, to boot. Houston has a website (www.chesspuzzlebook.com) that you can visit, and from which you can view five of his puzzles – either in PDF format, as laid out in the book, or using the MyChess.com-style game viewer. Again, the extra effort.
Who can use this book? I think we all know a few casual Charlie
Chessplayers who would benefit from tactical exercise (there’s a New Year’s
resolution!) as well as a few who wouldn’t bother (You can lead a horse
to slaughter but you can’t make him think…). Solid rock’em
sock’em club players who’ve been through Reinfeld’s two 1,001
books a few times, and up-and-coming juniors who’ve cut their teeth on Lazlo
Polgar’s Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games will likely
not be interested. (I’m a low B class player, and I nailed most of the
puzzles, but some of them tripped me up, and all were enjoyable to work
through. Tactical exercise and all that, you know.) Like
I’ve always said, though, the real dividing line between chess players is
not the one between masters and non-masters, but between those who have read
at least one chess book, and those who have read none.
There have got to be plenty of casual pawn pushers out there for whom
Chess Puzzles for the Casual Player Volume 1
would be that perfect first book.
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