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Chessville
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Predator at the Chessboard A Field Guide to Tactics by Ward Farnsworth Reviewed by Rick Kennedy
Instructional chess books have their diagrams, too. In fact, if you’ve traveled the traditional tactical training trail, you’ve touched the time-tested tome, Fred Reinfeld’s 1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations (1955). Therein, the tactical themes treated (e.g. pinning, knight forks, double attack) are tossed a touch of text; thereafter, though, trail those diagrams – 1001, as the title tells. For some players, this treasure trove fits them to a T. On the other hand, I like words. I’m one of those readers who will pass over a dozen naked games in a magazine to get to the annotated ones. I’m interested in not only what move the players chose or didn’t choose, but why they did or didn’t do such a thing. What were they thinking? I can learn from that. Maybe even emulate it. Words are the fundamental strength of Ward Farnsworth’s two Predator at the Chessboard volumes. In the process of providing about 1,200 problems to solve, his words set up the diagram (what’s there, what to look at) and then take the reader through the thinking steps necessary to solve it, using the tools he has provided. As he moves from simple diagrams/problems to more complex ones (more pieces on the board, more moves to get to the solution, more tools needed) the author also starts to answer the what if? questions that pop up along the way. For example, early in the knight fork section there is:
Simple, but useful. Predator at the Chessboard builds on it quickly. About thirty pages later, after we’ve studied more knight forks and looks at ways that they might not work, we encounter:
The selection reads like the personal instruction of a chess mentor. In fact, those familiar with the cleaning fluid marketed as a “janitor in a drum” might make the connection: here we have a sort of “chess coach in a tome”. As he notes in the Introduction, explaining how his books are different from their predecessors, Farnsworth explains that he has gathered many examples, carefully organized, and provided them with trains of thought explained. A professor and Nancy Barton Scholar at the Boston University School of Law, he would be expected to be well-skilled in organization and explanation. A look at his other book, The Legal Analyst, A Toolkit for Thinking About the Law, confirms this. As a Chessville book reviewer, I make it my business to read every book twice before writing about it, if at all possible. In this case, I must admit to having only gone through each book of Predator at the Chessboard only once. The combined volumes contain over 700 pages of coaching, which is a whole lot to enjoy and absorb; and it is pretty impressive when you consider each book costs only around $20. The Bibliography contains 45 sources, including the author’s assessments of some of the best. (I would compare Farnsworth’s writing style favorably with that of Yasser Seirawan in his Winning Chess series of books, although his coverage is deeper than Seirawan’s.) The Table of Contents for Book I is quite detailed. Here is a condensed version:
1. Introductory Matters
2. The Double Attack
3. The Discovered Attack Likewise, here is the condensed Table of Contents for Book II:
4. The Pin and the Skewer
5. Removing the Guard
6. Mating Patterns Farnsworth has used the services of print-on-demand publisher Lulu (www.lulu.com) to bring Predator out, and his attention to detail had produced an attractive book layout, with good use of space, bolding, italics and font sizes. Readability, typos or dypos (diagram errors) are not an issue. Predator at the Chessboard is ideal for the serious not-so-young chessplayer (high school on up) who wants to build (or shore up) a firm foundation of tactical understanding. It is also excellent for a “rusty” player who wants to get back his tactical chops by re-thinking the process of piece interplay; or for class/club/tournament players (like myself) who want to un-retire from the 64 squares and get back in the action, without looking like fools. It is an excellent resource for chess coaches or teachers working with middle school or even elementary school students. Predator at the Chessboard is probably not for the tactical maniac who reads through Vukovic’s Art of Attack in Chess without a board, pointing out the author’s errors of calculation as he comes across them. The advanced tactician whose goal is not to better understand how to think about a position, but how to see it in his mind’s “eye” some 4, 5, or 6 moves on, might be interested instead in the recently released Chess Visualization Course, Book 1; General Tactics by Ian Anderson which will be reviewed at Chessville in the future.
If you would like to evaluate Predator at the Chessboard for
yourself, you can visit the author’s website, where he has much of the
material available – just not as convenient or as portable as in book form,
of course, unless you’re using a small laptop computer, a PDA, or an iPhone
– at
www.bu.edu/dbin/law/chess/index.php.
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