Chess Training for post-beginners

En utmerket strategibok, men litt villedende tittel. Forfatteren skriver selv i forordet at den er mest for spillere med rating 1400-2200. Da kan vi si at den passer mest for spillere med norsk rating fra cirka 11-1200 til 2100.

Boka gjennomgår grunnleggende strategiske temaer og gir øvingsoppgaver på hvert av dem.

Den ukrainske sjakktreneren og forfatteren skriver så fornuftig i forordet:

How can I improve at chess? How should I train? These questions preoccupy thousands, perhaps even millions of people every day . A whole host of good books have been written and methods of training have been developed for chess beginners . You can learn the basics of chess with numerous books . And in addition to that there are very good books which have been designed for those at master level. In my opinion, the first and foremost writers of these books are Mark Dvoretsky and Iosif Dorfman.

There have also been attempts to write books for the ‘middle class’ (club players). However, such books usually fall down when faced with a central problem: the authors may be very good chess players, but they find it difficult to put themselves in the mind of other players and to understand the problems of club players. In the course of history her development, a chess player goes through many different phases At first there are the difficulties of remaining focussed on the whole of the board and pieces or pawns are often simply left en prise. The next stage in development requires some intensive work on improving the skill of combination. When ever the player has reached an Elo rating of 1400-1500, he should start to take an interest in simple strategic problems. My book is aimed specifically at this Elo 1400-2200 group.

In the book I should like to introduce you to a part of the system which I have tried out in practice with my own students. I am certain that it works. I know how important it is nowadays to build future development on a solid foundation. Modern man suffers from information over load. This is especially true in so far as the game of chess is concerned. For that reason it is very important to structure your chess knowledge in a reasoned way. I do not wish to simplify things, because that could give the student the totally false impression that chess itself is simple . Chess is enormously complex, it has innumerable different facets on which one could cast some light in a manual. But in this book I would like to concentrate on what I consider to be the central problem: the evaluation of a position